My research uses qualitative methods to examine the foundational questions in feminist sociology: How is a gendered society possible? How can gender be “undone” or “redone”? More fundamentally, what is gender? If gender is “an emergent feature of social situations,” when does its “naturalness” emerge (or dissipate) during an interaction? If gender is “a way of seeing the world,” what semiotic process structured such seeing? During social interactions, how do sign activities help us reconfigure intersecting axes of differentiation, such as gender, sexuality, and age? In the process of tackling these questions, I came to focus on gender and childhood as two intersecting social structures that can amplify each other in some situations but contradict or mute each other in other situations.
Book Project
When Gender Happens: Non-Sexist Parenting and the Perplexity of Normativity
My current book project, under contract with the University of Chicago Press, is a pragmatist-minded and ethnomethodologically informed intersectional analysis of the social production of gender in family. Based on over 70 interviews with feminist parents in the US, this study examines how seemingly individual attributes like gender emerge or dissipate through consumptive, discursive, and semiotic practices in childrearing and interview conversations. It moves beyond conventional scholarship on gender and parenting in two ways. First, instead of seeing childhood as a “natural” life stage where socialization happens, I theorize “children” as a socially constructed category that can be usefully deployed to achieve certain interactional outcomes (e.g., undoing gender) and legitimate various political agendas (e.g., non-sexist parenting). Second, instead of comparing parenting styles across pre-given demographic groups, I examine the intersection of distinctive axes of differentiation as a routinely reconfigured effect of social action. Through careful and reflexive analyses of how these parents render their parenting choices and their kids’ stereotypical preferences intelligible and reasonable to me, my study showcases how the reproduction of childhood as a social structure can serve both as a means and an end for the transformation of gender structure.
Articles
Theorizing Gender: From Performance to Uptake
Like many gender scholars, I started tackling the ontological questions of gender by approaching gender as a “performance.” But during my research, I gradually came to see the limits of this individualist heuristic. Through a series of journal articles, I seek to complicate the sociological truism of “gender is a performance” and formulate more relational and processual alternatives for thinking about gender. My most recent paper theorizes the semiotic process behind the accomplishment of gender from the audience’s, rather than the performer’s, vantage point. This shift of analytic focus, however, grows organically from my previous research.
In this article, I reformulated Connell’s famous concept of “hegemonic masculinity” by revisiting Gramsci’s original theorization of hegemony. In so doing, I urged scholars to attend to Connell’s vision for social change and to understand the concept in relational way, focusing on the consent it garners from subordinate groups, rather than defining it substantively as an enactment of sexist masculine qualities.
Taking the gender play in cosplay as my case, my first empirical project explored how gendered sensibilities are conveyed via minutiae body movements and modifications. While most studies of cosplay tend to focus on the performer alone, my findings invite scholars to consider the collaboration between cosplayers and their supporting crew as a new heuristic for thinking about gender that does not obscure its multi-authorship.
My second project took a further step beyond studying gender “performers” to focus on their “audience.” By examining asexual people’s accounts of high school sex talk, I showed how gender can be uncoupled from sexuality: While sociologists often see sex talk as a classic example of gender performance, its gendered connotation might not be picked up during interaction. As such, an intended display of hegemonic masculinity/femininity may not materialize as such.
Yang, Yuchen. 2025. “Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender.” Sociological Theory 43(4):360–384.
My most recent article develops an audience-centered theory of “gender uptake” to account for the indeterminancy in the semiotic materialization of gender. Integrating Dorothy Smith’s intellectual legacy for feminist interpretive sociology, ethnomethodology’s neglected insight on categorization, and cultural sociology’s recent rediscovery of Peircean semiotics, I argue the facticity of gender’s “naturalness” remains underdetermined until the audience makes a series of ideological moves that cannot be predetermined by the performer. With case studies of how feminist parents account for their children’s gender-stereotypical interests, I illustrate how this audience-centered approach helps us unpack the interactional production/naturalization of categorical differences processually as open-ended negotiation of sign relations, where meaning emerges from selective attention.
Theorizing Identity Pathways: A Collaboration
While doing my research on asexual people’s experience of high school sex talk, I was fortunate to connect with a supportive group of graduate students and junior scholars who were also studying asexuality. This group later expanded into the Ace/Aro Scholars Support Network. With four founding members of this network, I co-authored a paper that explores why so many people on the asexual spectrum once identified as bisexual or pansexual.
While results from the 2018 Asexual Community Survey suggests that about half of asexual-spectrum respondents once identified as bisexual or pansexual, our qualitative data reveal that asexual individuals do not always see these three sexual categories as mutually exclusive. The intelligibility of bisexuality and pansexuality, we argue, positions them as identity pathways for many asexual-spectrum individuals who experience equally little (or no) attraction toward people of any gender.
Yuchen Yang, PhD 