Paige L. Sweet

Paige Sweet studies gender and sexuality, knowledge, gender-based violence, health and illness, the state, and embodiment. She is interested in gendered and sexual forms of governance: how people's identities and practices are shaped by state programs and medicalized categories. Her work focuses on domestic violence, and how survivors navigate systems that simultaneously help and harm them. Paige’s work has been published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Gender & Society, Social Problems, Sociological Theory, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society, among others. Paige teaches courses on gender-based violence, body and embodiment, gender/sexuality, and sociological theory. 

Paige's book, The Politics of Surviving: How Women Navigate Domestic Violence and its Aftermath, was published with University of California Press in 2021.

Recent Publications (selected)

Sweet, Paige. 2023. “Organizing Penal-Welfare Hybridity: Trauma, Vulnerability, and State Recognition of Crime Victims.” American Journal of Sociology 128(6):1678-1715.

Sweet, Paige and Danielle Giffort. 2021. “The Bad Expert.” Social Studies of Science. 

Sweet, Paige. 2020. “Who Knows? Reflexivity in Feminist Standpoint Theory & Bourdieu.” Gender & Society 34(6): 922-950. 

Sweet, Paige. 2019. “The Sociology of Gaslighting.” American Sociological Review 84(5): 851-875.

Sweet, Paige. 2019. “The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood.” Social Problems 66(3): 411-427. 

Sweet Paige, 2018. "The Feminist Question in Realism." Sociological Theory 36(3): 221-243. 

Sweet, Paige. 2015. "Chronic Victims, Risky Women: Domestic Violence and the Medicalization of Abuse." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41(1): 81-105.