About
Jake (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in Sociology. Broadly, his research centers on the ways in which cultural categories of gender and sexuality emerge through processes of negotiation or contestation—from the embodied minutiae of individual lifeworlds to the messy and overlapping networks of institutional discourses. In particular, he is intrigued by how ostensibly different social groups practice what may in fact be similarly affirming forms of bodywork in order to make sense of their own genders, sexualities, and bodies. He is concerned currently with fetishizations of fitness and fatness, desires for size, and a comparative study of the “bodybuilding” and “gaining” communities. As a trained ethnographer and interviewer, he uses these and other qualitative methods to trace the contours of otherwise scattered groups, as well as the distinctly ritualized and embodied processes from which they can be rendered visible.
