About
Maya Glenn-Hunt is a Black feminist sociologist whose work sits at the intersection gender and sexuality, social theory, qualitative methods, body and embodiment, and pleasure.
Maya is interested in how people understand social inequality and their identities through the lens of pleasure. She explores these questions in her current Chicago-based qualitative study, The Black Women & Pleasure Project, which looks at how Black women across the sexual identity spectrum understand their identities, define pleasure, and articulate its importance in everyday life. The study also seeks to understand what social experiences bring the women pleasure and why. Maya’s working paper, “The Sociology of Accessing Pleasure: Toward a Multidirectional Theory of Stratification,” places stratification theory in conversation with critical theory to explore how minoritarian subjects theorize access to pleasure as being stratified along and against racial and heteropatriarchal axes of domination.
In a secondary project, Maya explored how race, gender, and heterosexuality shaped sexual interaction and subjectivity among a sample of Black women. These findings are published in her article, “Subversive Interpellations and Sexual Subjectivity Among Heterosexual Black Women.”
Maya also co-published on how formal sex education and the media shape understandings of intimate relationships, domestic violence, and gaslighting in ways that reproduce gender-based oppression.
Maya's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Academies’ Ford Foundation Fellowships, U-M’s Center for the Education of Women+, and U-M's National Center for Institutional Diversity, among other funding sources. She is also a Visiting Predoctoral Fellow in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern University.
