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 how survivors of gender-based violence 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. She is currently writing a book on gaslighting with Princeton University Press.

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)

Cooper, Chiara and Paige L. Sweet. Forthcoming. “Daddy Issues and Diagnoses: The Weaponization of Mental Health in Intimate Relationships.” Violence Against Women. 

Sweet, Paige L. 2024. "Clustered Vulnerabilities: The Unequal Effects of COVID-19 on Domestic Violence." American Sociological Review 89(3): 421-449.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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