Dr. Paige Sweet, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan, joins us as a guest lecturer for our Form Huber Colloquium Series. Dr. 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.
The talk she will be giving is titled:
"Trading Gendered Risks: How Domestic Violence Survivors Navigate Institutional and Intimate Housing Arrangements"
Existing literature shows that marginalized people shuffle across “public” and “private” living situations in moves that appear counter intuitive. What drives movement across institutional and intimate settings? How do people make decisions about where to go and when? Based on interviews with domestic violence survivors conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that survivors move because they are responding to gendered risks. Taking movement across the institutional and the intimate as our object of inquiry, we show that motherhood risks propel simultaneous use of public and private settings, whereas sexual risks propel ping-ponging movement. Relatedly, institutional settings tend to introduce risks to autonomy, while intimate settings tend to introduce safety risks. These risks are co-constituted and experienced cumulatively: risks in intimate settings push survivors to make different decisions about the institutional risks they’re willing to face. We argue that marginalized people experience the intimate and institutional as interlocking arenas of situated risks; decision-making in response to those risks drives different types of movement – ultimately prolonging instability.