BIO

In my current book project, Marriageable But Never-Married: Race, Class, Gender and Marriage Culture Among Black Professionals, I analyze the relationship between upward class mobility, gender ideologies, and family formation expectations and decisions among Black professional women and men. In this manuscript I analyze life history narrative data with 92 never-married Black women and men in and around Houston metropolitan area in Texas .

In my previously published work, “You can have it all, just not at the same time:" Why Doctoral Students are Actively Choosing Singlehood, I investigate how women and men PhD students prioritize family goals alongside career development. This paper was published in the Gender Issues journal and found that women disproportionately perceive family formation and the pursuit of an academic career to be fundamentally incompatible. While both women and men privilege career pursuits, women are more likely to report opting for singlehood, by intentionally delaying romantic relationships, marriage, and family formation until they have met career goals.

publication available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12147-020-09249-0

My recent work in Gender & Society publication, “Do The Marriageable Men want to Protect and Provide? The Expectation of Black Professional Hybrid Masculinity,” centers the narratives of 42 never-married and childless Black professional men in an investigation of how they construct gender ideologies related to the marital context. Findings reveal that these men value fairness and balance in relationships and construct “Black professional hybrid masculinity” constituted by a simultaneously racialized and classed compensatory strategy of masculine protection and equitable spousal sharing. They resist simple classification as either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic. These men cherry-pick hegemonic gender norms to reconstruct gender identities that reaffirm their sense of manhood and idealize their future wives as symbols of hybrid femininity—work-devoted women who are also femininely in need of masculine protection. This research offers an intersectional extension of hybrid masculinity, and illustrates the need for heterogeneous and context-varied theories of how Black men do gender.

publication available at https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432221102145

Email: mars2021 at stanford dot edu
currently located in The Bay Area, Ca