Karin A. Martin

Karin Martin is a Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies and received her MA and Ph.D. in sociology from University of California at Berkeley.  Her work concerns how bodies and sexuality are shaped by social inequalities, social relations, and culture. She is interested in the interplay of bodies, sexuality, and gender and in exploring these at the level of everyday life.  These interests emerge from several bodies of theoretical work (especially feminist theory but also psychoanalytic theory, symbolic interactionism...) that engage these issues quite differently. She particularly interested in connecting empirical evidence from everyday life to these theoretical perspectives. Her research has examined gender differences in pubertal experience and first sex; how kids' bodies are gendered in preschool; how gender identity serves as a form of social control during labor and childbirth; and she is currently studying how college women (sorority women, athletes, and feminists) construct appearance routines. She is author of Puberty, Sexually, and the Self: Boys and Girls at Adolescence (Routledge) and has also published in Gender and Society and American Sociological Review.