Dr Yuchen Yang

@dr-yang.bsky.social

1447 Followers 416 Following

Assistant Professor in Sociology at University of Birmingham | UChicago PhD '24 | UC Berkeley BA '17 | interactionist scholar of gender, sexualities, culture, semiotics, and childhood | friend of EMCA who stumbled into linguistic anthropology

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Drinks that do things.
Lecture notes for Sociology of Everyday Life
Week 10: From “Small” Routine to “Big” Transformation Burawoy, Michael. 1991. “Introduction” and “The Extended Case Method.” Pp. 1–7 and Pp. 271–287 in Ethnography Unbound: Power and Resistance in the Modern Metropolis, edited by M. Burawoy et al. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. “What is Institutional Ethnography? Some Contrasts.” Pp. 29–38 in Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Lanham: AltaMira Press. Smith, Dorothy E. and Alison I. Griffith. 2022. “Introduction.” Pp 3–12 in Simply Institutional Ethnography: Creating a Sociology for People. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2014. “Competing Technologies of Embodiment: Pan-Asian Modernity and Third World Dependency in Vietnam’s Contemporary Sex Industry.” Gender & Society 28(4):513–536. Recommended: Burawoy, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16(1):4–33. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2014. “Flirting with Capital: Negotiating Perceptions of Pan-Asian Ascendency and Western Decline in Global Sex Work.” Social Problems 61(4):507–29. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2020. “Engendering Global Capital: How Homoerotic Triangles Facilitate Foreign Investments into Risky Markets.” Gender & Society 34(4):547–572. Gibson, David R. 2011. “Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis.” American Journal of Sociology 117(2):361–419. Lempert, Michael. 2024. From Small Talk to Micro-Aggression: A History of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collins, Randall. 1981. “On the Microfoundations of Macrosociology.” American Journal of Sociology 86(5):984–1014.
Week 9: Repairing Everyday “Troubles” in Interactions Raymond, Chase Wesley. 2019. “Category Accounts: Identity and Normativity in Sequences of Action.” Language in Society 48:585–606. Yang, Yuchen. 2025. “Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender.” Sociological Theory. Recommended: Scott, Marvin B., and Stanford M. Lyman. 1968. “Accounts.” American Sociological Review 33(1):46–62. Schilt, Kristen, and Catherine Connell. 2007. “Do Workplace Gender Transitions Make Gender Trouble?” Gender, Work & Organization 14(6):596–618. Gal, Susan, and Judith T. Irvine. 2019. Signs of Difference: Language and Ideology in Social Life. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Week 8: Methodological and Theoretical Reflections on Online Interactions Forberg, Peter L. and Kristen Schilt. 2023. “What Is Ethnographic about Digital Ethnography? A Sociological Perspective.” Frontiers in Sociology 8:1156776 Manning, Paul, and Ilana Gershon. 2013. “Animating Interaction.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3):107–37. Recommended: Forberg, Peter L. 2022. “From the Fringe to the Fore: An Algorithmic Ethnography of the Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Group QAnon.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 51(3):291–317. Silvio, Teri. 2010. “Animation: The New Performance?” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20(2):422–438.
Week 7: Empirical Investigations of Online Interactions Ross, Scott. 2019. “Being Real on Fake Instagram: Likes, Images, and Media Ideologies of Value.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 29(3):359–374. Zhao, Sicong. 2025. “Intrapersonal Interactions on Social Media: Self-Curatorship within the Museum of Self.” Symbolic Interaction OnlineFirst: https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.1238 Recommended: Lane, Jeffrey. 2016. “The Digital Street: An Ethnographic Study of Networked Street Life in Harlem.” American Behavioral Scientist 60(1):43–58. Gershon, Ilana. 2010. “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover: Media Ideologies and Idioms of Practice.” Pp. 16–49 in The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Menchik, Daniel A. and Xiaoli Tian. 2008. “Putting Social Context into Text: The Semiotics of E-mail Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 114(2):332–370.
Week 5: Race in Everyday Life Whitehead, Kevin A. 2009. “‘Categorizing the Categorizer’: The Management of Racial Common Sense in Interaction.” Social Psychology Quarterly 72(4):325–342. Zhang, Tianhao. 2024. “Identifying the Unidentified Race: A Study of Normative Features of Commonsense Knowledge of Racism in Asian Members’ Online Interaction.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Online First: https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492241298254 Recommended: Whitehead, Kevin A., and Gene H. Lerner. 2009. “When Are Persons ‘White’?: On Some Practical Asymmetries of Racial Reference in Talk-in-Interaction.” Discourse & Society 20(5):613–41. Rawls, Anne Warfield. 2000. “‘Race’ as an Interaction Order Phenomenon: W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘Double Consciousness’ Thesis Revisited.” Sociological Theory 18(2):241–274. Timmermans, Stefan, and Iddo Tavory. 2020. “Racist Encounters: A Pragmatist Semiotic Analysis of Interaction.” Sociological Theory 38(4):295–317. Zhang, Jienian. 2023. “Playing with Oppression: Latinx Students’ Use of Humor to Navigate Assumed Racism.” Social Psychology Quarterly 86(3):256–274.
Week 4: Class in Everyday Life Lareau, Annette. 2002. “Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families.” American Sociological Review 67(5):747–76. Harvey, Peter Francis. 2022. “‘Make Sure You Look Someone in the Eye’: Socialization and Classed Comportment in Two Elementary Schools.” American Journal of Sociology 127(5):1417–1459. Recommended: West, Candace, and Sarah Fenstermaker. 1995. “Doing Difference.” Gender & Society 9(1):8–37. Calarco, Jessica McCrory. 2014. “The Inconsistent Curriculum: Cultural Tool Kits and Student Interpretations of Ambiguous Expectations.” Social Psychology Quarterly 77(2):185–209.
Week 3: Sexuality in Everyday Life Kitzinger, Celia. 2005. “Heteronormativity in Action: Reproducing the Heterosexual Nuclear Family in After-Hours Medical Calls.” Social Problems 52(4):477–98. Pascoe, C. J. 2005. “‘Dude, You’re a Fag’: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse.” Sexualities 8(3):329–46. Recommended: Pascoe, C. J. 2011. “Compulsive Heterosexuality: Masculinity and Dominance.” Pp. 84–114 in Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Oakland: University of California Press. Ward, Jane. 2020. The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. New York: NYU Press. Tavory, Iddo. 2009. “The Structure of Flirtation: On the Construction of Interactional Ambiguity.” Studies in Symbolic Interaction 33:59–74.
"There are very few infallible rules in intellectual life, but a surely robust one would be to close any book on Northeast Asia as soon as it begins to hold forth on Confucius and Confucianism and their relevance to the contemporary era." ——John Lie, The Dream of East Asia (2018)
Week 2: Gender in Everyday Life West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1977. “Women’s Place in Everyday Talk: Reflections on Parent-Child Interaction.” Social Problems 24(5):521–29. Goffman, Erving. 1976. “Gender Display.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 3:69–77. Thorne, Barrie. 1993. “Creating a Sense of ‘Opposite Sides.’” Pp. 63–88 in Gender Play: Girls and Boys in School. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Recommended: Goffman, Erving. 1956. “Introduction.” Pp. 1–9 in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Research Center. West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. “Doing Gender.” Gender & Society 1(2):125–151. Messner, Michael A. 2000. "Barbie Girls versus Sea Monsters: Children Constructing Gender." Gender & Society 14(6):765-784. Lucal, Betsy. 1999. “What It Means to Be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous Gender System.” Gender & Society 13(6):781–797.
Week 1: Introducing the Sociology of Everyday Life Adler, Patricia A., Peter Adler, and Andrea Fontana. 1987. “Everyday Life Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 13:217–235. Fishman, Pamela M. 1978. “Interaction: The Work Women Do.” Social Problems 25(4):397–406. Antaki, Charles. 2007. “Basic Transcription Notation Conventions.” https://learn.lboro.ac.uk/ludata/cx/ca-tutorials/notation.htm Recommended: Thorne, Barrie. 1997. “Brandeis as a Generative Institution: Critical Perspectives, Marginality, and Feminism.” Pp. 103–25 in Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement, edited by B. Laslett and B. Thorne. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Collins, Randall. 2004. “The Program of Interaction Ritual Theory.” Pp. 3–46 in Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” Pp. 13–31 in Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, edited by G. H. Lerner. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Sociological Theory - Original Article Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender Yuchen Yang Abstract “Doing Gender” is often read as a theory of how people signify femininity/masculinity via expressive “performances.” This prevailing interpretation falls short of what the theory calls for—an ethnomethodologically informed analysis of gender’s emergent “naturalness.” To further this agenda, I theorize the audience’s “gender uptake” as a central component of doing gender by elaborating ethnomethodology’s attention to interpretive acts. Integrating Dorothy Smith’s intellectual legacy for feminist interpretive sociology, ethnomethodology’s neglected insight on categorization, and cultural sociology’s recent rediscovery of Peircean semiotics, I argue the facticity of gender’s “naturalness” remains underdetermined until the audience makes a series of ideological moves that cannot be predetermined by the performer. With case studies of how feminist parents account for their children’s gender-stereotypical interests, I illustrate how this audience-centered approach helps us unpack the interactional production/naturalization of categorical differences processually as open-ended negotiation of sign relations, where meaning emerges from selective attention. Keywords accounts, categorization, childhood, doing gender, ethnomethodology, pragmatist semiotics
The Missing Childist Revolution in Feminist Sociology: Re-Revisioning Women and Social Change Tue, August 12, 8:00 to 9:30am, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Floor: Lobby Level/Green, Crystal B Abstract In Chicago in 1986, Barrie Thorne delivered her Cheryl Miller Lecture for Sociologists for Women in Society, titled “Re-Visioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?” Published the following year in the first ever issue of Gender & Society, this was not only the first Distinguished Feminist Lecture to appear in this journal, but also one of the first major statements to consider the place of children in feminist sociology. In returning to Thorne’s lecture on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Gender & Society, our paper asks: Amidst the advances in feminist sociology, are children still missing? Drawing on unique primary source material including Thorne’s own personal correspondence, we undertake an historical analysis of feminist sociology from the 1980s to the present. As our analysis will demonstrate, while the expansion of the field was marked with momentous achievements, these developments have tended to remain adult-centric and continue to sideline children. We therefore set an agenda motivated by Thorne’s early queries and adapt them for important evolutions in the field of the social scientific and feminist study of gender over the past 40 years, bracketed by the founding of Gender & Society in 1987 and the present day. We argue that a childist revolution in feminist sociology has the potential to transform all of sociology as we know it.
41051 - 30 Years of Raewyn Connell’s Masculinities: Looking Back and Charting the Future Mon, August 11, 4:00 to 5:30pm, West Tower, Hyatt Regency Chicago, Floor: Lobby Level/Green, Crystal B Session Submission Type: Invited Session (90 minute) Description 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Raewyn Connell's book, Masculinities (1995). The book has had a profound impact on feminist sociology. At the same time, a number of gender scholars have pointed out that the field of masculinities studies—despite Connell's critical intervention—has long been dominated by older, cisgender, white men. In this invited panel, we feature a diverse group of scholars who critically engage with Connell's work and generate innovative theoretical perspectives. These scholars are actively redirecting the field to a more progressive future for studies of masculinities.