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Background

Dr. J. Lotus Seeley joined the department of Sociology at ����ý as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2016. She has a Master’s in Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University (2007) and a PhD in Women’s Studies and Sociology from University of Michigan (2016). Her work focuses on gender, work, and organizations, with an emphasis on the mundane interactional processes through which identities and social statuses are (re)produced. Key research interests are feminist theory, economic sociology, sociology of gender and sexuality, the sociology of emotions, and microsociology. She is a qualitative researcher who engages in both ethnography and unstructured interviewing. Generally, her research emphasizes how gender is socially-constructed, organizationally-structured, performative, and generative of social inequality. She has examined experiences of women and men administrative professionals and IT support workers, focusing on how organizations structure their performances of gender and status.

At ����ý, Dr. Seeley teaches classes on sociological theory, qualitative research methods, gender and society, gender and work, sociology of work, and microsociology. As an instructor in sociology, her goal is to teach students how to benefit from applying their sociological imaginations to their own lives and immediate circumstances. Her mission is to help students understand how macro-level forces structure their lives so that they can develop more useful ways of looking at the world than the individualism that dominates our culture.

Dr. Seeley has published on feminist theory and sociological theory, the classed dimensions of slut-shaming stigma, how men administrative assistants perform masculinity and femininity, and how organizational status is (re)produced at universities when faculty and staff engage in help-seeking for IT support services and through efforts to circumvent waiting. Drawing from feminist theories of doing gender, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology, Dr. Seeley’s research as uses qualitative data to elucidate the individual and interactional processes by which gender and other inequalities are (re)produced both in and outside organizations.

She is currently researching the experiences of women workers in the gig economy. Her emphasis is on understanding how mothers with responsibility for small children use flexible labor to try and achieve work/life balance.

Selected Works

Hamilton, Laura T., Elizabeth A. Armstrong, J. Lotus Seeley, and Elizabeth M. Armstrong.
2019. “Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination.” Sociological Theory 37(4): 315-341. (Winner of 2020 Distinguished Article Award from the American Sociological Association Sex & Gender Section.)

Seeley, J. Lotus. 2019. “Jumping to the Head of the Invisible Line: Waiting, Queuing,
and the Reproduction of Organizational Status.” Social Currents 6(5): 487-503.

Seeley, J. Lotus. 2019. “‘A Give Grief Kind of Guy’: Help-Seeking, Status, and the Experience of Helpers at a University IT Help Desk.” Symbolic Interaction 42(1): 127- 150.

Seeley, J. Lotus. 2018. “‘Show Us Your Frilly Pink Underbelly’: Male Administrative Assistants Performing Masculinities and Femininity.” Gender, Work, and Organizations 25(4):418-436.

Seeley, J. Lotus. 2014. “Harrison White as (Not Quite) Poststructuralist.” Sociological Theory
32(1): 27-42

Armstrong, Elizabeth A., Laura T. Hamilton, Elizabeth M. Armstrong, and J. Lotus Seeley.
2014. “‘Good Girls:’ Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus.”
Social Psychology Quarterly 77(2):100-122.