Katherine Mason specializes in gender, health, social stratification and inequality, and the body in society. Her research focuses on how individuals' approaches to caring for their physical bodies - in particular, the body-cultivating projects of new and expectant mothers - act as moral and cultural status signifiers. As such, she shows how these practices both reflect and reproduce social inequalities across generations.

In both research and teaching, Professor Mason emphasizes the ties between large-scale social institutions and everyday life. Recent courses include: Embodied Inequalities (on social inequality from the perspective of human bodily difference) Gender, Family, and the State (on gendered nationalisms and the ways that the U.S. and other countries adopt policies to promote particular gender and family arrangements) Queer Theory and Society and Methods of Social Research.

Education

MA., Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
B.A., Brown University

Selected Publications

Mason, Katherine. 2012. "The Unequal Weight of Discrimination: Gender, Body Size, and Income Inequality." Social Problems 59(3).

Courses Taught

SOCY 291.03, Embodied Inequalities
SOCY 491.01, Gender, Family, and the State