About

Kristen Schilt is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. She holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. from the University of California-Los Angeles. Her research centers on the sociology of gender and sexualities, the sociology of culture, and the sociology of work and occupations. A key focus of her work is making visible the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality that serve to naturalize and reproduce social inequality. She has extensively written about the experiences of transgender people in the United States and about the development of transgender studies as a field within sociology. Her work explores qualitative research methods, feminist and queer cultural movements, and the social processes underlying workplace gender inequality. Schilt has co-directed a documentary film titled “Framing Agnes,” which investigates the history of transgender research in 1950s sociology. She served as the faculty director for the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at the University of Chicago from 2017 to 2023. Her notable publication, 'Just One of the Guys?', examines the workplace experiences of transgender men and how cultural beliefs about gender influence social and organizational responses, revealing how boundaries between men and women are both flexible and stable. She is also involved in editing works on queer methods in sociology and is working on projects that analyze the history of transgender research and the social processes involved in major life changes related to identity and body modifications.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Gender studies
• Medical education
• Psychology
• Criminology
• Medicine
• Epistemology
• Media studies
• Law
• Anthropology

Selected publications

• Thinking Sex in Sociology: Sexualities Research in the Twenty-First Century

  Annual Review of Sociology · 2026-04-13

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, we take stock of major developments in sociological approaches to the study of sexual life in the twenty-first century. First, we highlight the breadth of theoretical and methodological approaches within the sociology of sexualities subfield. We explore the growth of research that centers race, ethnicity, age, and geographic location within the study of sexualities. We also showcase the growing body of transnational research that critically examines the shifting forms of state power that constrain and enable the possibilities of sexual autonomy and collective action. Second, we examine the emerging subfield of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender)-inclusive demography, detailing the limitations and possibilities of this methodological approach and recent patterns in findings. Finally, we highlight how feminist and queer critiques have expanded the conceptual frameworks for studying sex beyond the procreative/nonprocreative binary that long pervaded the discipline. We end with ideas for how to safeguard the epistemological and methodological diversity of sexualities research in sociology.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: <i>Who’s Afraid of Gender?</i> by Judith Butler Who’s Afraid of Gender? By ButlerJudith. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2024, 308 pp., $30.00 (hardcover); $20.00 (paperback, e-book).

  Gender & Society · 2025-06-10

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• DIFFERENCES IN SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND HEALTH STATUS BY SEXUAL IDENTITY AMONG OLDER ADULTS: COMPARISON OF TWO COHORTS

  Innovation in Aging · 2024-12-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Sexual minority women experience poorer social, mental, and physical health than their heterosexual counterparts; yet limited work has been done to describe the scope of these health differences. Challenges to such analyses include a dearth of large-scale national surveys that collect sexual orientation data and small numbers of cases among those studies that do ask. To advance our understanding of the health and wellbeing of sexual minority women, we compare key indicators of health and wellbeing (e.g., diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, depression, loneliness) by sexual identity in the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, a nationally representative study of older adults, and in SAMLAP, a nationally representative sample of older LGBT adults. We employ OLS and logistic regressions to assess how health outcomes differ between sexual minority women and heterosexual women in NSHAP as well as health differences among sexual minority women in SAMLAP. We controlled for age, marital status, race, education, and network size in our models. In NSHAP, we found that sexual minority women had higher depressive symptoms than heterosexual women but there were no other health differences between these two groups. In SAMLAP, bisexual women had higher odds of developing diabetes and more depressive symptoms compared to lesbian women. We will discuss our results within the context of the minority stress model which details the impact of social stigma on the health of sexual minority populations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Un mec comme les autres ? Comment les hommes trans’ rendent le genre visible au travail

  Travail genre et sociétés · 2023-04-12

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Cet article examine la reproduction des inégalités sexuées sur le lieu de travail par le biais d’entretiens approfondis avec des hommes trans’. Avant leur transition de genre, certains ont eu une première expérience professionnelle en tant que femme, ce qui leur donne un point de vue spécifique d’ outsider within sur les avantages que les hommes en général tirent de la subordination des femmes. Ils découvrent que, en tant qu’hommes, ils reçoivent plus d’autorité, de récompenses et de respect sur le lieu de travail qu’en tant que femmes, même lorsqu’ils conservent le même emploi. Leurs expériences contribuent à éclairer la manière dont les désavantages structurels des femmes sont reproduits dans les interactions. Elles illustrent également comment le « dividende patriarcal » varie en fonction de caractéristiques telles que la race/l’ethnicité et l’apparence corporelle, car ces avantages sont moins nets pour les hommes trans’ racisés et/ou de relativement petite taille.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• What is ethnographic about digital ethnography? A sociological perspective

  Frontiers in Sociology · 2023 · 42 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  When COVID-19 health guidelines vastly restricted or shut down in-person ethnographic research in 2020, many researchers pivoted to forms of online qualitative research using platforms such as WeChat, Twitter, and Discord. This growing body of qualitative internet research in sociology is often encapsulated under the umbrella term "digital ethnography." But the question of what makes digital qualitative research ethnographic remains open. In this article, we posit that digital ethnographic research necessitates a negotiation of the ethnographer's self-presentation and co-presence within the field that other forms of qualitative research, such as content or discourse analysis, do not require to satisfy their epistemological stance. To make our case, we provide a brief overview of digital research in sociology and related disciplines. Then, we draw upon our experiences conducting ethnographies in digital communities and in-person communities (what we call here, "analog ethnography") to explore how decisions about self-presentation and co-presence facilitate or block the generation of meaningful ethnographic data. We think through pertinent questions such as: Does the lower barrier for anonymity online justify disguised research? Does anonymity generate thicker data? How should digital ethnographers participate in research environments? What are the possible repercussions of digital participation? We argue that digital and analog ethnographies share a common epistemology that is distinct from non-participatory forms of qualitative digital research-namely the need for the researcher to relationally gather data from the field site over an extended period of time.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Changing Women in a Changing Society</i> at 50: A Symposium

  American Journal of Sociology · 2023-11-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Divergent Pathways: How Pre‐Orientation Programs Can Shape the Transition to College for First‐Generation, Low‐Income Students¹

  Sociological Forum · 2023 · 3 citations

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Psychology

  First‐generation, low‐income (FGLI) students attend college at historically high rates in the United States. However, FGLI students continue to struggle in transitioning to college, particularly in elite universities. In this article, we engage with interview and supplemental survey data from 40 FGLI students at an elite university to demonstrate how self‐advocacy skills—conceptualized as a form of cultural capital—can support FGLI students' transition into college. We do this through the case of pre‐orientation programs, which are increasingly offered across universities, where half of the sample participated in pre‐orientation and half did not. We interviewed both subsets at the start of their first academic year, as well as during their COVID‐19‐induced departure from campus residences. In response, we argue that students who participated in pre‐orientation more often demonstrate self‐advocacy skills, both in‐person and online, especially in comparison with those who did not participate. We show that forming relationships with peers, as well as faculty and staff, during pre‐orientation is key to enacting self‐advocacy. Lastly, we also respond to previous studies that typically associate self‐advocacy skills with the cultural competencies of higher‐income and continuing‐generation students, while making clear how these skills can benefit FGLI students in transitioning into school.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sex and the Sociological Dope

  2022-10-20 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Harold Garfinkel’s case study of “Agnes,” a young woman assigned male at birth who sought medical treatment at the University of California at Los Angeles in the late 1950s, is widely characterized as the first sociological case study of a person who might today identify as transgender. While myriad scholars have reinterpreted his written case material over the years, less attention has been paid to locating his theoretical insights about “sex status” within the context of the social sciences of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Drawing on published works and archival materials, the author situates Garfinkel’s writing about Agnes within the then-dominant strands of sociological and psychoanalytic thinking about sex and gender. In particular, the chapter focuses on the distinctive sociological lens through which Garfinkel interpreted Agnes’s life history through a juxtaposition of Garfinkel’s work with that of his collaborator on Agnes’s case, psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller.

  PublisherDOI

• Front Matter

  American Journal of Sociology · 2020-07-01

  paratextOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ‘Strong Riot Women’ and the Continuity of Feminist Subcultural Participation

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  This chapter focuses on girls’ rock camps, week-long summer-camp programs in which adult women teach young girls how to play instruments, form bands and put on shows. Subcultures have long been theorized as the domain of the young. Illustrating this connection, studies of the varieties of subcultural participation often use the terms ‘subcultures’ and ‘youth cultures’ interchangeably. Since the first girls-only rock camp, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, opened in Portland, Oregon, in 2001, over two dozen rock ‘n’ roll camps for girls have popped up all over the world. Girls’ rock camps present a new strategy for continued subcultural participation for adult women—educating new generations of girls about women’s music history, feminism and Do It Yourself cultural production. Rock camps provide locations for an explicit transfer of knowledge between women and girls.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Laurel Westbrook

  Grand Valley State University

  7 shared

• Bernard E. Harcourt

  Columbia University

  3 shared

• Jenifer L. Bratter

  Rice University

  3 shared

• Patrick Jagoda

  2 shared

• Anthony Chen

  2 shared

• Elroi J. Windsor

  2 shared

• Anne Morrison Piehl

  2 shared

• Eric A. Feldman

  William Carey University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Changing Women in a Changing Society @ 50 (series of webinar…