Graduate Student, Sociology Dept., UC Santa Barbara

Katrina Kimport is a doctoral student in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. Her areas of research interest include gender, social movements, sexuality, and culture. For her master’s thesis, she analyzed how actors in social movements framed their claims in the debate over emergency contraception and what these framings communicated about their understandings of gender.

Research Sample: Excerpt from “The Campaign to Make Emergency Contraception Available Over-the-Counter: The Role of Gender in Framing Contests” (Master’s Thesis, Fall 2005)

On December 16, 2003, a joint committee of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) reviewed a petition for the status shift of Plan B, a brand of emergency contraception, from prescription-only to over-the-counter and voted overwhelmingly to support the proposed change. This decision cannot be understood without an analysis of the gendered processes at work by social movement actors and their targets in the framing of this issue. This study will combine gender and social movements analyses to understand how gender was mobilized in this moral contest. Specifically, this research utilizes a cultural framing approach to analyze the operation of gender. Using qualitative content analysis coding, this research identifies the actors, the frames they deploy, and the underlying assumptions about gender on which these frames are built. I seek to illuminate the ways in which understandings of gender are fundamental to this moral contest. This study highlights the intersection of gender and social movements, showing how assumptions of gender, even when gender is not invoked, pervade movement action, politics, and, indeed, our society.

Contributions to Transliteracies Project:
Blogdex (Research Report)
ConceptNet (Research Report)
Television Without Pity (Research Report)
TextArc (Research Report)
FaceBook.com (Research Report)