Helana Darwin is an award-winning sociologist of gender, whose research focuses on the regulatory impact of the gender binary system. Helana has turned to a wide range of subcultures, both online and offline, in order to theorize gender inequality. Helana’s research on the privileged position of omnivorousness within craft beer culture recently won the Graduate Student Paper Award through the Consumer and Consumption Section of the American Sociological Association. Her insightful research on gender in craft beer culture has attracted a considerable amount of attention from academics and non-academics alike, inspiring interview invitations from a variety of popular press outlets. Helana has also catalyzed a paradigm shift in the sociology of gender and religion, through her article “Redoing Gender, Redoing Religion,” published by Gender & Society. This research theorizes egalitarian social change within patriarchal religious traditions, by centering the experiences of gender-transgressive religious practitioners. The Association for the Sociology of Religion recognized “Redoing Gender, Redoing Religion” through the McNamara Award, as the most outstanding article by a graduate student in 2018.
Helana’s current research analyzes the social experiences of non-binary people (those who identify as neither man nor woman), identifying obstacles that they encounter in their daily lives, along with strategies they have devised in order to achieve social recognition. Based on a virtual ethnography of a social media site and a follow up series of in-depth interviews with 47 non-binary people from across the globe, this research illuminates the limitations and harmful effects of the gender binary system. Helana earned the prestigious Joyce Turner Dissertation Fellowship Award from Stony Brook University for this research. Helana is on the job market and in pursuit of a book contract.
