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College of Humanities People

Mary Thomas, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Geography

Department of Women's Studies: http://womens-studies.osu.edu/
Sexuality Studies: http://sexualitystudies.osu.edu



General Background:
I am a feminist geographer interested in social and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity, social difference, and identity. I hold a 50% appointment in Geography, which serves as my tenure home, and a 50% appointment in Women’s Studies. Thus, my teaching is split between the two departments, and I serve as graduate faculty in each. My research primarily focuses on the spatial processes of social difference in the United States. I explore how subjects learn and reproduce social difference through identification processes surrounding gender, sexuality, race and class, and I ask how sexuality, racism, and economic privilege structure identity formation. In my work I have specifically looked to the lives of teenage girls to approach the complexity of social identity and spatial subjectivity. The social lives of youth in United States cities remain remarkably segregated by race. Based on research in Charleston, South Carolina, and Los Angeles, California, I have asked how race comes to be a primary separating force in and through high school and urban social spaces. I am currently writing about research that examines how Latina and Armenian (many of whom are first or second generation American) girls at an LA high school responded to the racial-ethnic violence and rioting of boys. This work suggests that while girls disavow racism, they enjoy boys’ fighting by glorifying – and finding sexy – masculine strength. A main theme underlining my papers is an interest in the spatial performativity of gender, race, and sexuality. Particular spaces like urban streets, high schools, and homes, impart normative lessons about the ambivalent qualities of social differences like blackness, migrant, heterosexuality, and girlhood. I ask how girls embody these qualities through their identity practices – thus taking up normative social identities like femininity or racialized identities – yet do so in ways that the girls themselves do not recognize or acknowledge. They, as all subjects, take on fundamentally social differences to be their own, personal attributes, and their everyday social and spatial practices give form to social difference. The banality, the ‘everydayness,’ of identity thus feeds the normative reproduction of difference. Such a reading of practice, space, and the social impart radical lessons about agency and resistance. In a psychoanalytic sense, it also places oppressive social forms as personally pleasurable (femininity via sexism, racialized identities and racism). Hence, my interest in psychoanalytic theories: these provide the conceptual help we need in understanding how the social becomes powerfully personalized.