1036 Derby Hall

154 North Oval Mall

Columbus, OH 43210-1361

614-247-8222

thomas.1672@osu.edu

 

Assistant Professor, Departments of Geography and Women’s Studies, Ohio State University, 2005-present.

Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, UCLA, 2002-2005.

 

Education

Ph.D., Geography, Ph.D. Minor in Feminist Studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, May, 2002. 

M.A., Geography, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, 1997.

B.A. Hons, Political Science and History, College of Charleston, South Carolina, 1992.   

 

Research Interests: Feminist geography and theory; youth and girls; race and racism in the US; sexual practice; space and identity.

 

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 individual identities like 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, and girls are no different from boys in this regard.  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 have also examined girls’ different responses to the policing of urban, consumptive space.  In one paper, I ask, how have girls learned about the qualities of black and white through such policing of their youthful behaviors in Charleston, South Carolina?  My work has also examined sexual practices of girls. I argue that so-called underage sex is driven by the pleasures that creating spaces for sex offer (in other words, away from watchful, adult eyes).  I am also working on 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.

 

Courses taught at OSU 2005-2008

GEOG 240: Economic and Social Geography

GEOG 652: Cities and the Politics of Difference

GEOG 670: Population Geography

WOM STD 524:  Women and Work

WOM STD 550: Western Feminist Thought

 

WOM STD 850: Sexuality Studies

WOM STD 700: Introduction to Women’s Studies (Feminist Theory)