Emily Starr

Emily Starr graduated from the University of La Verne with a bachelor's degree in Sociology and obtained her Masters degree in American Studies at California State University Fullerton. Throughout her academic career she has worked service industry jobs to provide for tuition and living expenses primarily through bartending for over eight years in California and New Orleans, LA. With one foot in the relatively "high status" category of academic work and another in the relatively "low status" category of barwork, she began to examine the very divergent and gendered identities that manifested concurrently in both realms of her life.

In low-wage barwork the "glass ceiling" is often an irrelevant concern reserved for women who work in normative, corporate, or bureaucratic jobs. With previous research contending that the lower-status the work, the higher the gender division of labor and the more vulnerable women are to concrete or discreet forms of harassment or abuse, there is a need to map, address, and examine the lives of women who work on the fringes of the normative or "legitimate" workforce. Ms. Starr's dissertation and course of study seeks to shed light on the masculinities and femininities forged in the dark spaces of the labor market that have gone largely unexamined. 

As the middle-class is increasingly bottle-necked into expanding informal labor markets, the contours of identity via race, gender, class, and family will morph and come to take on new meanings and pose new challenges. Bartenders have long occupied these marginalized spaces and provide keen insights into how gender and class are produced, reproduced, and challenged through the everyday/every-night axes of their lives. Ms. Starr loves living in New Orleans and credits the openness and liveliness of her friends, her colleagues, and her fellow bartenders for providing endless insights and support in developing this project and helping to illuminate her understanding of the varied intricacies and vulnerabilities inherent within describing "what we do" and "who we are."

Research Interests

Gender, Race, and Class; Labor Markets; Qualitative Methods; Intersectionality

CV

Area Exams

Gender and Wage Work, Identity and Low-Skill Labor Markets

Dissertation

Keeps and Maids: The Politics of Gender, Identity, and Work Through Tending Bar"

Selected Publications

- 2015 Starr, Emily, and Michele Adams. “The Domestic Exotic: Mail-Order Brides and the Paradox of Globalized Intimacies.” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society forthcoming.

-2013 Buttell, Frederick, and Emily Starr. “Lifting the Veil: Foundations for a Gender-Inclusive Paradigm of Intimate Partner Violence.” Pp. 117-132 in B. L. Russell (ed.), Perceptions of Female Offenders: How Stereotypes and Social Norms Affect Criminal Justice Responses. New York: Springer.