Research Expertise and Interest

sociology of gender, capitalism, theories of neoliberalism, political economy, Gender and Work, Latin America, Mexico, ethnography, Marxian political economy, social reproduction

Research Description

Leslie Salzinger is Associate Professor and Chair of Gender and Women’s Studies. She got her PhD in Sociology at UC Berkeley and previously taught in the sociology departments at the University of Chicago and Boston College. She writes and teaches on gender, capitalism, nationality, and race and their ongoing co-formations. Her empirical research is ethnographic, mostly focused on Latin America, especially Mexico. Her primary research questions address the cultural constitution of economic processes and the creation of subjects within political economies. Her award-winning first book, Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9001.html), analyzed the gendered dimensions of transnational production.

Her current manuscript in progress, Model Markets: Peso Dollar Exchange as a Site of Neoliberal Incorporation, analyzes peso/dollar exchange markets as crucial gendered and raced sites for Mexico’s shift from “developing nation” to “emerging market.” Two recent publications, “Re-Marking Men: Masculinity as a Terrain of the Neoliberal Economy” (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n144139) and “Sexing Homo Œconomicus: Finding Masculinity at Work” (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0tg2q148) explore the relationship of masculinity and neoliberalism. Another vein of investigation focuses on social reproduction. A recent essay on this topic, “Seeing with the Pandemic: Social Reproduction in the Spotlight” (https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32v5r66b) was the lead article in an issue of Feminist Studies focused on the pandemic. Professor Salzinger is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and the Program in Critical Theory on campus.