RESEARCH and CV

My scholarship broadly focuses on gender and racial inequality at the intersections of victimization, identity, and organizations. In my research, I take the view that those who are at risk of violence and exploitation reveals much about the structure of inequality in society. I explore broad questions around why inequality persists and how it is reinforced at multiple levels. I examine how inequality and violence are embedded in social interactions, identities, organizations, and bureaucracy. 

My book (under contract with Oxford University Press) examines the social processes that contribute to sexual harassment and assault in the U.S. military. Drawing primarily on in-depth interviews with fifty current and former servicewomen, my book privileges their voices to describe how they navigate the combination of a sexist institutional climate, hostile forms of workplace harassment, and threats of sexual assault, while attempting to maintain military careers. I show how sexism adapts to and functions through institutional rules, policies, practices, and interactions. 

I am a qualitative researcher and have published articles that employ a variety of methods including in-depth interviewing, participant observation, visual methods, and critical discourse analysis. Over the next several years my scholarship will focus on understanding the relationship between organizations, identity, victimization, violence, and gender and racial inequality. As a critical criminologist, I work to advance scholarship on victimization that does not prop up the carceral state and instead explore opportunities for change on organizational, structural, and interactional levels. My research also contributes to the scholarship on masculinity and femininity and their relationship to victimization. 

Peer Reviewed Journal Articles 

Bonnes, Stephanie. 2022. “Femininity Anchors: Heterosexual relationships and pregnancy as sites of harassment for U.S. Service Women." American Sociological Review vol. 87, no. 4: 618-643. 

Bonnes, Stephanie. 2021. “An Intersectional Approach to Military Sexual Violence.” Sociology Compass vol 15, no 12.

Bonnes, Stephanie and Jeffrey Palmer. 2021.“The U.S. Marine Corps’ Response to Intimate Partner Sexual Violence: An Analysis of The Family Advocacy Program and the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program.”Armed Forces and Society vol. 48, no. 3: 609-633.

Bonnes, Stephanie. 2020. “Service-women’s responses to Sexual Harassment: The Importance of Identity Work and Masculinity in a Gendered Organization” Violence Against Women vol. 26, no. 12-13: 1656-1680.   

Bonnes, Stephanie. 2017. “The Bureaucratic Harassment of U.S. Servicewomen.” Gender & Society vol. 31, no. 6: 804-829.

Bonnes, Stephanie and Janet Jacobs. 2017 “Gendered Representations of Apartheid: The Women’s Jail Museum at Constitution Hill.” Museum & Society vol. 15, no. 2: 153-170.

Bonnes, Stephanie. 2016 “Power Differentials Among Married Couples in Malawi as Predictors for Likelihood of Physical and Emotional Intimate Partner Violence.” Violence and Victims vol. 31, no. 1: 51-70.

My research has won awards from the Sociologists for Women in Society, the Sex and Gender section at the American Sociological Association, the Division on Women and Crime and the Division of Victimology at the American Society of Criminology.