Piper Sledge

Piper Sledge is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. A sociologist by training and an interdisciplinary thinker by heart, Piper is curious about the meaning of gender across a range of contexts. She holds degrees in Sociology (Ph.D University of Chicago) and Natural Resources (M.S University of Vermont). Prior to the University of Arizona, Piper was an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Gender Studies at Bryn Mawr College.

Piper’s first book, Bodies Unbound: Gender Specific Cancer and Social Intelligibility is a comparative study showing how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care and the ways patients respond to these ideologies through decisions about their bodies using three cases: transgender men seeking preventative gynecological care, cisgender men diagnosed with breast cancer, and cisgender women with breast cancer who elect not to pursue reconstructive surgery. Bodies Unbound received the Best Publication Award from the Body and Embodiment Section of the American Sociological Association in 2022.

Her current book project emerges from the experiences of mixed-race queer individuals interpreted at the confluence of Queer theory, Black feminist theory, Critical-Mixed Race Studies, and Indigenous Studies. Through an analytic of rivers, Piper considers how these theories mix to create deeper understanding of and bring turbulent critique to our taken for granted understandings of race and gender. She imagines these structures as fluid convergences that retain the possibilities of divergences as well. The book dives deep into the ways that meanings of race and gender migrate across the bodies and boundaries of both social structure and geographic space through acts of reinforcement, rejection, and reimagining. Where a settler colonialist imaginary positions rivers as boundaries, obstacles, or modes of transportation for economic gain, Piper envisions them as relationships of connection and landed place from which to consider how structures of race and gender fluidly come together to (re)produce meaning.

Piper is also the Director of Community-based Initiatives and Research for the Indigenous Partnership Program (IPP) of Cosmic Explorer, a next generation gravitational wave detector.