The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology – through Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide (1897/1951) – sociology’s role has been less prominent in contemporary efforts to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim’s insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other disciplines. In so doing, we reveal the nuance and richness of Durkheim’s insights that have been largely lost in modern suicidology, despite being foundational to all sociological theories of suicide – even those that have moved beyond his model. We proceed to discuss broadly acknowledged limitations to Durkheim’s theory of suicide and review how more recent theoretical efforts have not only addressed those concerns, but have done so by bringing a larger swatch of sociology’s theoretical and empirical toolkit to bare on suicide. Specifically, we review how recent sociological theories of suicide have incorporated insights from social network theories, cultural sociology, sociology of emotions, and sociological social psychology to better theorize how the external social world matters to individual psychological pain and suffering. We conclude by making explicit bridges between sociological and psychological theories of suicide; by noting important limitations in knowledge about suicide – particularly regarding the roles of organizations, inequality, and intersectionality in suicide – that sociology is well situated to help address.

Recent research in the social sciences suggests a methodological paradox as scholars work to make sense of the contemporary relationship between masculinity and homophobia. Representative surveys consistently find dramatically decreasing levels of sexual prejudice among all groups, among men and young men in particular. Qualitative scholarship, however, continues to find that enactments of homophobia remain integral components of contemporary masculine identities. In this article, we make sense of this shift and apparent methodological inconsistency. We do not question which measure is best. Instead, we argue for a need to understand the ways that gendered sexual prejudice transforms in ways that allow the relationship between masculinity and homophobia to endure—sometimes even when it appears to be in decline.

We examine a case of homophobic language online, specifically the deployment of the phrase "no homo," shorthand for "I'm not a homosexual." An analysis of 396 instances (comprising 1061 individual tweets) of the use of the phrase "no homo" on the social media platform Twitter suggests that the phrase is a gendered epithet that conveys cultural norms about masculinity. The first finding is that the phrase is used more often by male tweeters than by female tweeters. The second, as predicted by the literature on homophobia, is that the phrase is used in a negative emotional context to convey disapproval for men's homosexuality or behavior that is not gender normative. The third finding is that the modal use of the phrase "no homo" is in a positive emotional context, accompanying expressions of men's pleasure, desire, affection, attachment, and friendship. Our analysis suggests that the phrase "no homo" is a gendered one, primarily used by men to facilitate a particularly masculinized construction of positive emotional expression. Our research adds to and complicates findings on the relationship between homophobia and masculinity that suggests that homophobia is an organizing principal of masculinity in western cultures. KeywordsHomophobia Emotion Men Masculinity 1 2 1 2 5/2/2018 e.Proofing

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