Who Can Recover from Disruption? Childhood Adversity, Structural Sexism, and Gendered Social Reproduction

• In Event: Disrupting Health Inequities Across the Life Course (Co-sponsored by Aging and the Life Course Section)

Abstract

This study advances a relational account of social reproduction by conceptualizing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as disruptions to the symbolic and institutional conditions under which habitus is formed and capital is converted. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction and Wacquant’s emphasis on embodied plasticity, ACEs are theorized not primarily as sources of psychological trauma, but as indicators of instability in early socialization environments that condition how stratification processes unfold over the life course. Using cross-sectional data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (2019-2023) across 41 U.S. states, linked to state-level measures of structural sexism, the analysis examines associations between ACEs and educational attainment, household income, and self-rated health among young adults. Results show that the consequences of early-life disruption are systematically gendered and amplified in institutional contexts characterized by higher structural sexism. Women exposed to ACEs experience substantially greater educational and economic disadvantage in more sexist states, whereas men’s outcomes are less sensitive to institutional context. These patterns suggest that inequality operates not only through differential access to resources, but through unequal processual resilience—the socially structured capacity for individuals’ embodied dispositions to remain institutionally callable, a capacity that is differentially regulated and buffered across gendered institutional contexts, and thus to sustain or re-enter participation in normative life-course processes following disruption. By foregrounding early-life instability and institutional context, this study reframes social reproduction as a contingent achievement, showing how existing structures of inequality persist by selectively sustaining participation among some groups while rendering others increasingly precarious.

Author

• Yang Zhong, Florida State University