“Send Him a Lot Lizard”: Masculinity, Controlling Images, and Humor in Online Trucking Spaces

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10. Masculinities: Crisis, Politics, and Transition

Abstract

Historically, trucking has been a predominantly male occupation, and most popular images of truckers often reinforce the occupation as a site for displays of blue-collar hypermasculinity. Given the mostly solitary and dispersed nature of trucking work, social media has emerged as a significant site of community-building for truckers. Social media provides a space where truckers can talk about their work, its rewards and challenges, give each other advice, and share knowledge about the industry. For this project, it provides an opportunity to investigate how gender stereotypes are employed in ways that reinforce a hypermasculine trucker identity. This paper analyzes Reddit content posted in 2023 in the popular online forum, “r/Truckers”, to analyze how the gendered stereotype of the “lot lizard” ---a sex worker found at truck stops---functions as a controlling. We find the stereotype is almost always applied using humor, and functions to 1) reinforce the image of truckers as hypersexual men with access to women sex workers as an essential feature of the job, 2) create boundaries between themselves and perceived outsiders, whether male or female, through the social construction of strangers in hostile and sexually exploitative ways, and finally, 3) maintain traditional gendered occupational boundaries through hypermasculine displays. All of these dimensions of the “lot lizard” controlling image happens inside the relatively new, unregulated environment of social media, which encourages and normalizes harassment and assault in work settings.

Authors

• Tiamba M. Wilkerson, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Laurel Smith-Doerr, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

• Helene Grogan, University of Massachusetts-Amherst