About

Nate King is an assistant professor at the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. He is a multidisciplinary artist who uses animation and compositing techniques to create mixed-media short films and installations. His production methods include video performance, hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation, stop motion, and projection mapping. King's work examines themes of identity and contemporary internet aesthetics. His teaching responsibilities include courses such as Stop-Motion Studio, Collaborative Production Studio, 2D Animation Studio, and Video and Compositing Studio. He has been recognized through various artist residencies, including the Wassaic Project, ChaNorth, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Stove Works, and ACRE. His recent work has been screened at festivals such as Frameline, Sweaty Eyeballs, and the Altered Images Film and Music Festival, and exhibited at venues including the Greenville Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Gender studies
• Economics
• Medicine
• Law
• Mathematics
• History
• Social psychology
• Gerontology
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• Mediated Ritual on Academic Ground

  Fast Capitalism · 2026-01-21

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Intersectionality and paradoxes of inequality

  2025-12-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  We define culture as distinctions between kinds of people, such as by gender, nation, race, sexuality, and age. At some locations of those intersections, inequalities combine to lift otherwise subordinate groups above other groups around them. We demonstrate this paradoxical outcome with recent research on retirement migration. Old-age migrants from nations with higher costs of living (mainly in the Global North) find that they can boost their status via migration south. Intersectional theory can forestall misinterpretations of such elevations of the status of old people, focusing us on inequalities rather than on reified Southern tendencies to cherish the old.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: <i>After Work: Japanese Silver Backpackers in Malaysia</i> by Shiori Shakuto After Work: Japanese Silver Backpackers in Malaysia. By ShakutoShiori. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025, 224 pp., $99.95 (cloth); $34.95 (paper; e-book).

  Gender & Society · 2025-11-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Male Femininities

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2024-02-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: <i>The Culture and Politics of Populist Masculinities</i> by Outi Hakola, Janne Salminen, Juho Turpeinen, and Oscar Winberg

  Gender & Society · 2022-01-22

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Published version

  PublisherDOI

• Studying constructions of aging manhood: Methodological considerations

  Journal of Aging Studies · 2022 · 4 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  PublisherDOI

• Vieillissement réussi, âgisme et persistance des rapports d’âge et de genre

  Nouvelles Questions Féministes · 2022-06-30 · 4 citations

  article

  Le paradigme gérontologique du vieillissement réussi vise à minimiser les conséquences du vieillissement. Il ne remet cependant pas en cause les rapports d’âge qui stigmatisent et dévalorisent la vieillesse. Au contraire, il pousse chacun·e à assumer individuellement les conséquences de cette stigmatisation, en imposant le devoir de résister à la vieillesse. Des entretiens avec des personnes d’âge moyen aux États-Unis sur le vieillissement réussi montrent qu’elles ont toutes recours à des régimes, à des compléments alimentaires et à de l’exercice. Elles se différencient selon le sexe, les hommes cherchant à faire preuve d’un travail qualifié et laborieux, alors que les femmes se concentrent davantage sur le maintien d’une apparence attirante. Les personnes interviewées s’accordent à dire qu’elles doivent s’efforcer d’être actives et énergiques. Elles se distancient également de la vieillesse, exprimant la peur de vieillir et s’efforçant de conserver un statut d’âge moyen. Le vieillissement des femmes est jugé moins réussi, leur passage à la vieillesse plus rapide. Le paradigme gérontologique du vieillissement réussi n’atténue pas les inégalités qui rendent la vieillesse plus difficile que nécessaire.

  PublisherDOI

• The Hegemony in Masculinity

  Men and Masculinities · 2021 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Most citations to “hegemonic masculinity” focus on gender ideals and men’s attempts to justify domination. Few scholars have tested the theory that masculinity can be hegemonic in effect by gaining the overt consent of others to their domination. We specify this largely untested theory and use data from a pilot study of middle-age men for our demonstration of how to operationalize and recognize hegemony. We argue that scholars will find that effect at intersections of gender and other inequalities such as age. We show that, in their discussion of linked ideals of gender and age, three respondents mention domination of older men by younger men, and then both consent to that domination and accept personal responsibility for forestalling it through regimens of fitness, productivity, and health. We call for further research on the hegemony of masculinity via study of intersections of gender with such understudied inequities as age.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond Successful Aging 2.0: Inequalities, Ageism, and the Case for Normalizing Old Ages

  The Journals of Gerontology Series B · 2020 · 74 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gerontology

  This article reviews challenges to Rowe and Kahn's Successful Aging (SA) framework, particularly those that focus on the ways social inequalities, including ageism, stratify age groups and affect possibilities for SA. We then assess the authors' replies to these critiques. We find that SA 2.0 maintains a naturalization of outcomes of age relations, and retains both its focus on personal choice and its indifference to inequalities. We advocate a paradigm shift that recasts the problems of aging in three distinct ways: (i) avoids treating old age as a problem; (ii) avoids treating medical and other maladies as results of aging; and (iii) treats the problems of old age as results of age relations instead. By focusing on age relations, this paradigm goes beyond calls to examine inequalities over the life course, and seeks to normalize old ages, valuing both different modes of aging and old age itself.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Hollywood Jim Crow: The Racial Politics of the Movie Industry

  Social Forces · 2019-05-25 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Maryann Erigha makes an important contribution to the study of colorblind racism, with her study of the market logic of racial exclusion in major-studio Hollywood cinema. She focuses on the careers of black directors and shows how white executives displace and excuse their own racial exclusions by sustaining the myth of an anti-black global audience. This book should interest scholars of race and popular culture with its original findings about the production of the world’s most popular entertainment, and with its provocative call for a black cinema collective to work outside of white-run studios. Erigha has combed trade-journal reports, email dumps from the infamous Sony hack of 2014, and Internet Movie Datebase details of blockbuster film production and release. From these data, she draws important conclusions about genre production, career trajectories, and occupational segregation by race and gender in one of the world’s most high-profile industries. Erigha makes a strong case for the relevance of her topic, no less than visibility on the world stage of the most widely shared entertainment, and the difference that having black filmmakers tell black stories can make to that prominence. She shows how Hollywood producers use the market myth of the globally “unbankable” black filmmaker and black story to justify constraints on budgets and opportunities given to black directors. They limit black visibility and water black culture down to “crossover” entertainment, repackaging black stories for white consumption. In the face of evidence that black-themed films made by black directors and writers are reliably profitable, white executives in Hollywood maintain the “unbankable” myth as part of the colorblind racism of the post-Civil-rights era, at the expense of both black careers and black stories. She suggests as well that the box-office focus of Hollywood has even shifted toward global returns as a way to maintain white hegemony during a rise of black success on the domestic market. The colorblind logic of Hollywood economics seems highly attuned to race.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Toni Calasanti

  Virginia Tech

  26 shared

• Ilkka Pietilä

  University of Helsinki

  9 shared

• Hanna Ojala

  Tampere University

  8 shared

• Talitha Rose

  8 shared

• Rayanne Streeter

  Maryville College

  7 shared

• Jessica Herling

  7 shared

• Martha McCaughey

  4 shared

• Amy Sorensen

  3 shared

Awards & honors

• Selected for Wassaic Project Artist Residency (2025)
• Selected for ChaNorth Artist Residency (2024)
• Selected for Haystack Mountain School of Craft Open Studios…
• Selected for Stove Works Artist Residency (2023)
• Selected for ACRE Artist Residency (2021)