Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Most commentators on sex markets focus on the debate between abolitionists and those who defend and support professional sex work. This paper, instead, looks at debates within the pro-sex work camp, uncovering some unattended tensions and contradictions. It shows that, within this camp, some stress the labor aspect, urging that sex markets perpetuate a "vulnerable population" of workers, similar to others who perform highly risky and/or exploited labor, and should be regulated accordingly. In this view, sex work would be assimilated into other labor. Others, though, take a more anti-regulatory... Read More

Through an examination of objectum sexuality, an orientation in which people sexually orient themselves toward objects, this essay reflects on what constitutes sexuality, the nature of intimacy, and the agency of objects. Using the discourse of similarity, I suggest that we read objectum sexuality as a mode of understanding subjectivity under neoliberalism. I also suggest, however, that we read it as a phenomena that could open into an alternate set of ethics. More specifically, I argue that objectum sexuality allows us to think critically about the displacement of the subject,... Read More

In June 2011, the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians featured “The Down & Dirty Show,” a drag and burlesque show, on the official conference program. After the show, Stephanie Gilmore and Leigh Ann Wheeler heard provocative comments about it, some enthusiastically supportive and others highly critical. Eager to explore these responses and the politics of staging such a show at an academic conference, we invited several people to participate in an email conversation for publication. Our goal was to reproduce what Joan Scott observed in an earlier JWH email conversation... Read More

In today's Europe, the term Eurosceptic often accompanies accusations of retrograde nationalism, irrational feelings, even fanaticism. When applied to Europe, skepticism, one of the critic's formative traits, acquires a bad reputation, as if it can only be an annihilating, rather than constructive, form of doubt. And yet skepticism is a much-needed critical affect, particularly when it comes to Europe. If we need to be skeptical of anything, it is Europe. Today one hears claims about Europe having become postnational, postracial, even post-Europe. How else can the literary and cultural critic... Read More

Mass incarceration is one of the biggest obstacles to social justice and democratic equality in the United States. This nation leads the world in imprisonment. As Angela Davis contended, the "prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions, and legislative and court agendas." Other developed states use social welfare policy to develop citizens’ capabilities, which increase their employment and life prospects. In stark contrast,... Read More

This paper seeks to make some connections between legal theorist Janet Halley and contemporary artist Kara Walker. It compares their recent oeuvre to show how both reject understandings of the interplay of sex, power, and subordination proffered by conventional "justice projects" - specifically civil rights’ and feminism’s articulations of bodily violence and violation as key modes of racial and gender injury and subordination. Neither of these two is the first to dispute such accounts of injury and identity; yet, what distinguishes them is that both attempt to ground their theoretical... Read More

An Essay is presented in response to Susan Stiritz and Susan Appleton's essay "Sex Therapy in the Age of Viagra: Money Can't Buy Me Love." The author states that the paper of Stiritz and Appleton refers to the dangerous power of viagra and charges it for having a dominative power rather than producing an equal interpersonal mutuality. He adds that the paper laid an increasing weakness on women's reproductive rights against their respect for the dominance of male's sexual pleasure.

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the... Read More

Most of the legal scholarship on reparations for Blacks in America focuses on its legal or political viability. This literature has considered both procedural obstacles, such as statutes of limitations and sovereign immunity, as well as the substantive conception of a defensible cause of action. Indeed, Congressman John Conyers introduced H.R. 40, a bill to study reparations, in 1989 and every Congressional session since, and there have been three law suits that have received national attention. This Essay takes a different approach, considering reparations as a social movement with a... Read More

This exchange of letters picks up where Professors Adrienne Davis and Robert Chang left off in an earlier exchange that examined who speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what is remembered. Here, Professors Davis and Chang explore the dynamics of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the law school classroom. They compare the experiences of African American women and Asian American men in trying to perform as law professors, considering how makeup and other gender tools simultaneously assist and hinder such performances. Their exchange examines the possibility of bias... Read More

Race has long been a central object of political reflection. The salience of racial difference remains hotly debated, figuring in both "utopian" and "dystopian" visions of America’s political future. If race is a primary configuration of "difference" and inequality in the nation, then intimacy between the races is often construed as either a bellwether of equality and political utopia or a re-inscribing of political dominance, typically represented as sexual predation by men against women. Quite expectedly, these political fantasies and fears are often played out at the multiplex, and we... Read More

The Essays in this volume seek to shed some light on the politics of identity after the 2008 Presidential election in which identity politics dominated. To explore how 2008 and its aftermath have shifted both academic and political debates, Professor Adrienne Davis invited scholars from a variety of disciplines who embrace diverse methodologies—political theory; cultural studies; history; and law. These authors explore identity politics as a field of academic inquiry; a cultural discourse; a legal claim; a negotiation of institutions and power; and a predicate for political alliances. Collectively, the... Read More

This short essay offers three snapshots of Catharine MacKinnon's work, exemplifying each of these common connotations of engagement - or the scholar modified.

Linda Nicholson’s Article tackles the complexity of how identity politics manifest in the 2008 election. In Identity after Identity Politics, she notes that during the election political and popular commentators continued to speculate about how race and gender were affecting the election, even as people proclaimed that "the era of identity politics was dead" and ushered in a post-identity world. Attempting to explain this contradiction, Nicholson urges an historical explanation rooted in two different visions of identity "difference" that emerged in twentieth century. Identity after Identity Politics investigates how environmental... Read More

During the 2008 Presidential election, one of the key questions was whether the ascendancy of Barack Obama means that we now live in a "post-racial" world. Or, for those who remain skeptical of this claim, what, exactly, does the first African-American presidency mean for race and racial politics? Rebecca Wanzo's Article, Proms and Other Racial Ephemera: The Positive Social Construction of African Americans in the "Post"-Civil Rights Era, tackles this question. Part of the obstacle facing cultural critics and policy analysts alike, Wanzo contends, is that we are most familiar... Read More

Most legal scholarship about polygamy has approached it in one of two ways. Some have framed it as a question of how far constitutional protection for religious freedom and privacy rights extends, including what we might think of as "intimacy liberty," particularly in light of Lawrence v. Texas. Others have debated decriminalization, based on the contested effects of polygamy on matters ranging from women’s subordination to fraudulent behavior to democracy. This Essay shifts attention from the constitutionality and decriminalization debates to a new set of questions: whether and how polygamy... Read More

Building on scholarship on academic women and the (gendered) institutional constraints they faced, this article explores different trajectories in the careers of academic women economists in the United States, and their efforts to pursue research, establish their authority and influence public policy. It argues that, despite the obstacles, such women were still able to use their new knowledge to influence the development of the welfare state. This study provides new insights into women’s efforts to pursue research and establish their authority, indicative of the interweaving of gendered conceptions of knowledge... Read More

Although US universities in the early twentieth century offered the promise of meritocratic entry into the academic profession via the graduate training they provided, they did not fulfill that promise for women. Most women who trained for the PhD in social sciences—the focus of this chapter—and who remained in academia could only find positions in colleges. There they pursued scholarship, teaching, and service, the three central activities of the professional scholar, but found themselves restricted by the expectations of large teaching loads, limited resources, and lack of opportunity to train... Read More

Reading masochism as a literary phenomenon means exploring several layers of relationships—of literature and performance, of textuality and subjectivity—and the relationships among various practices of reading. I start with Krafft-Ebing and his practices of reading, examine the relationship between literature and practice, and end with an exploration of diagnosis and writing. Rousseau's Confessions exemplifies these rich layers, as a text with a life and readership of its own and as writing exercise, and exemplifies what Michel Foucault termed a "technology of the self." The link I am forging between Krafft-Ebing... Read More

Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated.

The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings:... Read More

Book chapter "Berkeley Women Economists, Public Policy, and Civic Sensibility," from Civic and Moral Learning in America, edited by Donald Warren and John Patrick, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

From its formative years to the present, advocates of various persuasions have written and spoken about the country's need for moral and civic education. Responding in part to challenges posed by B. Edward McClellan, this book offers research findings on the ideas, people, and contexts that have influenced the acquisition of moral and civic learning in the America.

Whatever our perspectival and methodological differences, one thing we can all agree on about Jerome as a scholar: the man was prolific. He published over twenty articles, plus book chapters and a book, all penned with eloquence and what we now recognize as quintessentially 'Jeromeesque" passion. He published in major symposia as well as the most prestigious law reviews. For those who do not know Jerome's work as well, and for those of us who do but are still taking in the volume of it, I thought I would offer... Read More