Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Book chapter "Creative Financing in Social Science: Women Scholars and Early Research" from Women and Philanthropy in Education, edited by Andrea Walton, published by Indiana University Press.

Despite historians' best efforts to disassociate the anticommunist purges of the post-World War II era from one individual's extreme behav-ior, the early cold war years continue to be known as the McCarthy era, and Senator Joseph McCarthy remains a symbol—perhaps the paramount symbol—of irrationality and illegitimacy in American politics. His fall from grace in 1954 likewise denotes the return to moral order and political sanity. McCarthy did not introduce the practices and policies of political repression and sexual oppression that constituted the domestic cold war, and many of those practices... Read More

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble elaborates what may be called a queer subjectivity. Characterized by non-essential, performative identity, her theory has been criticized because, according to its critics, it does not give the subject political agency. Liberal theorists, such as Seyla Benhabib, have been particularly concerned with the political effects of this form of subjectivity on already marginalized social groups while other theorists, such as Susan Stryker and Ed Cohen, have articulated concern that the theory does not sufficiently account for embodiment, affect, and identity. This essay brings Deleuze's theory of... Read More

This essay analyzes the relationship between feelings and politics in Octavia E. Butler's novels "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents." Comparison of the sentimentalism approach used by the author and Harriet Beecher Stowe in the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; Characteristics of Butler's novels which are categorize as postmodernism; Significance of feeling of the novels' heroines to political activism.

Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the... Read More

These remarks were given in April 1996 at the First Annual LatCrit Conference, co-sponsored by California Western Law School and the Harvard Latino Law Review. ... Political corpus, body politic, body of law, corporate law, body of evidence, body of knowledge, the footnote. ... While the body of Christ has not been used explicitly to order secular American law and political theory, a multi-dimensional analysis of his body in Western political theory would have to include its use at a critical historic moment as an organizing metaphor for the racial... Read More

This Essay had its origins in a panel held during the Washington College of Law at American University's conference on Race, Law and Justice: The Rehnquist Court and the American Dilemma on September 21, 1995. The title of my panel, "Beyond Black and White: Race Conscious Policies and the 'Other Minorities,'" crafted by the conference organizers accomplishes subtly several things that I hope to continue in more explicit fashion in this Essay. The title challenges false binary racial logic from the position of groups who are neither Black nor white.... Read More

Burton Bledstein classed his book The Culture of Professionalism with the work of the giants in American academik history. He suggested that his theory of the culture of professionalism ranked in significance with Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, Charles A. Beard's industrialization theories, and Perry Miller's analysis of Puritanism. Bledstein's fresh historical perspective on higher education and his skepticism regarding professional authority no doubt were shaped by his experiences at elite public and private institutions, the University of California at Los Angeles (B.A., 1959) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1967). He has... Read More

In 1911 M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, faced a golden opportunity. An alumna of the college had died suddenly, leaving Bryn Mawr its largest gift since Joseph Wright Taylor's initial endowment for the establishment of the college. Emma Carola Woerishoffer's unrestricted donation provided Thomas unaccustomed freedom to expand Bryn Mawr's curriculum. In 1915 Thomas used a large portion of the bequest to establish the Graduate Department of Social Economy and Social Research for the training and certification of social workers and for the master's and doctoral education... Read More

As dean of Yale University's Law School, Robert Hutchins stressed social science theory and research as central to the university's work. Within a few years, as president of the University of Chicago, he abandoned the social sciences for philosophy and the great books. Hutchins's conversion seems ironic because it took place at an institution renowned for the work of its faculty in social science theory and research. This article is an attempt to make sense of Hutchins's shift in thinking at a critical juncture in his life and in the... Read More