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Full-Text Articles in Law
On Making Anti-Essentialist And Social Constructionist Arguments In Courts, Suzanne B. Goldberg
On Making Anti-Essentialist And Social Constructionist Arguments In Courts, Suzanne B. Goldberg
Faculty Scholarship
One of my most intense disagreements with another lawyer during nearly a decade of lesbian and gay rights litigation concerned social constructionism. The lawyer (a law professor, if truth be told) wanted to argue in an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court that sexual orientation, like race, was a social constructed category. He reasoned that since the Court had condemned race discrimination even while recognizing the "socio-political, rather than biological" nature of race, it would similarly be willing to invalidate a measure discriminating against lesbians, gay men and bisexuals, even while recognizing the socially constructed nature of sexual …
Illegalized Sexual Dissent: Sexualities And Nationalisms, Katherine M. Franke
Illegalized Sexual Dissent: Sexualities And Nationalisms, Katherine M. Franke
Faculty Scholarship
In this essay, Katherine Franke explores how dissent becomes a different, and in some ways more interesting, phenomenon when the dissenter emerges not from outside the political horizon drawn by the state, but rather from within it, and as an integral part of the state's project of governance. In these cases, the state calls up a set of subjects who are in some fundamental sense positioned to gain state, if not public, disfavor. These subjects are then isolated, excised or otherwise managed in ways that further state interests. Three cases are discussed in which the production of sexual outlaws proves …