Law Commons^™

The Eclipse Of Reason: A Rhetorical Reading Of Bowers V. Hardwick, Kendall Thomas

Faculty Scholarship

In a careful and compelling reading of the text of the Supreme Court's opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, Janet Halley provides a meticulous map of the misprisions by which the Hardwick Court "exploit[s] confusion about what sodomy is in ways that create opportunities for the [judicial] exercise of homophobic power." According to Professor Halley, the duplicitous mechanisms the Hardwick Court marshals in reasoning about sodomy entail a mobilization of two "incommensurable articulations": the idea of the sodomitical act, on the one hand, and that of personal identity, on the other.

Professor Halley rightly insists that an anti-homophobic critique …

Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death: Political Asylum And The Global Persecution Of Lesbians And Gay Men, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In a time marked by dramatic global change, women and men persecuted because they are lesbian or gay form part of the growing pool of international refugees. Their persecution takes the form of police harassment an assault, involuntary institutionalization and electroshock and drug "treatments," punishment under laws that impose extreme penalties including death for consensual lesbian or gay sexual relations, murder by paramilitary death squads, and government inaction in response to criminal assaults against lesbians and gay men. The survival of these women and men, like the survival of all refugees, depends on obtaining asylum outside the home country. Yet, …

Anti-Lesbian And -Gay Right Wing Initiatives: A Strategy For Response, Mary Newcombe, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The increasing visibility and political activism of the lesbian and gay community in this country has sparked a vicious backlash intended to reinforce restrictive notions of social morality and to stifle expressions of lesbian and gay identity. While this backlash has flourished in mainstream institutions, as in the U.S. Senate's hearings on lifting the military's ban against lesbians and gay men, it has also been incited on a grassroots level across the country by the Christian right wing, which has involved itself intimately in exploiting popular inclinations and reinforcing discrimination at the federal and local levels.

Cunning Stunts: From Hegemony To Desire A Review Of Madonna's Sex, Katherine M. Franke

Faculty Scholarship

What is sex? Is it an accidental or contingent property that every person can be said to have? I am brunette and female, but the Pope is bald and male. Or, is sex more constitutive, that is, an essential part of who we are? In this respect, the claim is often made that women experience the world ditfierently than men. Or, is sex something we do?

If we consider sex as an adjective, can we or should we be able to manipulate it like a new hair style? Or does the notion of sexual malleability trivialize the significance …

He's Gotta Have It, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

In 1929, James Thurber and E.B. White observed that

[d]uring the past year, two factors in our civilization have been greatly overemphasized. One is aviation. The other is sex.... In the case of aviation, persons interested in the sport saw that the problem was to simplify it and make it seem safe.... With sex, the opposite was true.... The problem in this case was to make sex seem more complex and dangerous. This task was taken up by sociologists, analysts, gynecologists, psychologists, and authors.... They joined forces and made the whole matter of sex complicated beyond [our wildest dreams].... Sex, …