I just posted my Law and Social Movements syllabus for this coming spring semester. I made some changes, added some new materials, and I’m excited to see what happens. Also, KUOW recorded my recent book talk at Elliott Bay Book Company and played it on the radio. You can listen here.
Normal Life is out!
Normal Life is available in stores now! I hope you’ll order it from your independent bookstore.
Laws as Tactics
I’ve just posted an article I wrote for a 2010 symposium about the impact of Judith Butler’s work on legal scholarship that was recently published by the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law. I welcome feedback!
Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement With Everything We’ve Got
Morgan Bassichis, Alex Lee, and I co-authored “Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got” in the anthology Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith. A Mandarin translation is available here: 全力打造一個以廢除為目標的跨性／酷兒運動).
Learn more about Captive Genders here.
Sci-Fi Inspired
The exciting new online journal, feminists@law, recently published their first issue. I wrote a little essay in there about what feminist legal theorists might learn from science fiction.
Laws as Tactics
I wrote “Laws as Tactics” published in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law in 2011. You can read it here.
Abstract:
This symposium invites us to consider the impact of Judith Butler’s work on legal scholarship in the area of gender and sexuality. I am interested in reflecting particularly on trans politics and law for two reasons. First, because Butler’s work has had such a significant impact on the emergence of the current iteration of trans politics of the 1990s and 2000s. Second, because I believe there is a great deal more that Butler’s work can offer to significant questions facing trans resistance formations as the field of trans legal rights advocacy institutionalizes and as trans legal scholarship engages and responds to that institutionalization. In particular, I am interested in how Butler’s work has provided analytical models for considering the role that norms and normalization play in both disciplinary and biopolitical modes of governance relating to gender. This analysis is essential to understanding the limitations of certain legal rights frameworks for addressing harms created by racialized and gendered systems of meaning and control.
Interview in Guernica
Guernica Interview and Books!
Meaghan Winter recently interviewed me for Guernica, have a look. In other news, I’m very excited that Nat Smith and Eric Stanley’s anthology, Captive Genders: Transembodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex is coming out in August. Finally, I’m happy to report that, working with the editors at South End Press, I’ve finally settled on a title for my forthcoming book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law.
About Purportedly Gendered Body Parts
I wrote up a little something about the language that we use to talk about body parts that are most strongly associated with gender norms. It might be of use, particularly, to health practitioners and others who talk about bodies a lot.
Be Professional!
I wrote “Be Professional!, published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender in 2010 in response to Bob Chang and Adrienne Davis’ article, “Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom,” 33 Harv. J. L. & Gender 1 (2010). You can read it here.
Abstract
In 2010, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender published a series of letters between Adrienne Davis and Bob Chang entitled, “Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom,” along with three response pieces by Adele Morrison, Darren Rosenblum and Dean Spade. “Be Professional!” is written in letter form like “Making Up Is Hard to Do” and discusses Spade’s experience becoming and being a trans law professor, as well as broader questions about activism, academia, professionalism and the neo-liberal academy.