NCJ Number
168998
Date Published
1997
Length
1248 pages
Annotation
This textbook discusses issues and behaviors pertinent to sexuality and gender, as well as the laws that proscribe such behaviors.
Abstract
The first cluster of chapters provides constitutional, historical, and theoretical groundings. The first chapter traces the development primarily of privacy and equality doctrine, followed by a chapter that describes the controversies associated with the medicalization of various sex/gender issues and their ramifications in the law. Chapter three introduces the student to a variety of theoretical approaches, emphasizing the dialectic between feminism and the philosophy of Michel Foucault, and closing with a section on how law operates as a mechanism of social construction as to sexuality and gender. Chapter four uses military policy to illustrate the role of the state in constructing manhood along the vectors of racial, gender, and sexual orientation exclusions. The second group of chapters examines the role of sexuality and gender in public and political life. Chapter five explores the emerging category of identity speech, questioning, for example, the categorization of "coming out" speech as private and contrasting how the law treats the publication of rape victims' names and the "outing" of lesbians and gay men. Chapter six focuses on explicitly sexual speech, including the feminist debate over regulation of pornography and the public funding of art with explicitly sexual content. Chapter seven and eight address the role of sexuality in education and examine sexuality and citizenship. The final third of the book focuses on sexuality and gender in daily life. Topics in this section include the increasing impact of these issues on family law, employment, people with AIDS in the workplace, transgender or transsexual issues, and the regulation of gender normative dress. A teacher's manual accompanies the textbook. A table of cases, and appended selected pertinent legislation