University of Chicago Press

Justice for Girls?: Stability and Change in the Youth Justice Systems of the United States and Canada

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:01:00 +0000

In Justice for Girls?, Canadian researchers Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob provide a comprehensive and concise overview on girls and juvenile delinquency in these two North American countries. Sprott and Doob address the misconception, fueled by media reports and newspaper articles circulating in the U.S. and Canada, that girls are committing more crimes, and more violent crimes. The book asserts that contrary to popular belief, “the violent girl crime wave that people have been waiting for since the early 1900s...has simply not happened.”

In uncovering the hype behind sensationalized reports on girls and violence, the authors view juvenile delinquency as a social construction. In researching the number of violent girl crimes throughout the twentieth century, they assert that girls are less likely to commit violent crimes than boys. However, they note that girls make up a large percentage of juvenile delinquents and custody cases due to status offenses, so-called crimes in which girls can be arrested and tried for non-criminal behavior, such as sexual immorality.

Connecting the courts' motivations behind status offenses to women’s political movements, the authors make a convincing argument that girls have often born the brunt of a sociopolitical backlash as a parallel when women's movements are afoot.At these pivotal moments in history, juvenile court systems have tightened their surveillance of girls’ behaviors and criminalized girls’ sexual expression. As a result, Sprott and Doob argue, girls have historically been punished, and continue to be punished, for behavior and actions considered normal and acceptable for boys.

The authors discuss the limitations of their research, acknowledging the absences in their data with regards to race and class. Another absence in the book is a discussion of queer girls as well as trans girls and boys. Since sexual immortality—one of the most common status offenses girls are cited for—is not discussed at length, it is unclear if any of the girls convicted of this offense were/are queer or trans, and how their sexuality and/or gender identity influenced a court’s decision. Moreover, besides examining one case study, the authors do not offer girls’ own voices or their stories. Instead, they allow statistical evidence to speak for the injustices girls face in juvenile justice systems.

As a feminist scholar interested in the intersection of girls’ studies and media studies, I would argue that Sprott's and Doob’s work could benefit any researcher addressing the current hype surrounding girls and violence in contemporary Western societies.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, March 20th 2010

Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Ellen Lewin

University of Chicago Press

In this well-written ethnography, Gay Fatherhood, Ellen Lewin examines the choices and the decisions of gay fathers in America, focusing particularly on men who choose to become fathers as gay men, rather than coming out after having had children in a different-sex marriage. Lewin, also the author of the 1993 ethnography Lesbian Mothers, works centrally from Chicago but has found research participants of impressive diversity with respect to race, religion, socioeconomic background, profession, number of children, and relationship to community. All of these elements make for a fascinating read.

The central question in Lewin’s book is one that has become increasingly pertinent and visible, particularly in queer communities, as the gay marriage debate advances in the United States. Does “being gay” simply mean being a man who loves and is sexually attracted to men, or does it imply another separateness, an inherent incompatibility, with a world that is and will always be predominantly straight? And does asserting the latter negate the identity of gay fathers, assuming "father," even "parent," to be the province of the straight world alone? Or does a gay man who chooses to be a father give up his right to identify as "gay?" Or does "parent" come to overshadow, to render irrelevant, the identity “gay”? And if none of the above are true, are there factors beyond the sexual orientation and gender of the parents that would specifically identify a family as a "gay family?"

As is often the case in anthropological research, Lewin explores these questions without ever fully answering them. Given the scope and depth of Lewin’s writing, however, no answer seems to be demanded. By simply displaying the complexity of the lives and relationships of gay fathers—relationships with partners, relationships with children, relationships with other parents, extended families, communities of friends, religious communities, communities of residence—she demonstrates that this is not an issue to be bullet-pointed or oversimplified. Lewin uses her ethnography to delve into the lives of gay families, and to show the complex nexus of identity at which they reside, and at which they must, in contemporary America, continue to reside. A true writer and a true anthropologist, she leaves the prescription of actions to her readers; there is no doubt that engagement with her writing will lead to more considered, and therefore better, action.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, March 1st 2010

Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and Failure in the Struggles Over Gay Rights

admin — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:25:00 +0000

By Gary Mucciaroni

University of Chicago Press

Gary Mucciaroni’s Same Sex, Different Politics offers a useful, though ultimately limited, account of the LGBT rights movement. Trained as a political scientist, Mucciaroni’s interests lie in the varying degrees of success and failure over LGBT public policy issues. He questions why certain policy issues (such as adoption) fare better than others (most notably marriage equality). Unlike studies that focus on individual policy areas, Mucciaroni’s text is an attempt to comparatively analyze multiple policy struggles in order to arrive at broad conclusions about the current state of the LGBT movement, as well as to identify new directions/methods with which to approach LGBT activism. As such, Mucciaroni charts six individual policy issues alongside and in relation to each other: military service, homosexual conduct and sodomy laws, adoption, marriage and partnership, hate crime legislation, and civil rights.

Using a variety of social science resources and extensive quantitative data, Mucciaroni deftly charts the contradictions that emerge through the comparative analysis of individual policy concerns. For example, he identifies an inherent disconnect in (seemingly) widespread public support for anti-discrimination legislation in venues like employment and housing, but stronger opposition to marriage equality and military service.

While Mucciaroni’s text is definitely groundbreaking in terms of its comparative methodological approach, its circumscribed focus on public policy, juridical process, and legislation disallows any discussion of the larger cultural, social, and ideological controversies that underlie public policy initiatives. What emerges is an argument that continually and uncritically reifies the legal system as the primary venue for bringing about social change, with little acknowledgement of the cultural work that necessarily needs to occur alongside policy struggles. Indeed, for a book that claims to concern itself with the material realities of family, discrimination, sex, and relationships, Same Sex, Different Politics remains utterly disconnected from the communities it seeks to represent.

Written by: Ashvin R. Kini, May 1st 2009

Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status

admin — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:12:00 +0000

By Amy C. Wilkins

University of Chicago Press

Labels—freak, geek, wigger, poser, prep, to name just a few—are plentiful and ever-expanding, flourishing in the fertile social grounds of high school and college. Often, labels are used against individuals, assigned and branded as tools of marginalization and preservation of social hierarchies. Amy C. Wilkins' Wannabes, Goths, and Christians: The Boundaries of Sex, Style, and Status is a sociological text that explores the ways labels can rather be symbols of resistance, or attempted empowerment, for three distinct subcultures coexisting in an insulated but diverse cross-section of a Northeastern college region.

Wannabes, Goths, and Christians is about the ways in which three groups of young adults in the United States test, push, and break the boundaries of an identity that paradoxically remains largely invisible, yet overwhelmingly dominant: "Whiteness." The self-described “freaks” of Goth, the members of a Christian organization at a large university, and the Puerto Rican "wannabes" are each given their due in a book that creates connections between seemingly disparate groups. Even those readers who are not sociologists by study or trade will appreciate the candor and perception with which Wilkins writes about the subjects of the book, as well as her forward-thinking analysis surrounding the important, but often overlooked, intersections of race, class, and gender within these predominantly white communities.

To write it, Wilkins engaged in countless interviews; some were formally conducted and others were casual conversations, not only with the subjects themselves, but also with their more mainstream peers, whose reactions and opinions spoke volumes about the way the strategic separation from the norm of Goths, Christians and wannabes elicits often volatile emotions from those who wish they would "act like what they are."

As much as possible, Wilkins tried to assimilate into these countercultures, whether by sexing up her appearance in black lace and dramatic Goth makeup, or by gelling her hair back and drawing on dark lip-liner to achieve the stereotypically Puerto Rican look of the wannabe. With her transformations complete, she would hit specifically geared club nights with her new tutors, subjects who had agreed, sometimes hesitantly, to take her under their wings and show her the ropes. Unexpectedly, the group that, of the three, prides itself most on kindness and goodwill was the hardest group to penetrate; Wilkins writes that although the University Unity Christians allowed her to attend meetings and agreed to speak with her in interviews, they were reserved, hesitant to open up, and never fully accepted her as an insider.

Wilkins effectively digs to the core of how subcultures are formed and fostered, particularly among young, white, middle-class people. In the United States, where society at large collectively fails to acknowledge the way white youth experience a broad spectrum of race, class, and gender, "whiteness" amounts to a lack of culture, in an environment that equates culture with "cool." In unique ways, the subjects of Wannabes, Goths, and Christians are eschewing what they see as a bland and narrow path of lack, in favor of a performed, chosen identity that may open up new alternatives to the umbrella of white identity. Wilkins insightful, fresh, sociologically focused portraits are much more than character studies, and the text is much more than tired "don’t judge a book by its cover" platitudes about today’s youth.

Written by: Kelly Moritz, April 25th 2009

Desiring Arabs

admin — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 17:19:00 +0000

By Joseph A. Massad

University of Chicago Press

On September 24, 2007, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran drew derisive laughter from a group at Columbia University when he announced, "In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon." Joseph A. Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia, was likely among the few who were not mocking this assertion. In Desiring Arabs, Massad rejects Western sexual epistemology, which he sees as the colonizing mission of "Gay International": "an academic literature 'describing' and 'explaining' what they call 'homosexuality' in Arab and Muslim history to the present; and journalistic accounts of the lives of so-called 'gays' and (much less so) 'lesbians' in the contemporary Arab and Muslim worlds."

He argues that the consequence, if this Western "progressive" epistemology takes hold, will be the suppression of same-sex desire and practices as they have been and remain a part of Arab and Muslim culture. The larger frame is the damage wrought by orientalist scholarship that framed much of Arab expression of desire as "deviant"—the "love of beardless boys" being a phenomenon that needs to be explained away and eradicated. There are no homosexuals (as there are no hetereosexuals) because those categories are ahistorical and culturally constructed and fail to account for the complexity and ambiguity of “Arab desire” as understood through a decolonized historical frame of reference.

As "an act of archiving," as Massad refers to his own study, this book is remarkable and will be required reading for those studying contemporary Middle Eastern culture. He draws on a wealth of historical texts, as well as a range of contemporary criticism, to stitch together a revised notion of Arab intellectual history and, particularly, the "problem" of its sexual "licentiousness." His work is not as stylish as Edward Said’s, nor is he the memorable phrasemaker his mentor was. But he is an accomplished intellectual historian, one to be reckoned with. As a polemic, however, the book is stunningly shallow and under-documented.

I write this review on the morning a Saudi Arabian court ordered forty lashes for a 75-year-old woman who was visited by two (unrelated) men, one for whom she had served as a nursemaid and had the audacity to bring her bread. I imagine the author’s chiding me for my sympathy for the "international human rights agenda," another one of those obnoxious Western colonizers accusing the Arab world of a cultural "retardation."

I find it laudable that Massad warn against the dangers of epistemological binaries. That he leads us towards different transhistorical methods of understanding sexual desire in the literature, from pre-Islamic poetry to contemporary fiction, is of great scholarly value. But his lack of sympathy for other groups struggling against oppression—or even those trying to reconstruct a sense of identity not based on someone’s notion of pathology—is troubling. In fact, his argument against the discourse of universalization leads, I think, to a new sort of binary: belief in the possibility of universal human liberation/colonization or cultural isolation and a militant defense against interference.

He is at his weakest when he departs from his role as archivist and critic of Arab cultural history and flails against international rights movements. He quickly smacks down the "white Western women’s movement, which has sought to universalize its issues through imposing its own colonial feminism on the women's movement in non-Western countries." He claims that the series of events including the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 led only to major schism, and he footnotes a couple of one-sided, obviously biased accounts to support his claim. This is not only bias, but bad scholarship, and bad scholarship, even in a potentially important book, is troubling indeed.

Written by: Rick Taylor, March 28th 2009