Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations

Fineman (Emory U.), Jackson (U. of California at Berkeley), and Romero (Yale Law School) present 21 chapters exploring debates between and among feminist and queer legal theorists, with a particular focus on evolving and contested ideas about the centrality of a positive theory of sexuality to the formulation of critical perspectives on legal, social, political, and cultural institutions. Examples of specific topics include a queer critique of feminist legal theory as having no positive politics of sexual pleasure, the focus on sexual advances and sexual conduct in the area of sex-based discrimination law as obscuring non-sexual forms of sex-based inequalities, civil rights advocacy and essentialized notions of black and gay identity, the principles and practices of polyamory versus monogamy, Adrienne Rich's idea of "compulsory heterosexuality" extended to the idea of "compulsory matrimony" in the context of the gay marriage debates, the sexual regulation dimension of welfare reform, and the contributions of poststructuralism to feminist and queer theory. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Martha Albertson Fineman is an internationally recognized law and society scholar and a leading authority on family law and feminist jurisprudence. Fineman is founder and director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which was inaugurated in 1984 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is a Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. Professor Fineman has authored three books: The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (New Press, 2004); The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (Routledge, 1995); and The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991). She has also edited six books, including Ashgate's forthcoming Children's Rights, and has written many book chapters and scholarly papers. Jack E. Jackson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Theory at UC Berkeley. He received his J.D. from Cornell Law School where he was recipient of the Freeman Award for Civil-Human Rights and a member of the Order of the Coif. Jackson served as an Ella Baker Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights and has taught at the University of Miami Schoolof Law. He recently published "Erasures and Imaginings" in Critical Sense: A Journal of Political and Cultural Theory (2005). Adam P. Romero holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he won the Kelley Prize and was a Coker Fellow and a director of the Complex Federal Litigation Clinic. He received his A.B. from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude and winning the Sherman-Bennett Prize. Previously a law clerk to Hon. M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and a fellow at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, Adam's current research considers the privileging of family in law and society, especially as relevant to significantly disabled adults who live disconnected from family.