Gender and Sexuality

Radical Pride

The rebellious origins of LGBTQ liberation

Fantasies of Fatherhood

Paternity is more complex than the stories we tell about it.

Women of the World, Unite!

A reading list for International Women’s Day

The New Faith-Based Discrimination

A sharp uptick in challenges to U.S. antidiscrimination laws threatens decades of progress in extending civil rights to all.

  • Louise Melling

Governing Transgender Identity

Trans-inclusive policies are essential, but efforts to establish them must not lose sight of the structural oppressions that trans people face. 

  • Paisley Currah
  • Robin Dembroff

Jurors Can Protect Abortion Access

Just as abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act, those resisting the criminalization of reproductive health can employ jury nullification.

  • Sonali Chakravarti

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Pleasure Activism

What would it look like if we put our desires at the center of our politics?

  • adrienne maree brown

What the AIDS Crisis Can Teach Us About Monkeypox

Harm reduction strategies have the best chance of stopping this disease.

  • Joshua Gutterman Tranen

Just Wear Your Smile

The gender politics of Positive Psychology valorize the nuclear family and heterosexual monogamy.

  • Micki McElya

My Revolutionary Inspiration, Barbara Ehrenreich

The late author of Nickel and Dimed played a major role in women’s liberation and U.S. socialism.

  • Lynne Segal

The Democratic Potential of Cruising

Cruising extends the political value of the city as a space that brings us into contact with people who seem unlike us until we realize our shared desires.

  • Jack Parlett

Nine Ways That Capitalism Is Ruining Sex

Our well-being depends on a better understanding of how the logic of labor has twisted our relationship with pleasure.

  • Breanne Fahs

Freedom, Not Benefits

Sex workers are labor’s vanguard.

  • Heather Berg

In Defense of Transnor­mativity

A new book offers a compelling, if imperfect, account of the bad feelings with which trans people often struggle.

  • Jules Joanne Gleeson

Queering the Dating App

Tinder and OkCupid should drop the gender binary. Doing so would help all users—queer and straight alike.

  • M. Andler

Grooming and the Christian Politics of Innocence

Challenges to Christian political control are often spun as threats to child welfare.

  • Michael Bronski

What Will It Take to End Violence Against Native Women?

The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act is an important step, but activist Mary Kathryn Nagle argues that only full restoration of Indigenous sovereignty will stop the epidemic.

  • Mary Kathryn Nagle
  • Emma Lower

Dispatch from Kharkiv National University

On the importance of women’s studies after the USSR collapsed, and what it helps us understand about Putin’s war on Ukraine.

  • Irina Zherebkina

Putin’s Anti-Gay War on Ukraine

How the Kremlin weaponizes “traditional values,” portraying LGBT rights as existential threats to the nation.

  • Emil Edenborg

Hating Motherhood

Some feminists think we can improve motherhood. But what if abolishing it is the only way to alleviate its problems?

  • Judith Levine

Is There a Constitutional Right to Sex Work?

The Supreme Court recognizes the right of consenting adults to an erotic life free of state control. Given that, it shouldn’t matter whether sex is your job.

  • Joseph J. Fischel

In Search of Foucault’s Last Words

Against the philosopher’s dying wish, the final volume of History of Sexuality has now been published. How should we approach it?

  • Mark D. Jordan

What It Means to Watch

On the uncanny relationship between film and reality.

  • Francey Russell

Why I Provide Abortions

My patients and I don’t use words like “choice” or “viability.”

  • Christine Henneberg
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