Center for Gender & Sexuality Law | Columbia Law School

Queer Theory Workshop

Fall 2012

Tuesdays, 4:20-6:10
Case Lounge, Room 701, Greene Hall

The Workshop in the fall of 2012 will take up a series of cutting edge issues in theory and practice of Queer Theory, bringing together theorists, activists and lawyers who are working on LGBT issues. The Workshop will be co-taught by Professor Franke and Urvashi Vaid, Director of the Engaging Tradition Project at the Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, and will be comprised of outside speakers for half of the sessions, and selected readings related to the work of the outside speakers in the intervening sessions. In the sessions with outside speakers we will pair an academic with an activist or lawyer who is working in different domains on issues such as queering the family; challenging sexual registration laws; bullying; integrating race and class into LGBT rights work; and fighting gender identity-based discrimination. Students will be expected to write short papers for each class, posing questions about the reading, and then one 15-20 page (double-spaced) final paper on a topic of their choosing, approved by the professor. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their class participation, short papers, and their final paper.

No laptops will be allowed in the Workshop.

Katherine Franke:
Room 627, Jerome Greene Hall
(212) 854-0061
kfranke@law.columbia.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 1:30 - 3:00 & Tuesdays 11:00 - 12:00 or by appointment

Urvashi Vaid:
Room 632, Jerome Greene Hall
(212) 854-2801
uvaid@law.columbia.edu

Syllabus

September 4: Introduction

September 11: Hate Crimes/Bullying Laws - background

• Human Rights Watch, Hatred in the Hallways: Violence and Discrimination Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Students in U.S. Schools

• Nathan Hall & Carol Hayden, Is 'Hate Crime' a Relevant and Useful Way of Conceptualising Some Forms of School Bullying?, Institute for Criminal Justice Studies, U. Portsmouth, England

• Dean Spade, Normal Life Chapter 2, What's Wrong with Rights?

September 18: Hate Crimes/Bullying Laws, Eliza Byard, Executive Director GLSEN and Richard Kim, Executive Editor The Nation

• Eliza Byard, Testimony Before the US Commission on Civil Rights (May 13, 2011)
• GLSEN, The 2011 National School Climate Survey Executive Summary: Key Findings of the Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth in Our Nation’s Schools (2012)
• Richard Kim, The Nation, Against ‘Bullying’ or On Loving Queer Kids (October 6, 2010)
• Richard Kim, The Nation, The Tyler Clementi and Dharun Ravi We Will Never Know (March 19, 2012)

September 25: Queering Criminal Justice

• Human Rights Campaign, Hate Crimes an Violence Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People (2009)
• Center for American Progress, The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth (2012)
• Giovanna Shay & J. Kelly Strader, Queer (In)Justice: Mapping New Gay (Scholarly) Agendas, 102 J. Crim'l Law & Criminology 171 (2012)

October 2: Queering Criminal Justice: Andrea Ritchie, Co-coordinator, Streetwise and Safe and Bennett Capers, Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School

• Joey, L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock, The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Gender, Policing Sex, Queer (In)Justice, (2011)
• Bennett Capers, Cross Dressing and the Criminal, 20 Yale J.L. & Human. 1 (2008)

October 9: Queer Citizenship and Marriage

• Complaint, Lazaro v. Orr
• Testimony of Helen Zia, Perry v. Schwarzenegger;
• Siobhan Somerville, Queer Loving, 11 GLQ: A Journal Of Lesbian And Gay Studies 335 (2005)
• Katherine Franke, Longing for Loving, 76 Fordham L. Rev. 2685 (2008)

October 16: Queer Citizenship and Marriage: James Esseks, ACLU LGBT/AIDS Project and Katherine Franke, Professor of Law and Director, Center for Gender & Sexuality Law, Columbia Law School

• Windsor v. United States – Brief of Plaintiff-Appellee
• Katherine Franke: Wed-Locked, Epilogue

October 23: Queering Tradition

October 30: Queering Tradition: Pam Spees, Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights and Ann Pellegrini, Associate Professor of Performance Studies and Religious Studies & Director of the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at New York University

• Pam Spees, In the Case Against Vatican Officials for Rape and Sexual Violence, We've Come to the End of the Beginning;
• The Center for Constitutional Rights, Fighting for the Future: Adult Survivors Work to Protect Children & End the Culture of Clergy Sexual Abuse;
• Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Rethinking Secularism: Going to Law
• Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Rethinking Secularism: "The Church"
• Janet R. Jakobsen & Ann Pellegrini, "These Things Are Old": Religous and Sexual Freedoms Are Not Opposed

November 6: Immigration, Citizenship & Belonging

• A Queer Immigration Timeline
• Brief Amicus Curiae Of Immigration Equality In Support Of Plaintiffs, Utah Coalition of La Raza v. Herbert
• Margot Canaday,  "Who Is a Homosexual?": The Consolidation of Sexual Identities in Mid-Twentieth-CenturyAmerican Immigration Law
   

November 13: Immigration, Citizenship & Belonging: Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, Staff Attorney, Lambda Legal & Siobhan Sommerville, Associate Professor of English, Gender and Women's Studies, and African American Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

• Siobhan Somerville, The Queer Geopolitics of Birth: Jus Soli in Global Perspective
• Brief Of Amici Curiae Lambda Legal, German Lopez Berera aka Karolina Lopez Berera, Petitioner, v. Eric H. Holder, Jr. Attorney General, Respondent

November 20: Queering Race/Racing Queer
 

November 27: Queering Race/Racing Queer: Aisha Moodie-Mills, Center for American Progress Advisor, LGBT Policy & Racial Justice and Russell Robinson, Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

• Russell K. Robinson, "Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration," 99 California Law Review 1309 (2010) - excerpted
• Aisha C. Moodie-Mills, Jumping Beyond the Broom: Why Black Gay and Transgender Americans Need More Than Marriage (January 19, 2012)
• Russell Robinson and Aisha C. Moodie-Mills, HIV/AIDS Inequality: Structural Barriers to Prevention, Treatment, and Care in Communities of Color (July 27, 2012)

December 4: Student Presentations