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Jane Ward | |
|---|---|
 Jane Ward gives a lecture at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on September 8, 2015. | |
| Born | October 15, 1973 |
| Spouse | Kat Ross |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of California Santa Barbara |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Feminist and Queer Studies |
Jane Ward is an American scholar,feminist,and author.
Ward is Professor and Chair of Feminist Studies at the University of California,Santa Barbara. [1] Ward received her PhD in sociology from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2003.
Ward is known for her books The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (New York University Press,2020),a 2021 PROSE Award Winner, [2] and Not Gay:Sex Between Straight White Men (NYU Press,2015), [3] a 2016 Lambda Literary Award Finalist. [4] Ward's research has been featured in The New York Times , BBC , NPR , New York Magazine , The Guardian , Forbes , Salon , Newsweek , Huffington Post , Cosmopolitan ,and Vice . Her 2008 book Respectably Queer:Diversity Culture in LGBT Activist Organizations was named a favorite book of 2008 by The Progressive magazine. [5]
She lives in Southern California with her partner Kat Ross. Ward's published work focuses on a broad range of topics,from feminist pornography,queer parenting,and the racial politics of same-sex marriage,to the social construction of heterosexuality and whiteness.
Ward's first book,Respectably Queer,is based on her observations of three different queer organizations:the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center,Bienestar,and Los Angeles-Christopher Street West.[ citation needed ]
Ward's second book, Not Gay, received positive reviews from New York Magazine and many other outlets. Singal states "[Ward] shows that homosexual contact has been a regular feature of heterosexual life ever since the concepts of homo- and heterosexuality were first created—not just in prisons and frat houses and the military,but in biker gangs and even conservative suburban neighborhoods." [6]
In Not Gay,Ward examines same sex encounters between men who are considered to be heterosexual.[ citation needed ] Questions that frame her analysis include "does having sexual encounters with men automatically mean that men are gay or bisexual?" To answer such questions,she traces American history to the 1950s,examining same sex encounters such as those in public bathrooms. Ward also uses sociological,psychological,and historical research to link gender and sexuality to race,focusing on the perceived heterosexuality of white men who have sexual encounters with other white men. Ward's work in Not Gay presents a perspective on opposite couple attraction [7] and a new outlook on heterosexual masculinity. [8] In 2016,Ward published a feminist response to gay male critics of the book. [9] Not Gay was translated into German and published by Mannerschwarm Verlag in 2018. [10]
In 2020,Ward published her third book,entitled The Tragedy of Heterosexuality,winner of the 2021 PROSE Award in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology. [11] As described by a reviewer for The New York Times,“The Tragedy of Heterosexuality wastes absolutely no time getting to the point,but while many of the sentences (including the title) made me laugh out loud,it is at heart a somber,urgent academic examination of the many ways in which opposite-sex coupling can hurt the very individuals who cling to it most." [12]
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.
Queer is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', queer came to be used pejoratively against LGBT people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to reclaim the word as a neutral or positive self-description.
Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women's studies. The term "queer theory" is broadly associated with the study and theorization of gender and sexual practices that exist outside of heterosexuality, and which challenge the notion that heterosexuality is what is normal. Following social constructivist developments in sociology, queer theorists are often critical of what they consider essentialist views of sexuality and gender. Instead, they study those concepts as social and cultural phenomena, often through an analysis of the categories, binaries, and language in which they are said to be portrayed.
The sex-positive movement is a social and philosophical movement that seeks to change cultural attitudes and norms around sexuality, promoting the recognition of sexuality as a natural and healthy part of the human experience and emphasizing the importance of personal sovereignty, safer sex practices, and consensual sex. It covers every aspect of sexual identity including gender expression, orientation, relationship to the body, relationship-style choice, and reproductive rights. Sex-positivity is "an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation." It challenges societal taboos and aims to promote healthy and consensual sexual activities. The sex-positive movement also advocates for comprehensive sex education and safe sex as part of its campaign. The movement generally makes no moral distinctions among types of sexual activities, regarding these choices as matters of personal preference.
"New queer cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.
Heteroflexibility is a form of a sexual orientation or situational sexual behavior characterized by minimal homosexual activity in an otherwise primarily heterosexual orientation, which may or may not distinguish it from bisexuality. It has been characterized as "mostly straight". Although sometimes equated with bi-curiosity to describe a broad continuum of sexual orientation between heterosexuality and bisexuality, other authors distinguish heteroflexibility as lacking the "wish to experiment with ... sexuality" implied by the bi-curious label. The corresponding situation in which homosexual activity predominates has also been described, termed homoflexibility.
Sheila Jeffreys is a former professor of political science at the University of Melbourne, born in England. A lesbian feminist scholar, she analyses the history and politics of human sexuality.
Bisexual erasure, also called bisexual invisibility, is the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or re-explain evidence of bisexuality in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources.
Joan Nestle is a Lambda Award winning writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which holds, among other things, everything she has ever written. She is openly lesbian and sees her work of archiving history as critical to her identity as "a woman, as a lesbian, and as a Jew."
Pegging is an anal sex act in which a woman penetrates a man's anus with a strap-on dildo.
Tamsin Elizabeth Wilton was an English lesbian activist, and the UK’s first Professor of Human Sexuality. She researched and wrote extensively about gay and lesbian health, the process of transitioning to lesbianism, and the marginalisation of lesbian issues within sexuality studies.
Queer heterosexuality is heterosexual practice or identity that is also controversially called queer. "Queer heterosexuality" is argued to consist of heterosexual, cisgender, and allosexual persons who show nontraditional gender expressions, or who adopt gender roles that differ from the hegemonic masculinity and femininity of their particular culture.
Judith G. Stacey is an author and Professor Emerita of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University. Her primary focus areas include gender, family, sexuality, feminist and queer theory, and ethnography. Her book Unhitched explores family configurations that deviate from the standard Western concept of "marriage", including polygamous families in South Africa, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, and intimacy and parenthood among gay men in Los Angeles, California. She has published many works. She is perhaps most known for her paper, co-authored with Timothy Biblarz, titled "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" This study found that children with gay or lesbian parents "are well-adjusted, have good levels of self-esteem and are as likely to have high educational attainments as children raised in more traditional heterosexual families."
Compulsory heterosexuality, often shortened to comphet, is the theory that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by a patriarchal, allonormative, and heteronormative society. The term was popularized by Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay titled "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence". According to Rich, social science and literature perpetuate the societal belief that women in every culture are believed to have an innate preference for romantic and sexual relationships with men. She argues that women's sexuality towards men is not always natural but is societally ingrained and scripted into women. Comphet describes the belief that society is overwhelmingly heterosexual and delegitimizes queer identities. As a result, it perpetuates homophobia and legal inequity for the LGBTQ+ community.
Feminist views on sexuality widely vary. Many feminists, particularly radical feminists, are highly critical of what they see as sexual objectification and sexual exploitation in the media and society. Radical feminists are often opposed to the sex industry, including opposition to prostitution and pornography. Other feminists define themselves as sex-positive feminists and believe that a wide variety of expressions of female sexuality can be empowering to women when they are freely chosen. Some feminists support efforts to reform the sex industry to become less sexist, such as the feminist pornography movement.
Queering is a technique used to challenge heteronormativity by analyzing places in a text that use heterosexuality or identity binaries. Coming out of queer theory in the late 1980s through the 1990s, queering is a method that can be applied to literature, film, and other media. Originally, the method of queering dealt more strictly with gender and sexuality, but quickly expanded to become more of an umbrella term for addressing identity as well as a range of systems of oppression and identity politics. Even the term queer itself can be queered, because much of queer theory involves working to fight against normalization even in the field itself. In the context of queer theory, "queering is something we do, rather than something we are ."
Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men is a 2015 book by Jane Ward, in which the author details the phenomenon of straight-identifying white men seeking out sex with other straight-identifying men despite not identifying as gay, bisexual, or bi-curious.
Janet R. Jakobsen is a scholar of gender and sexuality. She is the Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and is the author of several books focusing on gender and sexuality.
Queer erasure refers to the tendency to intentionally or unintentionally remove LGBTQ groups or people from record, or downplay their significance, which includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This erasure can be found in a number of written and oral texts, including popular and scholarly texts.
Brett Krutzsch is a scholar of religion at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University, where he serves as Editor of the online magazine TheRevealer and teaches in NYU's Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of the 2019 book, Dying to Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics from Oxford University Press. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Newsday, TheAdvocate, and he has been featured on NPR.
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