Janet Jakobsen | |
---|---|
Alma mater | Emory University |
Occupation | Professor |
Employer | Barnard College |
Notable work | Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerancewith Ann Pellegrini The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics |
Title | Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies |
Partner | Christina Crosby |
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. [1]
Jakobsen attended Dartmouth College for undergrad, where she received her A.B. in philosophy and economics. She received her M.A. at Claremont School of Theology. Jakobsen received her doctorate from Emory University in the Graduate School of Religion. [2]
She worked as a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C. and taught at both Wesleyan University and Harvard University and before starting at Barnard. [1] She is the Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College. She served as the Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) for 15 years. She has also been Barnard's Dean for Faculty Diversity and Development. [2]
During her time at BCRW, Jakobsen started the web journal Scholar & Feminist Online. Currently, Jakobsen serves as a principal investigator for the Gender Justice and Neoliberal Transformations Working Group, sponsored by BCRW. [2]
Jakobsen's partner was the Wesleyan professor of English and professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies Christina Crosby, [3] until Crosby's death in 2021. Crosby writes about their life together after Crosby's paralyzing bike accident in her memoir, A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain. [4]
Jakobsen's most recent book, published in 2020 by New York University Press, covers how gender and sexuality repeatedly appear at the center of America political issues. Jakobsen analyzes sexual politics in the first televised presidential debate, the AIDS crisis, the 2010s health care reform issues, #MeToo and more.
The Sex Obsession was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies. [5]
The views of the various different religions and religious believers regarding human sexuality range widely among and within them, from giving sex and sexuality a rather negative connotation to believing that sex is the highest expression of the divine. Some religions distinguish between human sexual activities that are practised for biological reproduction and those practised only for sexual pleasure in evaluating relative morality.
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.
Anne Fausto-Sterling is an American sexologist who has written extensively on the social construction of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, gender roles, and intersexuality. She is the Nancy Duke Lewis Professor Emerita of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University.
Gayle S. Rubin is an American cultural anthropologist, theorist and activist, best known for her pioneering work in feminist theory and queer studies.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+)-affirming religious groups are religious groups that welcome LGBT people as their members, do not consider homosexuality as a sin or negative, and affirm LGBT rights and relationships. They include entire religious denominations, as well as individual congregations and places of worship. Some groups are mainly composed of non-LGBTQ+ members and they also have specific programs to welcome LGBTQ+ people into them, while other groups are mainly composed of LGBTQ+ members.
Feminist sexology is an offshoot of traditional studies of sexology that focuses on the intersectionality of sex and gender in relation to the sexual lives of women. Sexology has a basis in psychoanalysis, specifically Freudian theory, which played a big role in early sexology. This reactionary field of feminist sexology seeks to be inclusive of experiences of sexuality and break down the problematic ideas that have been expressed by sexology in the past. Feminist sexology shares many principles with the overarching field of sexology; in particular, it does not try to prescribe a certain path or "normality" for women's sexuality, but only observe and note the different and varied ways in which women express their sexuality. It is a young field, but one that is growing rapidly.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal based published by Duke University Press. It was co-founded by David M. Halperin and Carolyn Dinshaw in the early 1990s. In its mission, the journal seeks "to offer queer perspectives on all issues touching on sex and sexuality." It covers religion, science studies, politics, law, and literary studies.
Sexuality and space is a field of study within human geography. The phrase encompasses all relationships and interactions between human sexuality, space and place, themes studied within cultural geography, i.e., environmental and architectural psychology, urban sociology, gender studies, queer studies, socio-legal studies, planning, housing studies and criminology.
Sylvia Rosila Tamale is a Ugandan academic, and human rights activist in Uganda. She was the first woman dean in the law faculty at Makerere University, Uganda.
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy was one of the founding feminists of the field of women's studies and is a lesbian historian whose book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of the Lesbian Community documents the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York, in the decades before Stonewall.
Feminist views on BDSM vary widely from acceptance to rejection. BDSM refers to bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and Sado-Masochism. In order to evaluate its perception, two polarizing frameworks are compared. Some feminists, such as Gayle Rubin and Patrick Califia, perceive BDSM as a valid form of expression of female sexuality, while other feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin and Susan Griffin, have stated that they regard BDSM as a form of woman-hating violence. Some lesbian feminists practice BDSM and regard it as part of their sexual identity.
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.
The Barnard Conference on Sexuality is often credited as the moment that signaled the beginning of the Feminist Sex Wars. It was held at Barnard College on April 24, 1982, and was presented as the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference IX, an integral part of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. The theme of the Conference was Sexuality. The Conference was set up as a framework for feminist thought to proceed regarding topics that many felt uncomfortable talking about. As Carole Vance, the Academic Coordinator of the Conference wrote in her letter inviting the participants "sexuality is a bread and butter issue, not a frill."
Amber L. Hollibaugh was an American writer, filmmaker, activist and organizer concerned with working class, lesbian and feminist politics, especially around sexuality. She was a former Executive Director of Queers for Economic Justice and was Senior Activist Fellow Emerita at the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Hollibaugh proudly identified as a "lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke."
Carolyn Dinshaw is an American academic and author, who has specialised in issues of gender and sexuality in the medieval context.
Christina Crosby was an American scholar and writer, with particular interests in 19th-century British literature and disability studies. She is the author of The Ends of History: Victorians and "The Woman's Question", which considers the place of history and women in 19th-century British literature, and A Body, Undone, a memoir about her life after she was paralyzed in a cycling accident in 2003. She spent her career at Wesleyan University, where she was a professor of English and of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies.
Juana María Rodríguez is a Cuban-American professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly writing in queer theory, critical race theory, and performance studies highlights the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and embodiment in constructing subjectivity.
Ann Pellegrini is Professor of Performance Studies and Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU and the director of NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. In 1998, she founded the Sexual Cultures book series at NYU Press with José Muñoz; she now co-edits the series with Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong'o. Her book You Can Tell Just By Looking, co-authored with Michael Bronski and Michael Amico, was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Non-Fiction.
Elizabeth Castelli is an author and Professor of Religion at Barnard College. She specializes in biblical studies, late ancient Christianity, feminist and gender studies in religion along with theory and method in the study of religion, with a particular focus on the after-effects of biblical and early Christian texts, including the citation of the Bible and ancient Christian sources in debates concerning cultural and political expression.
Lucinda Ramberg is an American anthropologist whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, religion and health. She was awarded multiple prizes in 2015 for her first book, Given to the Goddess: South Indian Devadasis and the Sexuality of Religion. Ramberg is associate professor in anthropology and director of graduate studies in the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Cornell University.