Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice

Cathy Sakimura

Dwight S — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 20:28:18 +0000

Cathy Sakimura is a Staff Attorney and Director of the Family Protection Project at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), where she works to improve access to family law services for low-income LGBT parents and their children, with a focus on increasing services to families of color. The Family Protection Project provides free legal information to low-income LGBT parents and their children; trains and supports attorneys providing free and low-cost services to these families; and works in coalition with organizations serving communities of color to provide culturally competent services to families of color. She also works on NCLR’s litigation docket, particularly on family-related cases.

Cathy joined NCLR in 2006 as an Equal Justice Works Fellow. She received her J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law in 2006 and her B.A. from Stanford University in 2001. Prior to law school, she worked at Gay-Straight Alliance Network, where she empowered young people to combat harassment in their schools and participated in a multi-organization project linking work against homophobia with work against racism in schools. Cathy was also previously a member of the Board of Directors of COLAGE, a national movement of children, youth, and adults with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or queer parents. In 2012, she was named one of the Best LGBT Lawyers under 40 by the National LGBT Bar Association.

Andrea Ritchie

Dwight S — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 02:25:39 +0000

Andrea Ritchie is a police misconduct attorney who has engaged in extensive research, writing, litigation, organizing and advocacy on profiling, policing, and physical and sexual violence by law enforcement agents against women, girls and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people of color in over the past two decades. She currently coordinates Streetwise & Safe (SAS), a leadership development initiative aimed at sharing “know your rights” information, strategies for safety and visions for change among LGBT youth of color who experience of gender, race, sexuality and poverty-based policing and criminalization in the context of “quality of life” initiatives and the policing of sex work and trafficking. Ritchie is also lead counsel in Tikkun v. City of New York, ground-breaking impact litigation challenging the use of searches to assign gender to individuals in police custody, and co-counsel to the Center for Constitutional Rights in Doe v. Jindal, a challenge to Louisiana’s requirement that individuals convicted of “crime against nature by solicitation” register as sex offenders. She is co-author of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Beacon Press 2011), www.queerinjustice.com.

Rebecca Wanzo

Dwight S — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 13:08:52 +0000

Rebecca Wanzo is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include African American literature and culture, theories of affect, popular culture, critical race theory, and feminist theory. Her first book, The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY 2009) looks at the kinds of stories people tell in the United States to make their suffering legible to various communities and institutions. Using African American women as a case study, she explores topics such as medical discourse about black women and pain, child abduction coverage, representations of sexual violence, and Oprah Winfrey.

She has published work in journals such as Women and Performance, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, and the Washington University Journal of Law and Public Policy. She is currently working on a book entitled The Melancholic Patriot, which looks at representations of African American citizenship in U.S. graphic storytelling, an edited collection about popular media in the U.S., and a set of essays about identity, “post” discourses, and time.

Berta E. Hernández-Truyol

Dwight S — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 20:06:23 +0000

Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol, the Levin, Mabie & Levin Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and an affiliate professor at the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies, teaches international law, international human rights, and specialized, interdisciplinary, graduate seminars on human rights including Women in the Americas and Trade and Human Rights in the Americas. She is the faculty advisor to the Florida Journal of International Law, and a permanent member of the planning committee of the Annual Conference on Legal and Policy Issues in the Americas. Her writing focuses on international human rights and her particular interests lie in exploring issues of gender, race, culture and language. She has urged the use of human rights norms in domestic fora in order to promote the rights of women and racial/ethnic/linguistic minorities.

Professor Hernández-Truyol is a founding member of LatCrit, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation with consultative status in the United Nations Economic and Social Council, that aims to develop a critical and inter-disciplinary discourse on law and policy towards Latinas/os, and to foster both the development of coalitional theory and practice. Professor Hernández-Truyol, has published numerous works in which she examines the condition of Latinas/os in the United States, Latinas in the Hemisphere, and women around the world.

She travels abroad frequently to promote and discuss human and civil rights matters and serves on the boards of various interdisciplinary journals, and on numerous committees and advisory boards of professional organizations and associations.

Elvia Arriola

Dwight S — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:11:06 +0000

Elvia Arriola is Professor of Law at the Northern Illinois University College of Law, where she teaches Constitutional Law, Gender, Sexuality and the Law, Civil Rights Litigation, Family Law, and a research and writing seminar, Women, Law and the Global Economy. She is a Women’s Studies Faculty Associate.

Raised in a large Mexican immigrant family in Southern California, Professor Arriola attended Catholic schools in Los Angeles and in Mexico before pursuing a college education through the California state university system. She attained her law degree from the University of California-Berkeley School of Law and began her legal career in New York City on a fellowship with the national offices of the American Civil Liberties Union. At the ACLU her involvement in the re-opening of the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education inspired her to pursue a Master’s Degree in History at New York University.

Professor Arriola’s experiences at the ACLU led her into teaching first as a writing instructor and civil rights litigation as a member of the N.Y. Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division where she litigated a sex discrimination class action and drafted amicus briefs on varied civil rights cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. These experiences influenced her first law teaching experiences at the University of Texas at Austin where she taught civil rights litigation, employment and family law, and sexuality and the law. Her publications range widely on the subjects that deal with civil rights, feminist and queer legal theory, gender and human rights and globalization of the economy. She owes her most recent research and scholarship interests to the influence of the “LatCrit” scholarly movement begun in 1995-96. Arriola is also Executive Director of an education nonprofit, Women on the Border, dedicated to advancing awareness of the impact of free trade law and policy on women and families who work for American companies at the U.S.-Mexico border known as “maquiladoras.”

Stacey R. Long

Dwight S — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 13:25:38 +0000

Stacey Long is the Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the oldest national organization advocating for the rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people. The Task Force is committed to establishing legal protections and economic stability for LGBT individuals and families across the nation.

As director of government affairs, Stacey pursues an LGBT social change agenda of achieving policy and legislative wins in employment, housing, health care, education and anti-violence. The Task Force’s campaign to end employment discrimination operates on the belief that everyone deserves the right to have a job with a living wage, based on their skills and qualifications, not based on who they are or whom they love. The organization also works to change laws and policies that deny same-sex couples the same rights and benefits as opposite sex couples. Stacey engages the LGBT movement beyond its traditional boundaries of sexual orientation and gender identity to include issues such as pay equity, reproductive rights, racial profiling and immigration reform.

Stacey serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations and is actively engaged with her local community. She received a bachelor’s degree in Africana Studies from Vassar College and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Martin Joseph Ponce

Dwight S — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:00:10 +0000

Martin Joseph Ponce is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Ohio State. He works in Asian American and African American literatures, and queer studies. He’s authored articles on Carlos Bulosan, Langston Hughes, Jose Garcia Villa, and the Filipino diaspora. His book, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading, was published by New York University Press in 2012. His current projects include a study of how competing imperialisms and nationalisms are mediated through sexuality in Asian American literature; an analysis of how non-normative desires and sexualities are framed in post-1965 Asian American literature; and a reconsideration of “identity politics” in 1960s and 70s ethnic cultures. Also in 2012, he was the recipient of the University’s Distinguished Diversity Award.

Shannon Winnubst

Dwight S — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:58:37 +0000

Shannon Winnubst is an Associate Professor in Women’s Studies at Ohio State. Trained in the history of western philosophy, particularly 20th century French philosophy, she specializes in queer theory, race theory, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Queering Freedom (2006), and editor of Reading BatailleNow (2006), and has published essays in journals such as Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and Philosophy and Social Criticism, as well as in numerous anthologies. In addition to ongoing work in French philosophy (especially on Foucault, Lacan and batalle), her current book project focuses on the questions of ethics and difference in neoliberalism, developing a queer critique that highlights the intertwining incommensurabilities of race and sexuality in our contemporary milieu.

Stephanie Wildman

Sarah P — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:23:58 +0000

Stephanie M. Wildman received the 2007 Great Teacher Award from the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest national organization of law school faculty. She was the founding director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). She taught for 25 years at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She received her A.B. (1970) and her J.D. (1973) from Stanford University. She clerked for Judge Charles M. Merrill of the United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit and worked as a staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance. In 1983 she was elected to membership in the American Law Institute. She has been a visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), U.C. Davis School of Law, Hastings College of the Law, Santa Clara University School of Law, and Stanford Law School.

Wildman most recently published Women and the Law Stories (with Elizabeth Schneider) (2011). Her book, Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America, (with contributions by Margalynne Armstrong, Adrienne D. Davis, & Trina Grillo) won the 1997 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for Human Rights. Her books, Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America 2d (with Richard Delgado, Angela A. Harris, and Juan F. Perea) (2007) and Social Justice: Professionals Communities and Law (with Martha R. Mahoney and John O. Calmore) (2003) are popular Thomson-West textbooks. She is past co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers and served on the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Executive Committee. Wildman teaches Law and Social Justice, Gender and Law, and Torts. Her scholarship emphasizes systems of privilege, gender, race, and classroom dynamics.

Frank Valdes

Sarah P — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:21:15 +0000

Francisco Valdes, Professor of Law and Dean’s Distinguished Scholar, earned a B.A. in 1978 from the University of California at Berkeley, a J.D. with honors in 1984 from the University of Florida College of Law, and a J.S.M. in 1991 and a J.S.D. in 1994 from Stanford Law School. Between law school and his graduate law work, he practiced with Miami and San Francisco law firms, and taught as an adjunct professor at Golden Gate Law School. After receiving his J.S.D. from Stanford, he taught at California Western School of Law in San Diego, joining the UM faculty in 1996. He is a leading figure in the “LatCrit” movement and in gay rights scholarship and is co-chair of LatCrit, Inc. He teaches civil procedure, comparative law, critical race theory, law and sexuality, law and film, and U.S. constitutional law.