The Masculinity Mandate: #MeToo, Brett Kavanaugh, and Christine Blasey Ford

In fall 2019, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings involving Dr. Christine Blasey Ford\u27s testimony about then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh\u27s alleged behavior at a high school party gone awry. This essay uses identity performance and multidimensional masculinities theories to analyze the hearings, specifically to consider the gender, race, and class performances of the participants, and how partisans and non-partisans interpreted those performances. This examination demonstrates that the judgment concerning masculinity and femininity performances and their appropriateness is, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder. By the same token, public interpretations are not arbitrary. Rather, at least in this context, power differentials based on gender, race, and class appear to have influenced the public reaction to these performances and the interpretation of what constitutes appropriate masculine and feminine behavior. Moreover, the perceived appropriateness of these behaviors governs who the winners and losers will be. In this case, upper-middleclass white males won while women of all races and classes lost. Although it was not immediately obvious how class and race influenced the process because both main participants are of a similar class and race, deeper analysis demonstrates that white, upper-middle class, male power affects how the participants were perceived and judged. Class, race, and gender were certainly present in the calculation of winners and losers. Part II of this essay establishes the theoretical basis for my analysis, explaining masculinities, identity performance, and multidimensional theories. Part III uses these theories to analyze the various performances as well as the public reactions to those performances. Finally, this essay concludes that gender, race, and class affect judgments in this context, and the Senate should write rules to assure that a fairer and more accurate process takes place in the future in the hopes of breaking the strangleholds of traditional gendered, raced, and classed power

Intersectional Cohorts, Dis/ability, and Class Actions

This Article occupies the junction of dis/abilities studies and critical race theory. It joins the growing commentary analyzing the groundbreaking lawsuit by Compton, California students and teachers against the Compton school district under federal disability law and seeking class certification and injunctive relief in the form of teacher training, provision of counselors, and changed disciplinary practices. The federal district court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss but also denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and class certification, resulting in prolonged settlement talks. The suit is controversial because it seeks to address the trauma suffered by Black and Latinx students in poor, violence-torn inner-city communities by characterizing the students as disabled.The Article disagrees with legal scholarship thus far, which posits that using disability law to help these students both stigmatizes them and ignores current disability law’s focus on individual claims. It asserts that concerns about stigma are outweighed by the potential to assist distressed students. Doctrinally, it contends the concern for individual claims is overstated because one major goal of disability law is to remove social barriers to the flourishing of people with dis/abilities. By analyzing the social construction model of dis/abilities implicit within current law, this Article shows that group-based claims like those of the Compton students are a valid use of the class certification power.This Article’s key contribution to the dis/abilities studies and critical race literatures is the creation of a theory of “intersectional cohorts.” The members of intersectional cohorts share similar self-identities, attributed identities, and identity performances to such extent that it is appropriate to think of them as a discrete and cohesive group in relation to a particular issue. This is a way to explore the meso-level of discrete and cohesive social groups who share multiple identities without devolving into a micro-level theory of each individual or essentializing identities through a macro-level theory of broad social groups.Understanding poor Black and Latinx students in violence-torn neighborhoods as an intersectional cohort shows they have sufficiently shared experiences and responses to their environment to presume they constitute a class that should be certified in the Compton suit and in other similar lawsuits. This approach is supported by the scientific research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their relationship to complex trauma and disability. We hope this analysis will serve as a model for future theoretical and applied analysis of intersectional cohorts, especially with respect to dis/abilities

Policing and the Clash of Masculinities

In 2014 and 2015, the news media inundated U.S. society with reports of brutal killings by police of black men in major American cities. Unfortunately, police departments do not typically keep data on police killings of civilians. The data that exist do show, however, that at least for a five-month period in 2015, there was a disproportionate rate of police killings of unarmed black men. There is no question that race and class play a key role in the nature of policing that occurs in poor black urban neighborhoods, but the relationship between police officers and their victims is not only about race and class. It is also about gender. Black men, especially those living in poor neighborhoods, are the common victims of police scrutiny, stop and frisks, arrests, incarcerations, and killings. White men are almost invariably the police personnel who kill unarmed black males in the streets. Performances of masculinity by the police and their victims exacerbate this problem. This article uses multidimensional masculinities theory to analyze the intersection of race, gender, and class at which this problem occurs. It evaluates the crucial role gender plays in the formation, education, training, and work behavior of police officers. It also discusses how black civilian men’s performances of masculinity may play a role in their treatment by police officers, and when combined with the police officer’s performance of masculinity, may turn deadly. The article concludes that an understanding of masculinities studies should lead to important policy changes in the gathering of evidence, research, education and training of police, and to a reassessment by all communities in the United States of what exactly makes men masculine. These understandings, combined with policy changes, may help prevent further police violence perpetrated on innocent victims

Reconsidering Legal Regulation of Race, Sex, and Sexual Orientation

Reviewing Sonu Bedi, Beyond Race, Sex and Sexual Orientation: Legal Equality without Identity; Devon W. Carbodo and Mitu Gulati, Acting White?: Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America; Ruthann Robson, Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy from Our Hairstyles to Our Shoes; and John D. Skrentny, After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace