Unapologetically Queer in Unapologetically Black Spaces: Creating An Inclusive HBCU Campus

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are notoriously perceived as unwelcoming towards lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) students, and are considerably behind predominantly white institutions (PWIs) in regards to providing supportive and affirming environments. Fewer than 25% of the 105 HBCUs in the United States have LGBTQ student organizations, and only three have established LGBTQ resource centers. This article, written by the co-founder of one of these centers, is a reflexive exercise that describes the history, successes and challenges of developing and sustaining a LGBTQ resource center on one HBCU campus. Establishing LGBTQ initiatives at HBCUs is absolutely imperative to the retention of LGBTQ students, student success, and sustainability and the purpose of this article is to guide other HBCUs as they work to become more inclusive institutions

CRJC 370

This is a survey course designed to give students an overview of criminal law, civil law and legal issues as they relate to sex and sexuality. Taught from a social constructionist perspective, this class considers why certain behaviors come to be legal or illegal, how laws that regulate sex and sexuality affect our culture, and how criminal justice professionals confront issues of sexuality within the framework of the law. Though specific topics may vary by professor or current events, they may include sexual assault, prostitution, sex trafficking, pedophilia, sting operations, abortion, hate crimes, GLBTQ rights (both civilians and CJ professionals), sex registries, and pornography

Discovering the Theorist in Tupac: How to Engage Your Students with Popular Music

This paper introduces creative pedagogical techniques for exploring theory in the undergraduate classroom. Using criminal justice and criminological theories as a primary example, it describes a technique that professors from any theory-driven discipline can use to engage students through popular music, from hip-hop to musical theater in order to strengthen their grasp of the basic theoretical foundations of their field. By introducing music as a forum for understanding theory, we can both peak the interest of our students and demonstrate to them that theory is present in our everyday lives. Here we will consider the importance of integrating popular culture and technology in our classrooms, the ways pop music espouses the major assumptions of theory, and creative approaches we can use to make criminal justice, criminology, and other theory-driven disciplines even more exciting to our students

Moving beyond the binary: Exploring the dimensions of gender presentation and orientation

The goal of this paper is to provide a forum or discussion of the problematic nature of gendered language as it is currently employed by social scientists in particular, and the larger culture in general. Drawing from my previous research – a 2008 study in which a large-scale qualitative survey that included 249 individuals who identified as transgender, and 55 individuals who were in committed relationships with transgender people – we are able to see that the issue of language, it’s construction, and it’s use in informal conversation and especially scientific discourse is a topic in need of further exploration and theorizing. Informed by the participants in my study, I question the utility of the current language to describe not only the transgender experience, but the experiences of those who embrace traditional gender roles as well

Queer criminology

Queer people 1 experience the criminal legal system in a way that is unique and worthy of criminological inquiry, hence the emergence of queer criminology. Queer criminology, simply put, is “a theoretical and practical approach that seeks to highlight and draw attention to the stigmatization, the criminalization, and in many ways the rejection of the Queer community… as both victims and offenders, by academe and the criminal legal system” (Buist and Lenning, 2016, p. 1). Queer criminology also considers the experiences of criminal legal professionals working in the field, such as in law enforcement, courts, and corrections systems. More recently, queer criminologists have expanded their scope of inquiry to include engaging “queer theoretical critiques to not only identify heteronormativity within criminal justice institutions, but also to question whether, in fact, the reform of such institutions can ever hope to address the injustices experienced by LGBTIQ people” (Ball, 2016, p. 8). Arguably, it is the latter focus that has placed queer criminology under the broader rubric of critical criminology. Indeed, contemporary queer criminology is differentiated from previous criminological work that simply considered Queer people as subjects particularly because of its disruptive and challenging nature (Dwyer, Ball, and Crofts, 2016). Additionally, queer criminology mirrors the variety of perspectives that fall under the umbrella of critical criminology (feminist criminology, cultural criminology, green criminology, and so on) - while there are countless ideas about what makes a particular criminology “critical,” so are there many notions about what makes queer criminology “queer.” This chapter is meant to provide a sampling of the varied topics of inquiry, theoretical perspectives, and research that currently dominate criminological work that we might consider “queer.