Monday Law Talk: What's Masculinity Got to Do with It? Gender, Pop Culture, and Law

The William S. Boyd School of Law on Monday, Jan. 28, 2013 will present Ann C. McGinley, Professor of Law at UNLV, and Frank Rudy Cooper, Professor of Law at Suffolk University, for a lecture titled "What’s Masculinity Got to Do with It?: Gender, Pop Culture, and Law."

Masculinities and the Law: A Multidimensional Approach is a recently released book co-edited by Professors McGinley and Cooper. According to masculinities theory, masculinity is not a biological imperative but a social construction. Men engage in a constant struggle with other men to prove their masculinity. Masculinities and the Law develops a multidimensional approach. It sees categories of identity—including various forms of raced-, classed-, and sex-oriented masculinities—as operating simultaneously and creating different effects in different contexts. By applying multidimensional masculinities theory to law, this cutting-edge collection both expands the field of masculinities and develops new thinking about important issues in feminist and critical race theories. The topics covered include how norms of masculinity influence the behavior of policemen, firefighters, and international soldiers on television and in the real world; employment discrimination against masculine cocktail waitresses and all transgendered employees; the legal treatment of fathers in the U.S. and the ways unauthorized migrant fathers use the dangers of border crossing to boost their masculine esteem; how Title IX fails to curtail the masculinity of sport; the racist assumptions behind the prison rape debate; the surprising roots of homophobia in Jamaican dancehall music; and the contradictions of the legal debate over women veiling in Turkey. Ultimately, the book argues that multidimensional masculinities theory can change how law is interpreted and applied.

Speakers

Ann C. McGinley is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law at the Boyd School of Law of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she has taught since 1999. A cum laude 1982 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and an editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, Professor McGinley clerked for the Honorable Joseph S. Lord, III of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and practiced commercial, employment, and civil rights law. Professor McGinley is an internationally recognized scholar in the area of employment law, employment discrimination and disability law and a leader in “Multidimensional Masculinities and the Law,” an emerging discipline that applies masculinities theory from social sciences to legal interpretation. She has published more than 30 law review articles and numerous book chapters on employment law and anti-discrimination law, and is the co-editor of Masculinities and the Law: A Multidimensional Approach (NYU Press 2012) (with Frank Rudy Cooper), a cutting edge collection of original chapters by known legal scholars who work in masculinities and law in varying fields ranging from criminal law to employment law and critical race studies and law. McGinley is co-author of Disability Law: Cases, Materials, Problems, Fifth Edition (LexisNexis) (with Laura Rothstein). Her book in progress, which will be published by New York University Press in 2013, is entitled Through a Different Lens: Multidimensional Masculinities and Employment Discrimination Law. McGinley has taught at the University of Insubria, Italy, and has presented a lecture on sexual harassment to students enrolled in the master’s degree program in Labor Law at the Universidad de Adolfo Ibanez, Santiago, Chile. She has recently been invited to join the Academic Board of the Master’s in Labor Law program at the University of Adolfo Ibanez.

Professor Cooper is a tenured Professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston, Mass. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Duke University Law School, where he was a staff editor on the Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy. Prior to entering law teaching, he served as a federal district court judicial clerk, practiced law, and was a teaching assistant at Harvard University, where he won three teaching awards. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Villanova University School of Law. At Suffolk, he has taught Constitutional Law; Constitutional Law/Criminal Procedure; Criminal Law; and Race, Gender & Law. A leader in national Law Professor organizations, Cooper has served on the Boards of the Society of American Law Teachers, Latina/o Critical Legal Theory, and the John Mercer Langston Writing Workshop. His scholarly interests lie at the intersection of Criminal Procedure and Critical Race Feminism, especially as applied to policing and men of color. He has just published the co-edited volume, Masculinities and the Law: A Multidimensional Approach (with Ann C. McGinley) (New York University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0814769690).