Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewLegally Straight is an important book that contributes new insights and arguments to debates within LGBTQ, feminist, gender and sexuality, and critical legal studies. Through meticulous analysis of US case law, history and social science, Prof. Rollins illuminates some of the mixed blessings for gays and lesbians of being assimilated into the charmed inner circle of legal marriage. Above all, the originality and surprise of this fascinating book lie in the compelling evidence it marshals to show how gay and lesbian marriage won the imprimatur of US courts because of profound shifts in the gendered meanings of childhood. -- Rosalind Petchesky,Distinguished Professor Emerita of Political Science, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Legally Straight offers powerful interventions into a dazzlingly broad range of fields--political science, queer studies, straightness studies, feminist studies, childhood studies, and family studies. Rollins carefully traces the evolving judicial deployment of reproduction and childhood, showing us the ways that heteronormativityboth as a structural formations and as a metaphorgives shape to seemingly gender- and sexuality-neutral laws and their interpretations. A well-researched example of the mutually constitutive relationship between law and culture, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the relationship between gender, sexuality, and legal personhood. -- Jane Ward,Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of California Riverside
This book provides excellent interdisciplinary insight on the historical, rhetorical, religious, cultural, social, political, economic, stereotypical, and legal aspects of how American marriage laws gradually expanded from 1971 until 2015 to include same-gender couples without impinging on opposite-gender couples' ability to marry. * Choice *
