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This article analyzes the National Football League (NFL) player protests against institutionalized racism as a means of radical democratic discourse. Players elected to sit/kneel during the...

This article begins with a discussion of the current social equity scholarship and advocates for the increased use of intersectional tools in order to make legible those individuals who are made in...

The extant environmental justice research examines the unequal distribution of environmental risks across and within societies. While patterns of environmental injustice reveal that marginalized co...

Recent political events have exacerbated the tensions between the expectation that faculty be neutral arbiters of knowledge and information and the reality that many individuals pursue careers in p...

During the 2017 American Political Science Association (APSA) annual meeting in San Francisco, the Caucus for New Political Science (CNPS) celebrated its fiftieth-year anniversary. CNPS held a seri...

This article examines the limitations of rights-based strategies and social movements for advancing the interests of marginalized and intersectionally-subjected populations in the US, and argues th...

Law enforcement has a lengthy history of policing LGBTQ communities. Throughout the 20th century, police utilized laws prohibiting same-sex sexual conduct to criminalize LGBTQ individuals, and to target public gathering places including gay bars. Sodomy prohibitions were supplemented by mental health diagnoses including assumptions about criminal pathologies among LGBTQ individuals and the government’s fear that LGBTQ individuals’ sexual perversions made them a national security risk to subject LGBTQ communities to extensive policing based on their alleged sexual deviance. The successes of the gay rights movement led the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental health disorder in the 1970s, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that prohibitions on sodomy run afoul of the Constitution ended the de jure criminalization of LGBTQ individuals based on their sexual conduct. Today, policing of LGBTQ communities consists of both overpolicing and underenforcement. Law enforcement regularly profiles some facets of LGBTQ communities in order to selectively enforce general criminal prohibitions on public lewdness, solicitation, loitering, and vagrancy—consistent with the goals of “quality of life” policing—on gay men, transwomen, and LGBTQ youth, respectively. The selective enforcement of these laws often targets LGBTQ people of color and other intersectionally identified LGBTQ individuals in order to criminalize their existence based on ongoing stereotypes about sexual deviancy. In addition, police regularly fail to recognize LGBTQ individuals as victims of crimes, with the exception of particularly heinous hate crimes, and do not adequately attend to their needs and/or subject them to secondary victimization. As such, the relationship between many LGBTQ communities and law enforcement continues to be characterized by antagonisms and mistrust.

The selective enforcement of solicitation laws on transgender individuals—often referred to as “walking while trans”—has an especially pernicious effect on transgender people of color, immigrants, and the poor. Intersectional subjection—the interaction between multiple categories of identity and diffuse power and sources of authority within contemporary American society—facilitates processes of governmentality and makes some transgender individuals more vulnerable to forms of social control such as trans-profiling. Using intersectional subjection to analyze the selective enforcement of solicitation laws exposes how trans-profiling (1) works to marginalize and remove transgender people of color and transgender immigrants from public spaces; and (2) enforces raced and classed gender norms and reifies white cis-heteronormative privilege. The concepts of intersectionality, subjection, and governmentality elucidate the mutually constitutive relationships among informal and formal actors and institution...

This article examines how the conservative legal movement's successful countermobilization of the politics of rights enables U.S. Supreme Court outcomes that exacerbate racial and ethnic inequities while solidifying the privileged position of others in the name of equality. A comparison of two pivotal Supreme Court cases involving native entitlements—Morton v. Mancari (1974) and Rice v. Cayetano (2000)—illustrates how appeals to formal, as opposed to substantive, equality work in effect to support existing hierarchies. At the same time, the conservative legal movement's success provides progressive social actors with opportunities to reframe the discourse. We suggest that a critical questioning of strategies predicated on appeals for equal rights may be necessary to advance the interests of native populations in the current environment, and we identify an alternative way of working for native interests, one that escapes the constraints of equality doctrine by appealing to broader claims of social justice.