Kelsy Burke

What makes a man: Gender and sexual boundaries on evangelical Christian sexuality websites

This article examines how some evangelical Christian men create alternative meanings associated with gender-deviant sex in order to justify it within an evangelical framework. The author shows how Christian sexuality website users construct gender omniscience—a spouse and God’s all-knowing certainty about one’s “true” gender identity—to reconcile men’s interests in non-normative sex with their status as Christian patriarchs. By constructing gender as relational and spiritual, they simultaneously normalize their behaviors while condemning others who participate in similar acts but fail to meet the requirements of gender omniscience. Challenging common assumptions about evangelical sexuality, this article offers insights into the intersection of heterosexuality, masculinities, and religion.

Superstars and Misfits: Two Pop-trends in the Gender Culture of Contemporary Evangelicalism

This paper examines gender in two forms of mediated contemporary Protestant evangelicalism in the United States: a male-dominated punk network, called Misfits United, and a women’s group studying Beth Moore’s Bible study, It’s Tough Being a Woman (ITBAW). While the appearance and performance styles of these two groups are drastically different, both support gender hierarchies in similar ways. Misfits United and Moore’s ITBAW present the gender of their Christian God as flexible, even transformative, and in effect open up discursive space to conceptualize gender on non-traditional grounds. Paradoxically, however, both reinforce traditional gender roles by emphasizing what distinguishes God from His creation: the gendered constraints of human biology.

Logics of Freedom: Debating Religious Freedom Laws and Gay and Lesbian Rights

In the wake of marriage equality for same-sex couples, many states have introduced and passed laws that provide religious exemptions for certain services and benefits for LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) persons. The authors use data from a general population survey of Nebraskans as a mixed-methods case study to examine public opinion of religious freedom laws. Drawing on data from both closed-ended (n = 1,117) and open-ended (n = 838) questions, the authors show that opposition to religious freedom laws is quite high, as 64 percent of respondents report that they oppose laws that would allow business owners to deny services to gay men and lesbians. The authors outline how both sides rely on frameworks that are foundational to the American experience: the protection of rights and the capitalist economy. The authors argue that these appeals to broad American values underscore why these bills will continue to be introduced and seen as controversial despite low levels of support.

Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic JewsBecoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews, by DavidmanLynn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 253 pp.

prised by the extent to which Dabney and Tewksbury portrayed the widespread acceptance within the law enforcement community of lying to, manipulating, and deceiving criminals and non-criminals alike (really quite scary) while simultaneously condemning the criminals with whom they worked as manipulative hustlers. As a society we expect criminals to be this way, but we usually hold our law enforcement officers to a higher standard. The authors also fail to challenge officers’ morally compromising behavior. The title is a misnomer, since the book focuses on the police talking strength to the weak. Theoretically, this study offers an interesting view of the counterfeit intimacy of the officer-informant relationship and makes some policy suggestions for managing the potential overlap of informant use between specialty departments who may be investigating common populations. It is useful for scholarly readers as well as for courses on law enforcement and criminal justice.

27.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780199380503.

Instructors often wish to address gender and sexuality in a wide variety of courses. Yet concerns regarding how to productively intertwine these topics with other class material while remaining attentive to feminist and queer concerns may lead to hesitation. We discuss two of the most frequent challenges that arise when discussing gender and sexuality in courses primarily focused on other topics. These challenges are related to (1) class materials that reinforce a gender binary and (2) students’ denial of gender and sexual privilege. We then demonstrate how highlighting exceptions to predominant social patterns and incorporating intersectionality in class readings and discussions can address these stumbling blocks. We conclude with a discussion of the proposed solutions help instructors present gender and sexual disparities in a critical and complex manner without being defeatist.

Making the invisible visible: Shining a light on gender and sexuality in courses primarily focused on other topics

This article complicates a popular notion that conservative religions are incompatible with sexual expression and pleasure. Case studies from Orthodox Judaism and evangelical Protestant Christianity demonstrate a breadth of sexual expressions and negotiations of desire and sin that defy the association of conservative religions with sexual repression.

God’s Case for Sex:

It can be easy to engage college and university students in the topic of organized racism, at least on a surface level, as the vile propaganda and violent actions of racist groups and movements are sensational and provocative. However, students’ understandings of organized racism often are very shallow and based largely on caricatured depictions of racist activists in films and on television. This essay describes four common obstacles that instructors face when they teach students about modern U.S. organized racism. These are the problem of the grotesque; the overshadowing of everyday racism; the slide to overly macro or micro explanations; and the paucity of good data. As a remedy to these obstacles, the authors present two alternatives to teaching about organized racism—a sociological approach and a trans-national approach—that may move students toward deeper and more complex interpretations of organized racism.