Panel II: Histories of Gender, Sex, and Nonconformity

Timothy Stewart Winter

This paper examines antigay policing in the United States at its height, during the 1950s and 1960s, through the lived experiences of men who were arrested but who never came out of the closet, understood themselves as gay, or challenged the legal system that ensnared them. Even wriggling out of the net and avoiding a courtroom or jail cell would enroll them in a secret drama of concealment or correction. Seeing the vice squad and the family as intertwined illuminates the histories of both, including how the hammer of the postwar antigay state regime came down not solely on those directly caught in its net but also on their wives and children.

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Russell Robinson

For decades, the courts regarded “discrete and insular minorities” as warranting judicial protection because of their vulnerability in the political process. The Roberts Court has inverted this tradition, establishing special doctrinal protections for White people, Christians, and heterosexuals. Increasingly, the Court is portraying demographic minorities as a threat to groups that make up an eroding majority. These opinions typically distort the truth as to the remaining political power of the majority, failing to tether judicial intuitions about power to objective markers. This inversion in which the majority is perceived as most vulnerable has also played out in confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justices and political discourse depicting “wokism” and “cancel culture” as a greater threat than racism and sexual assault and harassment.

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Doris Morgan Rueda   

This paper examines the relationship between the juvenile justice legal system, protected childhood, sexuality, and teen girls in Arizona. While Arizona sent its boys to Fort Grant Industrial School, the state briefly operated the Randolph School for delinquent girls. After less than 8 years, Arizona closed Randolph and contracted out the responsibility to the Convent of the Good Shepherd, where girls would be sent for much of the 20th century. Unlike Fort Grant which operated more along the lines of a vocational training school, this Catholic convent organized the school to function as a medical facility, subjecting girls to repeated and varied examinations to become “well” and “cure” their delinquency in order to be considered for parole. This presentation offers an opportunity to explore how the fear of these girls, their sexuality, and teen pregnancy created a bureaucracy that used sexuality and health as measures of “being cured” of delinquency that demanded strict compliance.

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Chair: Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School