Can you tell us about your family? Where did you grow up?

I was born in Philadelphia, which is where I grew up. My dad was—and is—a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. I always lived near the university and frankly I always loved school.

I was raised at a time when “feminist” became a commonly used popular term—not always with a positive valence—but people like my mom, who identified as progressive and who believed in equal rights, would not—at the time when I was young—have called herself a feminist.

Did your mother work outside the home? Was she a feminist?

She did not until when I was five my parents got divorced. Then she did work and she built a very remarkable career for herself and, I think, became an emblem of the feminist revolution. She never remarried and there were four of us kids. My dad was very much involved with us as well but she took care of us and worked. She still works today. She’s head of an agency in Philadelphia that finds people who have fallen through welfare safety net in the post-Clinton era and helps reknit them in the fabric of services. It’s a really important job.

How did your early schooling affect you?

For over 150 years, Philadelphia has been home to the second-oldest public boy’s high school in the country, Central High School, which has a sister school that was founded in 1848. They are the best public high schools in the city; so, when I was in ninth grade, I went to Girls’ High—and I really hated it. It was just a disaster. It felt second-rate. It felt cloistered. I had always had friends who were boys. I wanted a normal social life. We didn’t dissect frogs because girls didn’t do that! And this was in 1983!

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me or my family, who were worried about what to do because there really wasn’t another public school, a lawsuit had been making its way through the courts. As it happened during the first week of my sophomore year, the lawsuit was resolved, affirming that the girls’ school was inferior to the boys’ school in violation of the state’s equal rights amendment.

On the first Thursday of the school year, my parents called the lawyers that they had read about in the newspaper. The lawyers told them that I should go to the boys’ school the next day and enroll. So basically that’s what happened. There was a huge student walkout. Teachers were telling me that I couldn’t be in their class and there was press and media coverage. The next three years for me was an incredibly shocking, out of the blue, intense—wonderful but also really hard and heartbreaking—struggle. Not so much in the name of feminism but more in the name of a kind of humanism: I’m a person too. Why can’t I be here?

Did that experience affect your college career? Where did you go to college?

I went to Harvard where I majored in government. And I hate to say it but I had become sexist and male-identified. I took a women’s studies class in my senior year and didn’t like it much. I was always interested in issues of community and belonging and how individual self-expression can be flourishing but can also be shut down by political and social conditions. And when I went to graduate school at Cornell to get my Ph.D. in political theory, very accidentally I was assigned to T.A. a feminism class and I got more interested in it. My dissertation, though, was on two twentieth-century liberal philosophers, F.A. Hayek and John Rawls, not feminist thinkers at all.

How did you come to be in Women’s Studies?

It was only when I got my first job at UCSB where, for just very, very random reasons, I was given a 20 percent appointment in the Women’s Studies Program and an 80 percent appointment in Law & Society, that I first started to build intellectual relationships with women who are feminist and whose scholarship is really engaging and who are thinking about the intersection between various racialized identities and my work started to turn in that direction.

And now here I am. It’s really an accidentalist trajectory but I could not be happier. I feel like I have been rescued from my own bad judgment. It’s such a vital and vibrant field that is defined around open questions. There’s really a lot to say. As a scholar, that’s what you are looking for, that’s where the heat is. It’s all very exciting for me, the teaching and the writing.

What are your current research interests?

Currently, I am at work on two new book projects. The first is entitled Untying the Knot: Rethinking Marriage in the Twenty-First Century. This book considers the legal contradictions and social ambivalence surrounding the institution of marriage in the contemporary U.S. Untying the Knot includes chapters on topics ranging from the legal regulation of green card marriage fraud; spousal accommodation policies at universities; marriage-themed reality TV shows; transsexual marriage and the law; and sigheh (temporary marriage) in Iran.

My second book project, entitled Making a Difference: The Fall and Rise of Single-Sex Public Education in the United States, is a study of the growing movement for single-sex public education in the United States. Over the past fifteen years, the number of public primary and secondary schools offering single-sex educational opportunities in the United States has risen dramatically-from less than 10 in 1990 to over 250 today. Initially, single-sex public education was promoted by reformers as a way to address a perceived “boy crisis” understood to be taking an especially hard toll on the nation’s most disadvantaged populations. At the time, reform efforts emphasized the need for gender-differentiated pedagogies to be implemented
in the context of broader curricular initiatives foregrounding issues of racial and economic inequality. In the book, I document a pronounced change, beginning in the mid-1990s, in the public justifications presented for single-sex education, as claims concerning class-based and race-based discrimination increasingly were subordinated to assertions of “natural,”
“hard-wired,” “genetic,” and “biological” sex differences. Making a Difference explores the causes and consequences of this shift in single-sex education politics and practices, focusing in particular on the role that antidiscrimination law and policy has played in encouraging the shift from sociological to biologistic rhetoric.

What will you be teaching next year?

Introduction to Women’s Studies; Feminist Theories in Social Science; Women, Gender, and Popular Culture; and Women and Public Policy. For information, visit the Women’s Studies website: www.womensstudies.ucla.edu