States of Passion Law, Identity, and Social Construction of Desire [Hardcover]

InStates of Passion: Law, Identity and the Social Construction of Desire, Professor Yvonne Zylan explores the role of legal discourse in shaping sexual experience, sexual expression, and sexual identity. The book focuses on three topics: anti-gay hate crime laws, same-sex sexual harassment, and same-sex marriage, examining how sexuality is socially constructed through the institutionally-specific production of legal discourse.

States of Passionargues that law's power to authorize specific discourses and practices of love, desire, hatred, fear, and vulnerability remain grounded in the powerful discourses and institutional practices that mark law as dispassionate, cerebral, and fundamentally procedural.States of Passioncontends that those states of passion we experience in our daily lives as particularly significant-to our sense of self, to our collective and social identities, and to our ideas about the body and its dictates-increasingly have as much to do with the state as they do with passion.

Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Desiring the Discipline of Law
Chapter 3: Beyond the Binary Matrix
Chapter 4: I Hate the Way You Make Me Feel
Chapter 5: Categorical Imperatives
Chapter 6: Aspiring to Be Iowan
Chapter 7: Conclusion
References

Yvonne Zylan, Associate Professor of Sociology, earned a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Yale University, a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University and a juris doctor from the University of San Diego School of Law. She has published articles in the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, the Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Gender & Society, Social Forces, the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Prof. Zylan'sl“Y