Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture

I have taught this book in both my introductory graduate seminar on Feminism and Rhetorical Theory and my undergraduate upper-level course on Gender and Communication at Indiana University. In both instances, *Disciplining Gender* manages to provide a text that my students find timely and accessible, as well as a text that I believe pushes them intellectually and politically. For graduate students, I beleive it offers one exemplar for how they could model a media-based dissertation; for undergraduates, the chapters provide an exemplar for how to critically examine a popular figure/event as part of broader structural stakes in U.S. public culture. In other words, the book models a type of scholarship I hope to help my students write. Overall, *Disciplining Gender* aims to question a naive optimism some derive from Judith Butler's arguments in *Gender Trouble* by asking us to re-consider when troubling gender has led to less utopian outcomes of gender terrorism (including death, assault, ostricism, and so forth). As part of a larger conversation in queer studies, Sloop's book also provides a great text for provoking class discussion about the limits of theories of social construction (as well as the possibilities) and the differences we too often blur between the categories of "sex," "gender," and "sexuality."