Overview

my research focuses on the Texas sodomy statutes from 1860 to 1973 and the state’s homosexual conduct statute from 1973 to the present. i have been interested in how the law has informed and has been informed by cultural notions about sexuality, gender, and race. Furthermore, this work explores the construction of the U.S. State, citizenship, and sexual identities in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. This research has been guided by the works of such scholars as French theorist Michel Foucault, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, and historians George Chauncey, William N. Eskridge, Jr., Margot Canaday, and Jonathan Ned Katz, among many others.

Current Work

i am currently working on an article that places the 1943 legislative revision of the Texas sodomy statute within the larger contexts of child guidance reform, pseudoscientific American sexology, and racism. Shining light on this important point in the evolution of how homosexuality came to be criminalized in Texas shows how anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination is intimately connected to the same justifications for and machinations of white supremacy in the U.S.

Doctoral Work

my doctoral dissertation is titled “From Criminal Bodies to Criminal Minds: The Texas Sodomy Statutes, Homosexuality, and the Politics of a Criminal Status.” This study shows how homosexuality became a crime in Texas. On one hand, the twentieth-century criminal definition of homosexuality and its applicability in Texas law is informed by centuries of both religious and legal understandings of and proscriptions for sodomy. On the other hand of this centuries-long legacy, criminalizing homosexuality in Texas has more recent connections, too. First of all, the ways in which a sodomitical other was imagined within the sodomy statute’s enforcement and adjudication in Texas during the late nineteenth century was analogous to the deployment and protection of white supremacy in the South. Secondly, the criminalization of same-sex sexual desire was also very much rooted in the mid-twentieth century, specifically between 1943 and 1973. From wartime fears about vulnerable or misguided youth, to cold-war anxieties about secrecy or infiltration, and to the rise of the far right and the politicization of sexual identities, the effort to classify and incorporate a criminal definition of homosexuality into Texas law has been a misinformed endeavor and an injustice at every turn. During this thirty-year period the concept of a sodomitical other was reinvented, inscribed into new laws, and then used to classify and homogenize an otherwise heterogeneous group of people based solely on their individual sexualities. Ultimately, this study offers new insight into how criminal sodomy in Texas came to be reimagined within a heteronormative gaze as “homosexual conduct” and provides a broader context for what is often labeled as a part of queer history. I resist classifying discrimination against the queer community in Texas or any state as queer history, however. This is a study of straight history, of its connections to colonialism, white supremacy, and nationalism at the intersection of antigay discrimination and the law.

You can find a pdf copy of my dissertation’s bibliography HERE.

Panels and Presentations

i have presented my research in various settings, including at academic conferences, museums or cultural centers, and at special college events. i have also participated in other panels and types of presentations.

Selected Panels and Presentations:

Roundtable participant, “Fighting for Liberation Beyond the Classroom: A Conversation at the Intersection of Social Justice, Academic Freedom, and Anti-Colonial Solidarity” at the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Tejas Foco in San Antonio, 2024.

“Anti-LGBTQ+ Discrimination and Texas: A Teach-In” at San Antonio College, 2024.

“Criminal Bodies, Criminal Minds: Constructing the Sodomitical Other in Texas, 1943-1973” at the UNT Special Collections Fellows Lecture Series, 2022.

Panel moderator, “The Future is Forward: Challenging Discourse Frameworks for Palestinian Liberation” organized by Jewish Voice for Peace San Antonio Chapter at DREAMWEEK in San Antonio, 2022.

“Cold-War Homosexuality, Texas Law, and the 1956 ‘Morals Drive’ in El Paso” at the El Paso Community College Safe Zone Lecture Series, 2020

“Active Learning Practices for Developing Critical Thinking Skills” at the Border Learning Conference in El Paso, 2020

“Guilty as Sin: The History of Criminalizing Homosexuality in Texas” at the Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces, NM, 2020.

“Marriage Homogeneity: Inscribing Homonormativity in Obergefell v. Hodges” presented in absentia at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in San Francisco, 2019.

“The Thin Red Line between Privacy and Secrecy: Criminal Sodomy, Homosexuality, and the Cold War in El Paso, Texas” sponsored by the Committee on LGBT History at the American Historical Association conference in Washington DC, 2018.

“The New Crime, the New Man: The 1943 Texas Sodomy Statute and the Making of an Other” at the Conference in Citizenship Studies, Wayne State University, 2016.

“‘With mankind or beast’: Sexuality, Race, and the Texas Sodomy Statute, 1860-1893” at the Southwestern Social Science Association conference, 2015.