Seeing Straight

Jean Halley is associate professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. She served as the advisor for the Gay-Straight Alliance while at Wagner College and has taught extensively in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She is the author of several books, including Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy and The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets.Amy Eshleman is professor of psychology at Wagner College, where she regularly teaches courses on gender, sexuality, race, social class, and prejudice. Together, Jean Halley and Amy Eshleman are the authors of Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race, with Ramya Mahadevan Vijaya.

• 1. Privileged Thinking: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality2. Privileged Assumptions: Heterosexuality and the Normative Expression of Gender3. Privileged Power, Hate, and Heteronormativity4. Fifty Ways to Be Normal and Other Challenges to Privilege5. Institutionalized Heteronormativity: Military, Law, and Religion6. Privileged (Popular) Culture and Internalized Expectations7. Violence, Aggression, and Privilege8. It’s Getting Better: Queer Hope, Queer Courage

Seeing Straight is a rewarding—and challenging—book designed to take the young adult from passive acceptance of gender norms and sex roles, through the long and exciting history of awakening of identity, sexuality, dissent, freedom, and into adult respect for the variety of humanity. The volume covers stereotyping and prejudice, sex and gender, queer theory, gender privilege and heteronormativity, what is normal, what is deviant, what is queer and what is courage. The authors emphasize opportunity, empowerment, sex positivity, and the costs of gender and sexual oppression. This book will improve the lives of the students who read it.