Joanna Wuest

American Politics

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Joanna Wuest is a political scientist who studies identity and inequality, sexuality and gender, critical social theory, and American political and constitutional development. At Princeton University, she holds the Fund for Reunion-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in LGBT Studies in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.
 
She received her Ph.D. in Political Science with a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. Her doctoral research was funded in part by the Social Science Research Council and was the recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2019 Kenneth Sherrill Award for the Best Dissertation on Sexuality and Politics. Published work from this and related projects has appeared or is forthcoming in Perspectives on PoliticsPolitics & Gender, and nonsite. Her writing has also appeared in the NationDissent, the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon, Jacobin and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Wuest's book manuscript, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ Movement, is a comprehensive account of the “born this way” phenomenon as it has developed within the liberal LGBTQ movement in the U.S. In examining that history, it reveals the consequences of allowing scientific authority to bear so heavily upon questions of identity, rights, and citizenship in American politics and political culture.

She is also working on essays for a second book project tentatively titled Queers & Capital Interests: Gay Liberation in an Age of Inequality  

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