Jesus and the Bulldozer: Religion, Suburbanization, and Urban Renewal in a New Jersey Camp Meeting Community

The history of suburbanization in New Jersey is a well-established topic in the scholarly literature. Since the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the state’s northeastern and southwestern areas have become dense with suburban communities tied, culturally and economically, to New York City or Philadelphia. By the early twentieth century, these areas were a mix of middle-class white enclaves, Black towns, immigrant and working-class communities, agricultural hamlets, and industrial suburbs. However, in the late nineteenth century, some suburbs emerged as religious retreats. This article explores how suburbanization and, by the 1960s, urban renewal, transformed the Gloucester County borough of Pitman’s landscape. Founded in 1871 as a Methodist camp meeting resort, the history of Pitman demonstrates ways that religion complemented suburbanization, and suburbanization, amid religious decline and secularization, reshaped the religious landscape of one South Jersey community.

The Scientific Gaze in American Transgender Politics: Contesting the Meanings of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in the Bathroom Rights Cases

In this article, I examine how conflicts over transgender bathroom rights have ignited debates concerning the fundamental nature of transgender identity. Through an institutional and discursive analysis of North Carolina's House Bill 2 or “bathroom bill,” the Title IX case inGloucester County School Board v. G. G.,and similar federal court cases, I explore how and why forces both on the right and in the LGBTQ movement have come to rely on scientific expertise to legitimate their conceptions. As conservatives have marshaled evidence to challenge notions that transgender identity is innate, LGBTQ and transgender organizations as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have crafted a “born this way” biopolitical construction of transgender identity. I find that at their core, these conflicts are over the meanings of gender and sex in relation to transgender identity. Conservatives posit sex as biologically rooted and gender as a psychological phenomenon, whereas transgender advocates subsume gender identity into the definition of sex in arguing that constitutional and federal civil rights law must recognize gender identity as a biologically constitutive element of sex. I conclude by noting the limits of a liberal assimilationist and litigation-centric transgender politics and by exploring alternatives to this biopolitical form of transgender political identity.

The Alert Collector: Transgender Culture and Resources

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of transgender culture, issues, and experiences. In popular culture, trans celebrities such as Laverne Cox, Chaz Bono, and Janet Mock have been a part of this shift, often acting as celebrity spokespeople to increase understanding of trans issues. Even with the greater visibility of trans lives in popular culture, ongoing court battles like G.G. v. Gloucester County School Board (a US case centered on trans students’ rights to use communal bathrooms congruent with their gender) demonstrate the need for greater understanding and acceptance.As co-authors, we have had the privilege of working with materials on loan from the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria (Canada), the largest transgender archive in the world. This experience, which included collecting comments from library patrons who viewed the collection materials, highlighted for us the role that libraries and archives play in laying the groundwork for increased diversity, awareness, and inclusion related to trans lives, culture, and community. It is not only a matter of meeting the information needs of those who are coming out as transgender, but the wider community of family (spouses, children, parents, etc.), friends, and allies. And, alongside the value of providing information with direct practical application, patrons’ comments underscored how the inclusion of trans resources at the library enriches our cultural imaginary, and creates the space for imagining and living what they have sometimes felt to be “impossible lives.”