Arlene Stein is Professor of Sociology and a member of the graduate
faculty of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Rutgers. Her research
interests include sexual politics, social movements, political culture,
trauma, gender, and collective memory. She is the author of three books
and two edited volumes. Her book The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a
Small Community’s Battle Over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights won the
American Anthropological Association’s Ruth Benedict Award. She also
received the Simon and Gagnon Award for career contributions to the study
of sexualities, given by the American Sociological Association. A frequent
essayist for newspapers and magazines and co-editor of Contexts magazine,
she is dedicated to making sociological writing more engaging and
translating sociological ideas to diverse publics.

Her recent publications include “What’s the Matter with Newark? Race,
Class, Marriage Politics, and the Limits of Queer Liberalism,” in M.
Bernstein and V. Taylor, eds. Not the Marrying Kind, University of
Minnesota, 2012; “Therapeutic Politics: An Oxymoron?” Sociological Forum,
March 2011; and “Sex, Truths, and Audiotape: Anonymity and the Ethics of
Exposure in Public Ethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography,
October 2010. She is currently involved in several research projects: on
therapeutic culture and Holocaust storytelling; queer families’ struggles
to make themselves intelligible in the public sphere; and on Islamophobia
and rightwing “pseudo-documentaries.”