Janet Jakobsen

Janet R. Jakobsen is a scholar of gender and sexuality. She is the Claire Tow Professor of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College and is the author of several books focusing on gender and sexuality. She also writes on secularism, religion, and violence.

Biography

Education Jakobsen attended Dartmouth College for her undergraduate studies, where she received her A.B. in philosophy and economics. She received her M.A. at Claremont School of Theology. Jakobsen received her doctorate from Emory University in the Graduate School of Religion.

Career She worked as a policy analyst and organizer in Washington, D.C. and taught at both Wesleyan University and Harvard University and before starting at Barnard. until Crosby's death in 2021. Crosby writes about their life together after Crosby's paralyzing bike accident in her memoir, A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain.

The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics Jakobsen's most recent book, published in 2020 by New York University Press, covers how gender and sexuality repeatedly appear at the center of America political issues. Jakobsen analyzes sexual politics in the first televised presidential debate, the AIDS crisis, the 2010s health care reform issues, #MeToo and more.

The Sex Obsession was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies.