Frank Rudy Cooper

University of Nevada, Las Vegas | UNLV · William S. Boyd School of Law

Introduction to Micky Lee, Frank Rudy Cooper, and Patricia Reeve, eds. (2022) Dis/ability in Media, Law and History: Intersectional, Embodied AND Socially Constructed? Routledge. ISBN 9781032189765

This book explores how being "disabled" originates in the physical world, social representations and rules, and historical power relations—the interplay of which render bodies "normal" or not. Do parking signs that represent people in wheelchairs as self-propelling influence how we view dis/ability? How do wheelchair users understand their own bod...

Space is a vantage point from which masculinity can be critiqued and understood. Documentary film-makers employ specific mode(s) to relate space to masculinity by positioning themselves vis-à-vis the interviewees, and the interviewees vis-à-vis the viewers. A financial crisis may threaten the hegemonic masculinity embodied by Wall Street’s lonesome...

This chapter confirms theories of “bipolar black masculinity.” That is to say, the media tends to represent black men as either the completely threatening and race-affirming Bad Black Man or the completely comforting and assimilationist Good Black Man. For Obama, this meant he had to avoid the stereotype of the angry black man. Meanwhile, though, t...

Backward design is a course creation method that encourages teachers to identify their goals for student understanding and measurable objectives for learning from the outset. In this article we explore the application of backward design to the production of scholarly articles. Specifically, we report on a writing group program that encourages group...

Ann Scales's scholarship on masculinities in relation to sexual assault and militarism prompted us to consider exactly how power is distributed by assumptions about what is masculine. For instance, men privileged by association with hegemonic masculinities-those most dominant and preferred-are sometimes excused for acts of violence against people w...

Angela Harris’s essay in this Symposium makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of hyper-incarceration. She argues, quite persuasively, that the term “gender violence” should be understood broadly to include men’s individual and structural violence against other men. She then considers what we ought to do about the incredible increase in...

Moderator: Sylvia R. Lazos Athena D. Mutua: The Multidimensional Turn: Revisiting Progressive Black MasculinitiesJuliet Williams: The Theory and Practice of Multiple MasculinitiesFrank Rudy Cooper: The King Stay the King: Multidimensional Masculinities and Capitalism in The Wire

On Thursday, July 16, 2009, white male police officer James Crowley was called to the home of prominent black male scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on a report of a potential break-in. After confirming that no break-in had occurred and Gates’s identity, Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct. Gates was promptly released without charges, and cl...

During the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and general election, there was a discourse in the media about Senator Barack Obama's femininity. When he faced Senator Hillary Clinton in the primaries, the head of a women's nonprofit said, "He's the girl in the race."1 The magazine Marketing said, "In swept Barack Obama with what could be describ...

A common way of bragging about an achievement is to ask, “Who’s the man?” This article utilizes the interdisciplinary field of masculinities studies to reveal what that statement exemplifies: Men are anxious to have their masculine esteem validated by other men. The hegemonic, or dominant, way of being a man in this culture is to be aggressive in g...

This short essay was solicited for the 20th Anniversary Critical Race Theory Workshop in 2009. It celebrates Angela Harris's trail blazing essay, Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory. Harris argues against essentialism, which is the idea that we can identify characteristics of identity groups that describe their fundamental experiences an...

This essay applies Judith Butler’s theory of identity performance – the idea that we create our identities by acting in ways designed to leave a particular impression – to the Fourth Amendment. As a jumping off point for that analysis, it details the FBI’s extensive surveillance of Martin Luther King, JR. That surveillance may have altered King’s b...

People often talk about the significance of Barack Obama's status as our first black President. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, however, a newspaper columnist declared, "If Bill Clinton was once considered America's first black president, Obama may one day be viewed as our first woman president." That statement epitomized a large media disco...

People often talk about the significance of Barack Obama's status as our first black President. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, however, a newspaper columnist declared, "If Bill Clinton was once considered America's first black president, Obama may one day be viewed as our first woman president." That statement epitomized a large media disco...

I contend that popular representations of heterosexual black men are bipolar. Those images alternate between a Bad Black Man who is crime-prone and hypersexual and a Good Black Man who distances himself from blackness and associates with white norms. The threat of the Bad Black Man label provides heterosexual black men with an assimilationist incen...

In the early 1990s the public supported the NYPD's experiment with maximum use of Terry stops and frisks to fight crime. By the end of the 1990s, the public was very critical of the NYPD for using stops and frisks to racial profile. At the 2000 New York Puerto Rican Day Parade rampaging groups of men, most of whom were racial minorities, sexually a...

This essay is my contribution to the symposium memorializing the Teaching From the Left conference, which was held at Harvard Law School March 11, 2006. I begin by describing 1968 as a year when progressive dreams emerged, but were killed off. I then consider how the 1968 Terry v. Ohio decision, which allowed police officers to "stop" and "frisk" s...

We usually associate police officers' dis-identification with certain types of suspects with the practice of racial profiling - the systematic over policing of whole classes of suspects based on their racial status. Recently, we have seen police officers' dis-identification with certain suspects manifest itself in systematic under policing of those...

Discussion Leaders: Frank Rudy Cooper and Ann C. McGinley

For 28 years the Court held that an officer’s search incident to arrest powers automatically extended to the entire passenger compartment of a vehicle. In 2009, however, the Arizona v. Gant decision held that officers do not get to search a vehicle incident to arrest unless they satisfy (1) the Chimel v. California Court’s requirement that the susp...