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Jillian Jacklin

Jillian Marie Jacklin recently received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She is a historian of the United States and places her work in a comparative and transnational context.

Her research explores interactions between workers and business, as well as the government bureaucracies and corporate interests that inform these relationships. She situates her work within the fields of ethnic studies, labor history, critical race theory, gender studies, and Indigeneity and explores the role that working-class political activism has played in shaping the outcomes of local, national, and global movements for social justice. Her teaching and scholarly interests include cultural history and carceral studies, economic and industrial relations theory, the histories of masculinity and sexuality, migration studies, settler colonialism, and the history of politics and American capitalism from the mid-19th through the 21st Century.

Jacklin chose “Queer Precarity and the Myth of Gay Affluence” by Amber Hollibaugh and Margot Weiss in an effort to open up a conversation about the intersections between class, race, gender, and sexuality. In the article authors discuss the heightened economic difficulties that LGBT/Q people experience on an everyday basis and challenge the popular belief that queer individuals simply desire access to heteronormative lifestyle standards like legal marriage. Instead, they claim that the labor movement needs to bring matters of gender and sexuality to the forefront of organizing campaigns by recognizing the “survival struggles” of our most vulnerable workers.