Fineman (Emory U.), Jackson (U. of California at Berkeley), and Romero (Yale Law School) present 21 chapters exploring debates between and among feminist and queer legal theorists, with a particular focus on evolving and contested ideas about the centrality of a positive theory of sexuality to the formulation of critical perspectives on legal, social, political, and cultural institutions. Examples of specific topics include a queer critique of feminist legal theory as having no positive politics of sexual pleasure, the focus on sexual advances and sexual conduct in the area of sex-based discrimination law as obscuring non-sexual forms of sex-based inequalities, civil rights advocacy and essentialized notions of black and gay identity, the principles and practices of polyamory versus monogamy, Adrienne Rich's idea of "compulsory heterosexuality" extended to the idea of "compulsory matrimony" in the context of the gay marriage debates, the sexual regulation dimension of welfare reform, and the contributions of poststructuralism to feminist and queer theory. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)