Wendy Chapkis, PhD

Dr. Chapkis engages in research and teaching on such issues as drug policy reform, LGBTQ history and culture, body politics, and inequalities/intersections of gender, race, nationality, and class,

She is the author of three books: Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (South End Press 1986); Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor (Routledge 1997); and Dying to Get High: Marijuana as Medicine (with Richard J. Webb; New York University Press 2008). Among her recent articles are “Performing without a Net? Safer Sex in Porn” (Sex Matters, 2018, Norton); “The Trouble with Mary Jane’s Gender: gender politics in the marijuana policy reform movement” (Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 2013); “Productive Tensions: Ethnographic Engagement, Complexity and Contradiction” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 2010); and “Trafficking, Migration, and the Law: Protecting Innocents, Punishing Immigrants” (Gender & Society 2003).

From 2016 to 2019, Dr. Chapkis served as the Faculty Scholar for the Jean Byers Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine working with the LGBTQ+ Collection. In that capacity, she trained student researchers in oral history techniques and matched them with local community members for life history interviews. These “Querying the Past” oral histories are available online at: https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/querying_ohproject/ .