Arlene Stein
Personal Information
Description
Arlene Stein is an American sociologist and author best known for her writing about sex and gender, the politics of identities, and collective memory. She is Distinguished Professor of sociology at Rutgers University where she directs the Rutgers University Institute for Research on Women. Stein has also taught at the University of Essex and at the University of Oregon. Stein grew up in New York City and graduated from the Bronx High School of Science. She attended Amherst College from which she received her BA in History in 1980. She studied at University of California, Berkeley where she obtained an MA in 1985 and a PhD in sociology in 1993. Stein identifies as a lesbian. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland.
Books
The stranger next door
In The Stranger Next Door, Alrene Stein explores how a small community with a declining industrial economy became the site of a bitter battle over gay rights. Fearing job loss and a feeling of being left behind, one Oregon town’s working-class residents allied with religious conservatives to deny the civil liberties of queer men and women. In a book that combines strong on-the-ground research and lucid analysis with a novelist’s imaginative sympathy, Stein’s exploration of how fear and uncertainty can cause citizens to shift blame onto “strangers” provides insight into the challenges the country faces in the age of Trump.
Sex and sensibility
In the first book to analyze shifts in lesbian identity, consciousness, and culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, Arlene Stein contributes an important chapter to the study of the women's movement and offers a revealing portrait of the exchange between a radical generation of feminists and its successors. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian movement from the bar scene to the growth of alternative families, Stein illustrates how a generation of women transformed the woman-centered ideals of feminism into a culture and a lifestyle.
Sisters, Sexperts, Queers
This collection of essays illustrates both the vitality and the variety within the lesbian community, with topics such as the politics of butch-femme identity, lesbian pop music stars, and class differences in the lesbian community. Original.
Shameless
Reluctant witnesses
Americans now learn about the Holocaust in high school, watch films about it on television, and visit museums dedicated to preserving its memory. But for the first two decades following the end of World War II, discussion of the destruction of European Jewry was largely absent from American culture and the tragedy of the Holocaust was generally seen as irrelevant to non-Jewish Americans. Today, the Holocaust is widely recognized as a universal moral touchstone. In Reluctant Witnesses, sociologist Arlene Stein--herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor--mixes memoir, history, and sociological analysis to tell the story of the rise of Holocaust consciousness in the United States from the perspective of survivors and their descendants. If survivors tended to see Holocaust storytelling as mainly a private affair, their children--who reached adulthood during the heyday of identity politics--reclaimed their hidden family histories and transformed them into public stories. Reluctant Witnesses documents how a group of people who had previously been unrecognized and misunderstood managed to find its voice. It tells this story in relation to the changing status of trauma and victimhood in American culture. At a time when a sense of Holocaust fatigue seems to be setting in and when the remaining survivors are at the end of their lives, it affirms that confronting traumatic memories and catastrophic histories can help us make our world mean something beyond ourselves.