Criminalizing Gender: Feminism, Queerness, and the Fight Against Wrongful Conviction, With Koa Beck, author of White Feminism

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We face a future where abortion will soon be re-criminalized, trans women are arrested for their gender identity, and the labor of sex work continues to be illegal to the detriment of sex workers. In this talk, authors Valena Beety and Koa Beck discuss how the bodies of marginalized genders are criminalized and how inclusive feminism can chart a path forward. Koa Beck, the author of White Feminism: From the Suffragettes to Influencers and Who They Leave Behind, and Valena Beety, the author of Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights, discuss what role feminisms play in both controlling our bodies and liberating them from these laws.

Valena Beety is a law professor, an innocence litigator, and a former federal prosecutor. She has exonerated wrongly convicted clients, founded the West Virginia Innocence Project, and obtained presidential grants of clemency for drug offenses. She co-edited a guide to causes of wrongful convictions called The Wrongful Convictions Reader and Manifesting Justice: Wrongly Convicted Women Reclaim Their Rights is her first book.

Koa Beck is the former editor-in-chief of Jezebel. Previously, she was the executive editor at Vogue and cohost of “The #MeToo Memos” on WNYC’s The Takeaway. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Observer, The Guardian, and Esquire, among others. For her reporting prowess, she has been interviewed by the BBC and has appeared on many panels about gender and identity at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Historical Society, and Columbia Journalism School to name a few. She lives in Los Angeles.