Jacob Breslow
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Jacob Breslow | |
|---|---|
| Title | Associate Professor of Gender Studies |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics |
| Thesis | The theory and practice of childhood: interrogating childhood as a technology of power (2016) |
| Doctoral advisor | Clare Hemmings and Sadie Wearing |
| Website | https://drjacobbreslow.wordpress.com |
Jacob Breslow is an American academic and independent scholar. He was Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics (LSE)[1] until he resigned in July 2023, claiming harassment that he claimed was "part of a broader movement against the field of gender studies, and against trans rights and dignity".[2] In 2022, he resigned from the transgender charity Mermaids after it emerged that he had spoken at a conference organized by B4U-ACT, an organization that provides support to paedophiles.[3][4]
He completed his PhD at the LSE Gender Institute in 2016, and published his first monograph entitled Ambivalent Childhoods in 2021 through University of Minnesota Press, in which he analysed childhood in relation to blackness, transfeminism, queerness, and deportability.[5] He was previously an LSE Teaching Fellow in Transnational Sexuality and Gender.[6]
Jacob Breslow participated in queer youth activism for almost a decade prior to beginning his PhD, which led him to study #MeToo, homonationalism, and incarceration.[7] Breslow soon became an expert on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them, including Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements.[1][6]
His PhD thesis analyses the category of childhood as a power structure,[8] an idea which is further developed in his book Ambivalent Childhoods.[5]
Breslow's research expertise also includes the analysis of transphobia in UK public discourse,[9][10] where he developed a critique of the third conditional, "If I had grown up now, I would have been persuaded to transition", arguing that it is not only being used as a "fabricated straw man" to undermine trans healthcare, but that it could actually be used to support "solidarity between cis and trans" perspectives.[10]
