Education
2013 Ph.D. Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV)
2009 Graduate Certificate, Women’s Studies, UNLV
2007 MA, Sociology, UNLV
2003 BA, Psychology, UNLV
Bio
Jackson's research and teaching interests are in gender & sexuality, sex work, social justice, inequalities, and feminism. She is an associate professor in the Sociology Department and an active member of the Gender Studies Program Advisory Committee, currently serving as the Gender Studies Program Director. Dr. Jackson teaches undergraduate sociology and gender studies courses. In Summer 2016, she co-directed an LGBTQ+ Activism Study Abroad Program in Amsterdam, coinciding with EuroPride. Students can visit her JJC ePortfolio here.
Her research agenda is committed to identifying new insights into the gendered and racialized deployment of state power and the advancement of knowledge about how gender, sexuality, race, class, and the law structure the social world in uneven and inequitable ways. Dr. Jackson’s analyses do so through the lens of U.S. socio-politics around commodified sex/uality and labor rights. She has explored the meaning of worker organizing for “non-traditional” workers: sex workers. Jackson has also researched strip club laws, porn tourism at an annual expo for the adult film industry, and how queer adult film producers and performers situate their work as activism. She is co-author of The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex, and Sin in the New American Heartland (Routledge, 2010), an ethnographic exploration of the only legal sale of sex in the country, Nevada’s rural brothels.
pronouns: she/her and they/them
JJC Affiliations
Professional Memberships
Sociologists for Women in Society
Society for the Study of Social Problems
National Women's Studies Association
Scholarly Work
Research Summary
Jackson’s research features important findings about the gendered socio-politics of commodified sexuality. First, her scholarship on porn cultures has broadened scholarly conceptualizations of sexual consumption. For example, she found that porn consumption can re/define identity and sexuality for two disparate groups: queer porn performers and producers who see porn as a form of advocacy and visibility, and straight cisgender male fans who attend a mainstream porn expo “for the sexualized atmosphere,” as self-reported. Jackson’s scholarship challenges dominant academic & political narratives of porn as a public health issue, and provides new methodological & theoretical standpoints to ascertain how, when, and if porn viewing intensifies sexist beliefs and misogynistic actions.
Second, as a sexualities scholar, Dr. Jackson theorized the rise and continued popularity of prostitution neo-abolitionism in the United States, and sex workers’ social justice actions against it. Her research illustrates the unforeseen consequences of mainstream anti-sex trafficking advocacy, spurred by the federal U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 and the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) of 2018.
