Sociologist of sexuality,
medicine & the law.

Co-editor of Unsafe Words and the War On Sex. Author of Punishing Disease.

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Current Research

Welcome! I am currently Associate Professor of Sociology at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I came to UNCG from University at Albany and, prior to that, a postdoctoral fellowship in the Criminology, Law and Society Department at the University of California at Irvine. My research examines the social control of disease and sexuality.

I have published three books. The first, “The War On Sex,” is a collection of essays co-edited with David Halperin analyzing the criminalization of sex. The second, “Punishing Disease,” is a monograph explaining the rise of punitive responses to HIV and other infectious diseases. In 2018, “Punishing Disease” was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies. The third book, “Unsafe Words,” is a collection of essays co-edited with Shantel Gabrieal Buggs on sex, consent, and harm from a queer perspective.

Unsafe Words

Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. Unsafe Words tells their side of the story.

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Punishing Disease

From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV – mostly stigmatized minorities – began before doctors could even name the disease. Punishing Disease explores how and why this disease was reframed as a crime.

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The War on Sex

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. The War on Sex complicates that story.

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Media

Interview about Unsafe Words

In this interview with Queerful and my co-editor Shantel Gabreial Buggs, we discuss our new book Unsafe Words and how LGBTQ communities navigate ethical sex, consent ,and harm. Watch video

Epistemology of the Pandemic Symposium

In this talk, I analyze the responsibility politics the followed in the wake of the 2020 New Year’s Eve White Party in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I argue that gay men were yet again pitted against each other in the face of a deadly epidemic, obscuring the real drivers of the epidemic and repeating many of the moralistic errors made in early HIV prevention efforts.Watch video

Berkeley Sociology Colloquium

In this talk, I will report and consider demographic findings from a recent analysis of civil commitment facilities conducted by myself and colleagues at the Williams Institute at UCLA. We find that there are over 6000 men currently civilly committed for sex offenses in the United States. In almost every state analyzed, detainees are disproportionately Black. And, in the two states for which it was possible to consider detainee sexuality, we find that detainees are also disproportionately men who have sex with men. I consider these findings and explore next steps in this developing project.Watch video

FEBRUARY 2023

Interview about Unsafe Words

Friday, February 10

In this interview with Queerful and my co-editor Shantel Gabreial Buggs, we discuss our new book Unsafe Words and how LGBTQ communities navigate ethical sex, consent ,and harm.

FEBRUARY 2023

Epistemology of the Pandemic Symposium

Friday, February 10
In this talk, I analyze the responsibility politics the followed in the wake of the 2020 New Year’s Eve White Party in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. I argue that gay men were yet again pitted against each other in the face of a deadly epidemic, obscuring the real drivers of the epidemic and repeating many of the moralistic errors made in early HIV prevention efforts.

FEBRUARY 2023

BUILDING POWER ACROSS THE SPECTRUM 2020 KEYNOTE

Friday, March 12

In this interview with Queerful and my co-editor Shantel Gabreial Buggs, we discuss our new book Unsafe Words and how LGBTQ communities navigate ethical sex, consent ,and harm.

Curriculum vitae

Below, find my current CV. Or click here to download the PDF if using mobile.

PRAISE

We need Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era now more than ever. A vital cultural reckoning with sexual assault and harassment brought issues of consent to the forefront – but often oversimplified them. We now need a more nuanced discussion of how consent may be understood and enacted. This groundbreaking collection brings together voices that explore and expand how concepts as such as power, assent, identity, autonomy, and community function in many people’s lives. It is imperative reading for everyone – policymakers, scholars, sexual liberationists – who grapples with these questions.
Michael BronskiAuthor of "A Queer History of the United State"

PRAISE

With this dazzling collection of meditations and provocations from leading scholars in the field of sexuality studies, Unsafe Words offers something we desperately need: a place to ask the queer questions about consent that dare not speak their names. Can consent be queered? What happens when queer and feminist sexual politics clash over questions of consent? How does the prevailing consent paradigm perpetuate the harms of the criminal legal system and thwart more just possibilities for redress? This is a must-read for both activists and scholars of sexual ethics alike.
Cati ConnellAuthor of "A Few Good Gays: The Gendered Compromises behind Military Inclusion"

PRAISE

What happens when a nation seduced by carceral solutions confronts a dreaded disease linked to sex and drugs? Trevor Hoppe’s thorough and well documented analysis explains how and why legislators, courts, public health officials, and police across the United States have “criminalized sickness” in the case of HIV/AIDS. "Punishing Disease" is a wake-up call about the dangers of punitive approaches to stopping the spread of disease.
Steven Epstein Author of "Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and thePolitics of Knowledge" and "Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research"

PRAISE

Sociologists have examined a plethora of human conditions that have been medicalized and treated as Illness. This well researched book examines a case that flips medicalization on its head: how HIV/AIDS, a devastating disease, became criminalized and with what consequences. Trevor Hoppe’s clear analysis sheds important new light on how the meanings of disease and illness have significant social, political and health consequences.
Peter ConradBrandeis University

PRAISE

Containing essays from some of the most insightful scholars and activists working on the front lines, "The War on Sex" is a vital tool for understanding how the regulation and criminalization of sex relate to our vital struggles in racial, economic, gender, and disability justice. Full of thoughtful, carefully researched essays, "The War on Sex" will support readers in classrooms and social movements to understand and strategize about the relationships among sex, criminalization, poverty, disability, and contemporary politics. We need this book right now.
Dean SpadeAuthor of "Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law"

PRAISE

Recent events just keep confirming, all too dismally, that the issues this collection takes up—from sex offender registries and sex trafficking to HIV in public health—link together as a major front of struggle in our time, often far from public view. Questioning some of the narratives of progress that are so widely echoed in the media and popular consciousness, "The War on Sex" will immediately meet the needs of academics and activists alike.
Michael WarnerAuthor of "Publics and Counterpublics"

PRAISE

We are living through a little-discussed assault on sexual freedoms that is pioneering new, subtle, and insidious methods of social control: this is the disturbing and difficult-to-refute thesis of The War on Sex, a new collection of essays... Interdisciplinary in scope and inclusive of activist voices from outside the academy, the book is an essential introduction to a struggle for self-determination and sexual self-assertion that has been occurring behind mainstream social movements’ focus on dignity and respectability.
Ben MillerLambda Literary Foundation
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Get In Touch

The easiest way to get in touch with me is through the contact form below. If you are a member of the media on deadline, please put DEADLINE at the beginning of the subject.

University Address

Trevor Hoppe
Department of Sociology
UNC-Greensboro
337 Frank Porter Graham Building
PO Box 26170
Greensboro, NC 27402-6170

Copyright © 2023, Trevor Hoppe

Unsafe Words: Queering Consent in the #MeToo Era

Queer people may not have invented sex, but queers have long been pioneers in imagining new ways to have it. Yet their voices have been largely absent from the #MeToo conversation. What can queer people learn from the #MeToo conversation? And what can queer communities teach the rest of the world about ethical sex? This provocative book brings together academics, activists, artists, and sex workers to tackle challenging questions about sex, power, consent, and harm. 

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Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness

From the very beginning of the epidemic, AIDS was linked to punishment. Calls to punish people living with HIV – mostly stigmatized minorities – began before doctors had even settled on a name for the disease. Punitive attitudes towards AIDS prompted lawmakers around the country to introduce legislation aimed at criminalizing the behaviors of people living with HIV. Punishing Disease explains how this happened —and its consequences. With the door to criminalizing sickness now open, what other ailments will follow? As lawmakers move to tack on additional diseases such as hepatitis and meningitis to existing law, the question is more than academic
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The War on Sex

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control.
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