The Pleasure Project
Angela Jones
Department Chair, Professor of Sociology, Department Chair. Farmingdale State College, State University of New York.
Angela Jones is Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at Farmingdale State College, State University of New York. Jones's research interests include African American political thought and protest, sex work, race, gender, sexuality, feminist theory, Black feminisms, and queer methodologies and theory. Jones is the author of Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry (NYU Press, 2020) and African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (Praeger, 2011). They are a co-editor of the three-volume After Marriage Equality book series (Routledge, 2018). Jones has also edited two other anthologies: The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (Routledge, 2012), and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (Palgrave, 2013). Jones is the author of African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment, published in 2023, and a forthcoming book, Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook both with Bloomsbury. They are also the author of scholarly articles which have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Social Problems, Gender & Society; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Sexualities; The Black Scholar; Disability Studies Quarterly; Porn Studies; International Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Law; Culture, Health, and Sexuality; Sociology Compass; Fat Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society; Sexuality and Culture; Sociological Focus; The Journal of Historical Sociology; and Interalia: a Journal of Queer Studies. Jones also writes for public audiences and has published articles in venues such as Contexts (digital), The Conversation, the Nevada Independent, Peepshow Magazine, PopMatters, and Salon.
Marlon M. Bailey
Professor and Associate Chair in Department of African and African American Studies, Professor in Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Washington University
Marlon M. Bailey is Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of African and African American Studies and Professor in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Marlon is a Black queer theorist and critical/performance ethnographer who studies Black LGBTQ cultural formations, sexual health, and HIV/AIDS prevention. He has served as the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor in Africana Studies at Carleton College; the Distinguished Weinberg Fellow in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) in the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Marlon is a member of the committee that authored the award-winning report, Understanding the Well-Being of LGBTQ+ Populations, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). This report won the 2021 Achievement Award from The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA).
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Marlon’s book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2013. In 2014, Butch Queens Up in Pumps won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize awarded by the GL/Q Caucus of the Modern Language Association and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Book Award in LGBT Studies. Dr. Bailey has published in the Architecture Review, American Quarterly, GLQ, Signs, Feminist Studies, Souls, Gender, Place, and Culture, The Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services, QED, AIDS Patient Care and STDs, LGBT Health, Health Promotion Practice, and several edited volumes. He is also a member of the Black Sexual Economies Collective which edited the volume, Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in the Culture of Capital, published by the University of Illinois Press (2019).
Marlon’s current book manuscript in progress, “Black Gay Sex,” is an ethnographic examination of the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on Black gay men’s sexuality. His manuscript is under contract with the University of California Press. He also co-edits (with Jeffrey McCune) the New Sexual Worlds Book Series, also with the University of California Press.
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He holds a PhD in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Department of African American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies respectively from the University of California, Berkeley.