Embodied Sovereignty: Race, Gender, and Sexual Regulation in Oklahoma’s Fourteenth Amendment History

Robin Henry, Wichita State University

This paper reinterprets Oklahoma’s Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence as a crucial site for understanding how the modern US state constructed and contested racial, gendered, sexual, and sovereign orders. Rather than a peripheral jurisdiction, Oklahoma functioned as a laboratory of constitutional governance where courts grappled with the entanglements of sex, caste, sovereignty, and bodily regulation. Drawing on queer, trans, feminist, and Indigenous studies, the paper argues that decentralized contests over intimacy and embodied difference were central to the formation of US constitutional modernity. The analysis begins with early twentieth century segregation and disfranchisement cases, which reveal how Oklahoma courts policed racial boundaries and regulated the intimate arrangements of everyday existence. In adjudicating racialized contact, movement, and association, these decisions produced “intangible harms” that structured lived inequality, demonstrating how racial hierarchy operated through the governance of embodied proximity. The paper then traces Oklahoma’s disproportionate influence on constitutional understandings of sexuality and bodily autonomy. Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) exposed how eugenic sterilization laws targeted sexual capacity and reproductive possibility, illustrating the state’s authority to discipline “undesirable” bodies and shape reproductive futures. By recognizing procreation as a fundamental right, the Court laid essential groundwork for later doctrines of intimate and sexual autonomy. This trajectory continued in Craig v. Boren (1976), where Oklahoma’s gender specific drinking age statute codified normative assumptions about gender and citizenship; the Court’s adoption of intermediate scrutiny marked a pivotal moment in dismantling state sanctioned gender hierarchies. Finally, McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020) and Oklahoma v. Castro Huerta (2022) demonstrate how jurisdictional conflicts shape the conditions under which queer, trans, and gender diverse Indigenous people navigate overlapping authorities. Taken together, these episodes reveal the queer, trans, intersectional, and sovereign foundations of American state formation and reposition Oklahoma as a central and generative site in the making of constitutional governance.

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 Presented in Session 113. Sexuality, Race, and the Regulation of Difference