Her current research examines the role of the mainstream media in the welfare-reform debate. She has published in Social Science Quarterly and contributed chapters on Congressional races to the 1998 and 2000 edition of The Roads to Congress. Mary Caputi is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the California State University, Long Beach, where she teaches political thought and feminist theory. Her first book is Voluptuous Yearnings: A Feminist Theory of the Obscene (Rowman and Littlefield 1994). It addresses various feminist responses to pornography and the obscene. She is working on a second book, about American melancholia, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press.