Jeremiah Ho: The Intersectionality of Scholarship

Saint Louis University School of Law Professor Jeremiah Ho remembers the Campbell’s soup commercial he first saw in 2015 well. The spot featured two dads goofing around with their son, making Star Wars references between spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup. Ho remembers that his first reaction was that the ad was refreshing, depicting same-sex parents and their son as a normal soup-eating family. But then it struck him that there was something off about it — it felt too staged. The commercial featured two men who looked, in every way, mainstream, except that they were gay.

The experience raised questions for him about not just what kinds of couples were represented in prime-time television spots but also how these couples perpetuated normativity in other ways. Though the couple in the soup commercial were gay, the otherwise heteronormative depiction might effectively narrow ideas of what kinds of “other” was acceptable.

Ho’s research is at the intersection of sexuality and race. “Certainly, there has been progress,” Ho says, “but progress is attenuated if you have one kind of image as the image — the only image, the only representation. That idea led me to writing about cases that reflect that kind of gesturing, that kind of staging, and how the law does the same thing.”

The ad aired around the time of U.S. v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges, both landmark Supreme Court cases addressing marriage equality. These developments led Ho to reflect not only on the LGBTQIA+ community’s lack of full legal equality but also on the unequal status some members face within the community itself. According to Ho, depictions that present only a narrow vision of what it looks like to be LGBTQIA+ can lead to further discrimination.

Ho gets ideas for his scholarship from a wide range of sources, including pop culture and classical music. He believes that it’s important to keep an open mind, noting that inspiration can come from a most unlikely source. While researching his recent article, “Colonizing Queerness,” for example, he was struggling with the structure of the piece. His breakthrough came while sitting in the audience for a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by the New York Philharmonic.

In his article, Ho’s examination of the fallout from Colorado Cakeshop is, at its heart, a matter of freedom of contract. This case examines the question of when a business owner can refuse to enter into a transaction with a customer based solely on the business owner’s view of same-sex marriage. Ho applies contemporary settler-colonial theories to American contract law to argue that the holding undermines those of U.S. v. Windsor and Obergefell vs. Hodges. Of the settler colonialist framework, Ho says “it helped me see that we are still working within a kind of patriarchy that has never really gone away, despite all of this litigation. And that patriarchy is not only going to espouse misogyny toward women but [is] also going to use trans and gay folks as an example of how to reify itself.”

This innovative pairing of ideas — applying norms from settler colonialist theory to law — is not unlike Ho’s commitment to bridging scholarship and art. And it has paved the way for him to think about how social expectations and patterns, including inequality and assimilatory forces, have manifested themselves in legal training and scholarship, and how they reify themselves in our own institutions. Ho says, “Just as much as the law animates us, it needs us. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist.” He wishes law students got this message more often in orientation and throughout their legal education. Students, as future lawyers, are the agents of change that the law needs.

“Law doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” he says. “It requires norms to change in order for the law to be buttressed in its changes. Students need to see that. It’s the norms underneath that have to shift.”

Professor Ho’s work in both his scholarship and teaching has received notable recognition. His "Colonizing Queerness" article earned Ho a SLU Senior Faculty Scholarly Works Award. The annual awards celebrate research excellence and recognize success in publications. His scholarship in law and sexuality has earned him a Dukeminier Award, specifically the Ezekiel Webber Prize from the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law — an award that recognizes the best in LGBTQIA+ scholarship published in law reviews each year.

This article was originally published in the SLU LAW Brief alumni magazine issue 2025.