by Aongus Burke
So you’re gay. Or bi(curious). Or maybe you don’t have any tendencies in that direction at all (yeah, we’ve heard that one before). Who knows why you’re interested in the field of gay, lesbian, and sexuality studies? But you are, and you figure "hey, I’m at Wesleyan-I should learn something about this stuff while I’m here." And why not? On the whole, people here will be pretty supportive of that kind of interest. It sure beats bringing, say, Fear of a Queer Planet to the counter at your local bookstore back home.
So you go to the coursebook and try to see what’s available. Invariably, you discover that there’s not much there. There probably aren’t any courses devoted exclusively to gay, lesbian, and sexuality studies. Maybe there are a couple that devote a decent amount of time to the field, but it’s definitely not central. And then a good few courses mention the word "Sexuality" in the course description, almost always proceeded by "Race, Class, Gender, and..."
So you’re in a conundrum. You decide you don’t want to take one of those courses that contain a token amount of gay, lesbian, and sexuality stuff-the rest of the course just isn’t interesting enough to you. You grudgingly consider taking one of the semi-queer-oriented courses. Then you realize that you have to put it as a second or, more probably, first primary if you want to get it. But you’re a such-and-such major and you’ve all these courses you have take and to take them you have to get to them...Or there’s some other courses that are entirely devoted to stuff that you’re really interested in. You’ve got to prioritize, and that means queer studies has to go.
This is an all-too-familiar scenario for many students, myself included. This year I’ve been working on the Gay, Lesbian, and Sexuality Studies (GLASS) Committee to do something about it. One thing we’ve been doing is collecting information before pre-registration about exactly which courses being offered the next semester have a decent, if not substantial, amount of queer-related material in them and letting students know about them; hopefully, most of you got our list in your mailboxes a few weeks ago.
Our other main project has been pressuring the university to institute a queer faculty line. A queer faculty line is a professor specifically recruited by the university to teach queer studies. Incidentally, Professor Henry Abelove, who teaches in the English department and American Studies program, does not fulfill this function. Abelove, like every other faculty member at Wesleyan, was recruited to teach courses in a non-queer studies field. Faculty members get to teach a certain number of electives each year (rarely more than two), although if they take on additional departmental and/or administrative duties, or go on leave, this number is reduced. Abelove, for example, almost always devotes his electives to queer studies courses, but he was forced to cancel his Queer Theory course this semester when he became chair of the American Studies program. Since Abelove took a sabbatical during the 1995-6 academic year, his course on gay and lesbian literature, The Newest Minority, was the only course offered at Wesleyan during the past two years that dealt primarily with gay, lesbian, and sexuality studies. One wonders how anyone ever fulfills the (mysteriously unadvertised) concentration in Queer Studies offered for American Studies majors.
Do students want more queer studies courses to be offered? You be the judge. I coordinated a petition drive for a queer faculty line earlier this semester. I’m sure a few of you remember because many of you signed it-692 people, in fact, all in about 5 hours of petitioning. Certainly the numbers for the queer-relevant courses offered at the University are suggestive. The Newest Minority enrolled 97 students in the Fall 1996 semester, an unheard of number of students for an English course. The number is especially impressive since Abelove only let in sophomores, juniors, and seniors who listed the course as a first or second primary during preregistration. This semester, there were about 10 courses offered at Wesleyan that gave more than a passing reference to queer issues. Of these, however, only a few really dealt with gay, lesbian, and sexuality studies to any significant degree. The pre-registration figures for these courses also show how much demand there is for them. Race and Sexuality in American History, taught by Renee Romano, originally had a class limit of 20. Given the excessive demand for the course, Romano expanded the cap to 22. That meant she still had to turn away 17 other students who tried to pre-register for the course (almost all as first or second primaries), as well as 10 other students who expressed interest. The class limit for Lisa Wedeen’s Sex, Gender, and Sexuality course was 35. There were 15 failed enrollments for this course (again, almost all first and second primaries) and about 5 other students expressed interest. (Note to professors: if you want students to preregister for your class, put the word "sexuality" in the title.) The numbers for Sex, Gender, and Sexuality are particularly impressive since a similar course, Feminist Theory, was offered this semester. Feminist Theory, normally an extremely difficult course to get into for non-majors, only enrolled 20 spaces this semester. The major difference between Feminist Theory and Sex, Gender and Sexuality: the level of queer studies content. Claire Potter’s Women and the American Experience and Gary Comstock’s Introductory Sociology section, queer relevant courses taught by openly queer professors, also had astronomical numbers of failed enrollments and turn-aways.
Gary Comstock, the university’s Protestant chaplain, is perpetually listed as a visiting professor. Wedeen and Romano are untenured; Potter just got tenured this semester. This points to another problem students interested in queer studies courses face: since such a large number of those courses are offered by either visiting or otherwise untenured professors, no one looks out for them. The tenure issue is an especially prickly one for professors who teach queer studies material because politics have a way of figuring into university employment practices. Wedeen, for example, is leaving the university after this semester amidst rumors of friction between her and others in the notoriously conservative Wesleyan Department of Government. One wonders if her decision to teach Sex, Gender, and Sexuality as an elective fits into that. There are good reason to believe as much. Abelove was originally denied tenure in the early 1970s until pressure from gay students got the decision overturned. In recent years, queer visiting professor of sociology Becky Thompson, who taught popular courses with significant amounts of queer material, was not offered tenure-track positions at the university. Thompson alleged to The Argus that word leaked that several members of the Wesleyan Department of Sociology were displeased with her "activist" politics, which were supposedly in conflict with her intellectual responsibilities.
Which brings us to the question of academic legitimacy. When members of the GLASS Committee spoke with President Bennet and Vice President of Academic Affairs Richard Boyd about the possibility of instituting a queer faculty line at Wesleyan, they weren’t much impressed with our arguments concerning the student demand for queer studies courses. They wanted arguments about the legitimacy of queer studies as a field of inquiry. This is a familiar reply, of course-it has been issued to the proponents of women’s studies and African American studies programs in the past, often by those whose political leanings make them prone to disfavoring such programs. But no serious scholar today can neglect incorporating things like race, class, and gender into their analyses of literature or social phenomena. I’m sure we’ll be saying the same thing one day about sexuality.
What makes queer studies a legitimate field? Well, first of all, try the fact that gay people exist. We have always existed, everywhere. I’m reminded of the argument that women’s studies advocates still have to make, that women represent half of the world’s population. How can you justify not studying them? How can you justify not studying us? Like women, people engaging in homosexual behavior have always existed, and those people have almost always been oppressed. Why have societies gone to such great lengths to oppress a group of people marked only by activities they consensually engage in with one another? How have societies done this? How have queer people responded? It is beyond me how anyone could argue that these are not legitimate questions for academics to attempt to answer.
Answering them requires a serious intellectual effort. It requires people to question some of their deepest assumptions-about gender, sex, anatomy, evolution, the family, power, science, God...the list, I’m always discovering, goes on and on. It requires people to think across disciplines. Oppression of gay people has roots in and/or is expressed in politics, economics, philosophy, religion, language, socialization, and medicine.
Questioning assumptions, thinking across disciplines: isn’t this is what a liberal arts education is supposed to be all about? I certainly know the impact that the works of queer theorists like Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, and Judith Butler have had on my thinking. In addition to the substantive knowledge I have gained from their writings, they have also effected a thorough revolution in my analytical and critical skills. When I read now, I am much more attuned to what the author’s underlying premises are, what s/he normalizes, what analytical categories are being used, what s/he treats as ahistorical or natural, and so on. These are contentious matters, ones that I encounter in almost all of my classes-even the ones that have no obvious relation to queer studies (like the classes in my decidedly straight CSS major).
Many of these analytical skills could, I suppose, have been acquired in non-queer studies classes. Maybe the only reason I learned them in courses with queer studies content is because I’m queer and am close to the material. Of course, there are a lot of queer students here at Wesleyan. If we want them to pick up those all important critical thinking skills, giving them queer studies courses is a pretty sensible and efficient strategy for the administration to pursue. But queer studies does more than cater to a specific audience. It has the potential to produce knowledge that no other field can. Being queer forces you to examine fundamental assumptions because your very existence defies them. It gives you an intimate knowledge of what oppression is. In fact, I would argue that gays generally have a capacity to understand oppression in a way that no other group can. Unlike most ethnic minorities and (straight) women, most gays get to experience life as both oppressor and oppressed for the same category of oppression. We know what it’s like to identify as both straight and gay. We know the radical shift in one’s consciousness that is effected when one undergoes the identity transformation that is at the very essence of coming out. Personally, I don’t share the viewpoint that all oppression is the same or even interconnected. But I do believe that are broad similarities involved, if only because since coming out I better understand why other oppressed groups are also so angry, also harbor separatist tendencies, also demand self-determination.
But, in the end, whether or not a queer faculty line get instituted at Wesleyan isn’t about academics. The GLASS Committee knows this; for the most part, we’re letting our allies in the faculty handle the legitimacy questions. The real issues are political and economic-the biases of administrators, their fears about alienating alumni, parents of prospective students, and anybody else who helps keep Wesleyan financially afloat. Our goal is to counter those forces. Our meetings with President Bennet and Vice President Boyd and the petition drive have been part of an effort to show that students interested in queer studies are a political force on this campus too. And our more recent efforts to gain the support of queer alumni and parents of queer students mark our first attempts at addressing economic issues. Again, the forces of irrational homophobia, not of rational argumentation, stand in the way of the institutionalization of a queer faculty line at Wesleyan. And what better way to conquer irrationality than through education?