Category Archives: Queer Studies

July 15, 2007, 1:11 pm

Big City Comes to the Radical: Notes on Shoreline, New York and Change Over Time (Also Known As History)

One feature of middle age for me is not just being able to reflect on my youth and see the turning points, but also to see turning points as they are occurring. Historians will recognize this as “periodizing,” something we are taught to do when we prepare for our general exams as graduate students, and which is a traditional way of organizing historical knowledge: i.e., the Age of Jackson begins here, with this event, and ends here with this event. The events on either end are turning points in which something fundamentally changes, and that change is something that the Jacksonians perhaps did, or did not, perceive as something very significant at the time. So for example, probably everyone who was sentient and following politics knew that it was a Big Deal when Andrew Jackson successfully intimidated South Carolinians into paying federal taxes and resolved the Nullification Crisis i…

May 23, 2007, 2:04 pm

A Few Little Things, All Important, But None Important Enough for A Post of Their Own

By Claire Potter

What I had really decided to do today was work on a little talk I am supposed to give on Saturday about teaching Queer Studies for Zenith alums and parents of graduating seniors. In order that this not go into the category labeled No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, I determined a while back to use this presentation as an opportunity to write a short, pleasant article about building queer studies as a concentration in American Studies at a liberal arts institution that is unlikely to dedicate more than a line or so to any interdisciplinary field. Such fields rely on people trained in something else entirely switching over and becoming, shall we say, Transscholarly.

I don’t emphasize Zenith’s limited resources to be churlish: it is simply a Fact, and a Fact to be Dealt With as creatively and cheerfully as possible lest there be research I am unaware of concluding that griping is a major cause…