As this book approached its last stages of preparation in the summer of 2003, the United States Supreme Court powerfully demonstrated a founding principle of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer (LGBTQ) studies: that queer ideas can change the world. In the groundbreaking ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, the Court decreed at last that sodomy laws are unconstitutional. Thus it over-turned the notorious 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, which had justified the arrest of adults having consensual sex by asserting that prohibitions against homosexual activity had “ancient roots” as well as a long legacy within U.S. law. Debunking the reasoning in Bowers in the majority opinion for Lawrence, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote:
At the outset it should be noted that there is no longstanding history in this country of laws directed at homosexual conduct as a distinct matter. Beginning in colonial times there were prohibitions of sodomy derived from the English criminal laws passed in the first instance by the Reformation Parliament of 1533. The English prohibition was understood to include relations between men and women as well as relations between men and men. . . . Nineteenth-century commentators similarly read American sodomy, buggery, and crime-against-nature statutes as criminalizing certain relations between men and women and between men and men. . . . The absence of legal prohibitions focusing on homosexual conduct may be explained in part by noting that according to some scholars the concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century. See, e.g., J. Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995); J. D’Emilio & E. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (2d ed. 1997) (“The modern terms homosexuality and heterosexuality do not apply to an era that had not yet articulated these distinctions.”) Thus early American sodomy laws were not directed at homosexuals as such but instead sought to prohibit nonprocreative sexual activity more generally. This does not suggest approval of homosexual conduct. It does tend to show that this particular form of conduct was not thought of as a separate category from like conduct between heterosexual persons. (2478–79)
Had Justice Kennedy been attending the annual David R. Kessler lectures at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS)? Had he been sitting among us in cognito (sans gown) all these years at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center? After all, at these gatherings, which honor scholars who have made substantial contributions to the expression and understanding of LGTBQ lives, he would have been exposed to exactly the sort of documentary evidence and theoretical analyses that enabled him both to recognize the capacious and unintended reach of colonial America’s sodomy laws and to historicize “homosexual” as a category of identity. Each lecture offered, on the celebratory occasion of its delivery, new insights into and deep contemplations of LGTBQ studies, as well as personal and communal self-scrutiny. Together, in this volume, the lectures provide a rich map of the varied terrain of the field over a remarkably fecund period.
Dropping by for each lecture in the Kessler’s first dynamic decade, Justice Kennedy might also have come to appreciate how Esther Newton’s “butch career has been made possible by gay people who fought to create an alternative vision, a freer cultural space for gender and sexuality,” or what makes Edmund White’s lush novels political, or why, as Cherríe Moraga explains, “The fictions of our lives—how we conceive our histories by heart—can sometimes provide a truth far greater than any telling frozen to the facts.” And, if he really listened, the Supreme Court Justice might even have agreed with Samuel R. Delany about the value of random and frequent cross-class encounters and the importance of public sex.
This last, in all seriousness, is an unlikely scenario. But, it is an imaginable one, thanks precisely to the paradigm-shifting, institution-rattling, and downright pulse-quickening work of the thinkers and writers who have brought LGTBQ studies into being. Initiated in 1992—before LGTBQ studies had found much of a foothold in American universities, much less been institutionalized in programs and departments, and through the rise in number of centers like CLAGS—the Kessler lecture series has featured pioneers in the field: Joan Nestle, Edmund White, Barbara Smith, Monique Wittig, Esther Newton, Samuel R. Delany, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, John D’Emilio, Cherríe Moraga, and Judith Butler.
As for what, exactly, that field has been and ought to be, these ten scholars would no doubt offer ten richly conflicting definitions. Indeed, anyone reading through Queer Ideas will discover what a wide range of approaches is not only accommodated, but in fact demanded, by LGTBQ inquiry. Interdisciplinary and unfixed, LGTBQ studies is a perpetual work in progress. So the essays gathered here, like shards in a kaleidoscope, work jointly to create a colorful and wondrous picture of a field of study that never sits still. Some of the lectures have themselves changed slightly in the transition to print and are published here with revisions made after the event. While some of the spontaneity of performance is gone, what stands maintains of the original intensity of each Kessler.
In their own distinct ways, all ten lecturers seized on the occasion of the Kessler to reflect on their personal and intellectual developments within queer thought, community, and/or politics. Some share the struggles of queer research—Smith contending with an archive that “exists in fragments, in scattered documents, in fiction, poetry, and blues lyrics, in hearsay and innuendo”; D’Emilio falling into near “mortal combat” with Bayard Rustin, the slippery subject of a biography. Others assess the intimacies that constitute queer life—Sedgwick in a therapist’s office, Delany in Times Square movie houses. Some address issues of urgent moment—White considering the fate of gay fiction, and Butler, corporeal vulnerability and violence. And some—Moraga, Nestle, Newton, Wittig—trace a lesbian journey, real or imagined or both, that touches down in both hell and paradise. Their lectures speak in ten different registers, but you can hear in each voice a heady admixture of what Butler describes as a motive force for her own queer theory: rage and desire.
LGTBQ activism, too, has always been fueled by these feelings, and for all their divergence, the Kessler lecturers concur on one fundamental point: LGTBQ scholarship begins in, and remains tied to, a liberation movement. It’s important to place these ten lectures in an intellectual and political context and describe the field they have helped to form, but not so easy to fill the story in neatly. Or, rather, it’s too easy to offer an orderly account that doesn’t capture the wonderfully messy, contentious, multifaceted activity of queer research. Nothing, least of all intellectual inquiry, follows a clean sequential narrative.
Unlike, say, the revolutionary physicist or literary critic whose new ideas can be shown to break with or develop out of previous traditions, early LGTBQ scholars were not entering into a field, but actually making it up as they went along. As D’Emilio notes in his Kessler lecture, the work had a distinct and self-conscious use-value. In the thrilling days of the early 1970s, he explains, “The excitement of reimagining and, in the process, reinventing our lives was balanced at times by a sense of being rudderless, of having not a clue as to what we were doing or where we were going, of having no history or tradition in which to anchor our activities.” The new scholarship would provide such an anchor. But the course of the gay liberation movement and the inquiries it urged on—being powered, as it was, by love—never did run smooth. As we trace the broad trajectory of the birth and growth of LGTBQ studies, it’s crucial to note from the outset that the development of the field is far tidier in the telling than in reality. What is certain is that it’s impossible to relate any story about LGTBQ studies without repeatedly bumping into the names of the authors brought together in Queer Ideas.
THE FERVENT YEARS
LGTBQ studies has its origins in the gay activism that marks its symbolic birth with the Stonewall uprising of 1969. Though gay and lesbian publications and civil rights and social organizations had been functioning far earlier, and scholarship on sexuality had long been produced, Stonewall galvanized these wings of the emergent movement. Indeed, scholars who insisted that research on lesbian and gay lives, histories, and communities was both necessary and legitimate—and who produced that research—were very much working as part of the movement.
The writers in this volume place themselves and their work firmly within such activism (and recall disparate experiences of reception): D’Emilio consciously and eagerly produces “scholarship for the movement”; Newton credits her connection to community “via books and art, conferences and politics” with helping to make her own queerness possible; Moraga admits to feeling “betrayed” by “the white-entitlement of lesbianfeminism” and has to look elsewhere “for a radical revisioning of our lives.” Edmund White participates in the “growth of the modern gay publishing movement” as books like his begin to win contracts from mainstream houses, while Smith creates publishing opportunities for those overlooked by the modern gay publishing movement with the grassroots establishment, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
In other words, producing the research was not itself enough to forge a field. Pioneering scholars built institutions like Kitchen Table that made it possible for work to be disseminated, and even—as in the case of New York’s Lesbian Herstory Archives, of which Joan Nestle was a founder—to be engaged at all. Other gay and lesbian archives were collected in other cities; gay papers and feminist journals proliferated. Those performing the typically voluntary labor to sustain these efforts were doing nothing short of creating the means of production of a revolutionary new scholarship.
Within academic institutions, LGTBQ scholarship emerged not only in relationship to the growing gay liberation movement, but also amid the explosion of women’s studies and African American and other ethnic studies—precisely at the moment, that is, when universities were being radically reshaped by demands both that they open their doors to more diverse populations and that they admit new perspectives. But it would be some years before lesbian and gay studies would find any traction within the academy; those already in faculty positions often felt forced to stay in the closet to preserve their jobs. So while women’s and ethnic studies fought for institutionalization, early gay and lesbian research was mostly being produced by such independent scholars as D’Emilio, Smith, and others—Allan Bérubé and Jonathan Ned Katz to name only two more—without the benefit of research grants or professorial salaries.
Soon, however, they joined with brave colleagues who did have academic positions in taking on, as Jeffrey Escoffier has put it, “the virulent homophobia of the academy” (13) In New York City, for example, D’Emilio and Nestle were active, along with Martin Duberman, Barbara Gittings, and Karla Jay, among others, in founding the Gay Academic Union (GAU). They produced a conference at CUNY’s John Jay College in 1973 that drew three hundred people. D’Emilio chronicles the GAU’s efforts in Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics and the University. Its statement of purpose, adopted in summer 1973 “after extensive debate,” he writes, asserted:
As gay men and women and as scholars, we believe we must work for liberation as a means for change in our lives and in the communities in which we find ourselves. We choose to do this collectively for we know that no individual, alone, can liberate herself or himself from society’s oppression. The work of gay liberation in the scholarly and teaching community centers around five tasks which we now undertake: 1. to oppose all forms of discrimination against all women within academia; 2. to oppose all forms of discrimination against gay people within academia; 3. to support individual academics in the process of coming out; 4. to promote new approaches to the study of gay experience; 5. to encourage the teaching of gay studies throughout the American educational system. (127)
Much of what these activist-scholars produced—like much of the early research in women’s and ethnic studies—was work of recovery, in this instance, identifying and analyzing the experiences of gay and lesbian historical subjects. Katz has described this “documentary impulse” as “defensive, a compensatory, reactive move against those who, directly or indirectly, denied the existence of our past.” And precisely because of that denial and the invisibility it enforced, gay and lesbian research required what Katz calls “detective work,” a “tracing of history’s missing persons” (“Making Sexual History”). His own book, Gay American History (1976) is a foundational text in this tradition. Others, to mention only a few of dozens, include John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980), a monumental revisioning of thirteen centuries of western civilization; Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989), an anthology edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr.; and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis’s Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), a study of the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York, from the 1930s to the 1960s.
While many of these books chronicle the experiences of people from a wide range of class, ethnic, and racial backgrounds, the field as whole began to acquire what Smith calls, in her contribution to this volume, “a white dominant meta-narrative.” Her own work, which sought to “understand Black lesbian and gay life in the context of both Black history and gay history,” is one of countless contributions by scholars of color that have displaced that meta-narrative. Such works both place the context of communities of color at the center of their studies and insist on an analysis that disrupts the assumption of a universal gay or lesbian identity. Moreover, they build on Audre Lorde’s influential argument (made powerfully in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”) that ignoring the differences among members of a group will not only inevitably shatter any joint effort or theory they undertake, but will also starve the project of its most generative resource. “Difference must not be merely tolerated,” Lorde declared, “but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (111).
QUEER THEORY
The search for and study of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender subjects in a full range of contexts—which continues richly today—deepened as the field began to emphasize questions about what constitutes such a subject at all. Within the academy, at least, such issues were highlighted in response to two major influences that swept through universities in the 1980s, shaping the intellectual approach of a new generation of scholars in a wide variety of fields: French post-structuralist thought and the theories of Michel Foucault (whose work was first published in English in the 1970s).
But this “progress narrative” is too neat and unidirectional. Randolph Trumbach’s research on same-sex activity in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, for example, raised questions about identity categories before Foucault became fashionable (Trumbach, 1989). And Monique Wittig had long been exploring, as she puts it in her Kessler remarks, how “heterosexuality is not only an institution but a whole political regime.” In her essays and experimental fiction, written over several decades, Wittig challenged the sex and gender binaries, even splitting or avoiding the use of pronouns in order to escape what she calls in her Kessler remarks “the gender trap.”
What’s more, such questions were not unique to LGTBQ scholarship: Debates about the contingencies of social construction and the power of discourses productively roiled women’s and ethnic studies as well, producing important insights in gender and critical race theory. Still, researchers in LGTBQ studies began to call for a shift in focus from gay and lesbian people to the political/social/cultural/medical realm of human experience called sexuality. The impetus is summed up well in Joan Scott’s influential essay, “The Evidence of Experience,” where she argues:
Histories that document the “hidden” world of homosexuality, for example, show the impact of silence and repression on the lives of those affected by it and bring to light the history of their suppression and exploitation. But the project of making experience visible precludes critical examination of the workings of the ideological system itself, its categories of representation (homosexual/heterosexual, man/woman, black/white as fixed immutable identities), its premises about what these categories mean and how they operate, and of its notions of subjects, origin and cause. Homosexual practices are seen as the result of desire, conceived as a natural force operating outside or in opposition to social regulation. (400)
Some scholars delved precisely into such critical examinations of the system itself, looking at the establishment and enforcement of sexual categories and practices, their social regulation, and the myriad ways these structures and their meanings shift over time and locale. Gayle Rubin, for one, traced the impact of moral panics about sex, showing, in “Thinking Sex,” how they erupt and produce new systems of control (267–75). Judith Butler demonstrated the performativity of gender—the way it is produced “as an effect of the very subject it appears to express” (“Imitation” 24). In her much-cited book Gender Trouble (1990), she offers a model for examining the social reproduction and regulation of identity categories. Reflecting on that book at her Kessler lecture some eleven years after its publication, she suggested that its “perhaps naive example of drag” was intended to “make us question the means by which reality is made, and to consider the way in which being called real, being called unreal, can be not only a means of social control, but also dehumanizing violence.”
Sedgwick was another pioneer in theorizing sexuality, demonstrating through meticulous and giddying literary analysis how to read through a queer lens. In her 1990 classic Epistemology of the Closet she mined the productive dissonances between two central ways of defining heterosexuality and homosexuality: a “minoritizing” view that holds that “there is a distinct population of persons who ‘really are’ gay,” a “relatively fixed homosexual minority” (85), and a “universalizing” view that holds that “sexual desire is an unpredictably powerful solvent of stable identities,” and that it is “of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities” (1).
Under the deliberately loose rubric of “queer theory”—a term whose coining is typically attributed to Teresa de Lauretis (iv) (who soon after distanced herself from it), and a practice that was at first most successfully pursued within literature and cultural studies—scholars from the post-structuralist generation elaborated a theoretical framework favoring Sedgwick’s “universalizing” view. Little surprise that post-structuralism’s skepticism toward sign systems and categories would be so appealing to queer theorists, as anybody coming to terms with a dissident sexuality has likely recognized that s/he couldn’t so easily line up her/his experience on one end or the other of an absolute hetero/homo binary (while, in a heterosexist world, straight people can live securely in a false sense of sexual certainty). A theoretical framework that unsettles binaries, seeks to explode the formation of fixed categories or norms, and works to reexamine the direction of the arrows between cause and effect challenges the way knowledge production is domesticated and made subservient to hegemonic cultural norms. These projects have been fundamental to queer theory.
At the same time, arguably, the move to queer theory was a vigorous response to the ascendancy of identity politics in the Reagan era and the emerging dominance of a narrowly drawn civil rights agenda in the lesbian and gay movement, a distinct departure from the sexual liberation ethos of the Stonewall generation, which saw itself tied to movements for racial and economic justice. Indeed, the manifestos and analyses from the early movement collected in Karla Jay and Allen Young’s Out of the Closets (1972), which call for breaking down social structures that sustain themselves by defining who’s in and who’s out, challenge gender norms, and propose desire as a lens for wider social scrutiny, sound more like queer theory than like the lobbying materials of today’s mainstream gay rights organizations, for instance the large, Washington-based Human Rights Campaign. As books like Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, maintain, queer theory sets forth a radical liberationist agenda. The AIDS epidemic also had a huge impact on LGTBQ scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s, not only prodding scholars to produce important epidemiological studies but also pushing the field toward policy-oriented investigations, for instance, of the behavioral patterns of urban men having sex with men, and toward scrutiny of the very language and categories by which diseases are named, studied, and addressed within medical and cultural discourses. Work on HIV/AIDS by such scholars as Cathy Cohen, Douglas Crimp, and Cindy Patton are also foundational queer studies texts.
FROM CONSOLIDATION TO PRODUCTIVE DISSOLUTION
Paradoxically, though, as David Halperin notes “the more [queer studies] verges on becoming a normative academic discipline, the less queer ‘queer theory’ can plausibly claim to be” (113). Indeed, throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, lesbian and gay studies was increasingly institutionalized (though not necessarily tamed, as Halperin would have it.) The first lesbian and gay studies conference, held at Yale University in 1989, drew hundreds of participants, and such conferences proliferated. Lesbian and gay caucuses within disciplinary associations soon followed, as did CLAGS and other research centers, as well as specialized journals, book series, and even programs of study.
If only because of the way academic institutions slice up the resources for which LGTBQ studies now competed with more established areas and disciplines, the field consolidated itself around sexuality per se. At least in the self-justifying language demanded of academic bureaucracies, proposals for new LGTBQ programs, courses, and even publications left the category of gender to women’s studies and of race and ethnicity to African American studies, Latino/a studies, and other such programs, and staked out sexuality as the field’s unique concern—even though much of the research being produced in lesbian and gay/queer studies interrogated the categories of gender, ethnicity, and race as vigorously as they did questions of sexual orientations and practices.
In the introduction to The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), for instance, the editors set out the parameters of what they refer to as LG studies: For them, the proper object of analysis in women’s studies is gender; in lesbian and gay studies, it is sexuality (Abelove, Barale, and Halperin xv). Yet in an influential 1994 article, “Sexualities Without Gender and Other Queer Utopias,” Biddy Martin shows how much queer theory premises the instability and deconstructive potential of homosexual/heterosexual binarism on the presumed stability of gender distinctions (105). More recently, scholars in transgender studies have brought gender back into the mix, showing how, as Susan Stryker writes, the term transgender often “bears an intimate and in many ways polemically charged relationship” to the term queer, even as “transgender can in fact be read as a heterodox interpretation of queer” (149). With the interventions of such scholars as Aaron Devor, Jason Cromwell, Judith Halberstam, Joanne Meyerowitz, Shannon Minter, Viviane K. Namaste, Sandy Stone, and Stryker, to name only a few, transgender studies is pushing LGTBQ studies to recognize that hegemonic gender and sexuality norms are intersectionally related and mutually imbricated, and that there is much to be gained in unpacking the productive tensions between narratives of homosexuality and transsexuality. (But again, the caveat about a tidy genealogy: Esther Newton’s seminal ethnographic study of drag queens in Kansas City, Mother Camp, was published in 1972.)
Similarly, the emergence of gay and lesbian studies as defined by the single identity category of sexuality tended effectively to constitute the analysis of racial oppression outside of the field. Works that focused on the experiences of lesbians of color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), for example, were quicker to become central texts of women’s studies programs than of gay scholarship. Nonetheless, the body of work generated by lesbian writers of color in the late 1970s and early 1980s called attention to the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality, pointing the way toward later theories of “hybridity” and postmodern notions of the fractured and socially constructed self.
Outside the academy, the rise of the “new social movements”—of the black civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, and more recently the transgender rights movement—worked to displace the “ontological priority” of the working class. The New Left notion that class was the central category of oppression, and that the elimination of class-based axes of oppression would also eliminate such “epiphenomenal” kinds of oppression as racism and sexism, gave way to “identity politics.” In displacing class as the priority, often these new social movements asserted priorities of their own, often based on race- or gender-defined identity. In the feminist and gay liberation movements, at least, the question of how—and whose—identity was recognized and asserted was highlighted early on. In 1977, a Black feminist group in Boston, the Combahee River Collective, challenged the monolithic way in which feminist and gay and lesbian organizations understood and acted from their “own identity.” In their “Black Feminist Statement” the collective declared their active commitment to “struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” and claimed as their task “the development of an integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking” (362). Their critique remained relevant two decades later, as Cathy Cohen notes in her assessment of queer activism. She writes:
In contrast to the left intersectional analysis that has structured much of the politics of “queers” of color, the basis of politics of some white queer activists and organizations has come dangerously close to a single oppression model. Experiencing “deviant” sexuality as the prominent characteristic of their marginalization, these activists begin to envision the world in terms of a hetero/queer divide. (209)
Increasingly, LGTBQ scholars insisted that understanding power as operating through the construction of binary categories and systems of exploitation—race, gender, sexuality—requires that attention be paid to the way oppressions intersect and mutually reinforce each other. For example, Cohen and others have pointed to the process of welfare reform in the 1990s to demonstrate how heternormativity is racially structured. Anjali Arondekar’s work in critical race queer theory, Siobhan Sommerville’s work in Queering the Color Line, and, more recently, investigations of the connections between LGTBQ studies and disabilities studies in works by such scholars as Lennard Davis, Kenny Fries, Robert McRuer, and Ruthann Robson are examples of investigations that not only cross paths with LGTBQ studies, but reconstitute it.
Intersectionality, then, is both a practical and a conceptual issue in LGTBQ studies. Judith Butler has put the question this way:
Within the academy, the effort to separate race studies from sexuality studies from gender studies marks various needs for autonomous articulation, but it also invariably produces a set of important, painful, and promising confrontations that expose the ultimate limits to any autonomy: the politics of sexuality within African American studies; the politics of race within queer studies, within the study of class, within feminism; the question of misogyny within any of the above; the question of homophobia within feminism—to name a few. (“Merely Cultural” 269)
The very slipperiness of “queer” has made debates over efforts to further institutionalize the field even more self-conscious—and, arguably, more generative—than they have been in other interdisciplinary areas. Among the urgent questions: Does LGTBQ studies have its own disciplinarity? Should it? Are there schisms in the field between, say, social scientists and humanists, or between those producing queer theory and those grounded in empirical work? How should relationships among the “constituencies” of LGTBQ studies—both inside and outside the university—and academic inquiry be mediated? How should an LGTBQ studies program be situated in relation to other interdisciplinary programs or departments, such as women’s studies, diaspora studies, Chicano/a studies, disability studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and so on?
There is only one way to find answers: in the day-to-day grappling with the teaching and doing of LGTBQ studies. Praxis argues for an LGTBQ studies that creates productive spaces for the interrogation of sexualities and sexual minorities and the cultural and social processes by which they are named, shaped, and contested; such insights have percolated throughout LGTBQ scholarship in the United States, across traditional disciplines, with continued productive debate, over the last three decades. They are part of what sustains the radical impulse of the field and its promise to continue to produce new knowledges. As John D’Emilio put it in a talk he gave at the 1989 inauguration of the first gay and lesbian studies department in the United States, at City College of San Francisco, “We are involved in an effort to reshape a worldview and an intellectual tradition that has ignored, debased, and attacked same-sex relationships and that has, in the process, impoverished our understanding of the human experience and human possibilities” (158).
THE KESSLER LECTURES AND CLAGS: THE FIRST TEN YEARS
The Kessler lectures as annual event—and now, we trust, as a body of published texts—not only participate in the field’s vast enrichment of our understanding of human experience and human possibilities, indeed, in reshaping worldviews—even the views of Supreme Court justices. They also look both forward and back at a field in formation, and always in struggle. To borrow a phrase from Moraga’s lecture, every one of the essays here is “as much an autobiographical narrative as it is a dream waiting to happen based on some irrefutable facts.”
Diverse as they are in outlook, angle, and emphasis, the ten lectures share an interest in both the means and methods of making LGTBQ knowledge, and in the meanings of lives lived—in community, in politics, sometimes in crisis, sometimes in ecstasy, always in bodies. The blending of theory and practice, the intellectual and the material, the abstract and the carnal, has been a feature of the Kessler from Nestle’s inaugural lecture in 1992, which carefully examined “the fragile records of a tough woman” to demonstrate “another paradigm for doing history—not around coming out or bar culture, but around daily survival as a worker and an African-American woman who never apologized for her sexual life,” to Butler’s post-September 11 consideration, a decade later, of how political community is wrought as “passion and grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our own, fatally, irreversibly.”
Even more than revealing common concerns, laying the lectures alongside each other allows them to talk back to one another—engaging in the sort of “discursive collision” that Delany finds, so crucially, in urban contact. D’Emilio’s struggle with the “dual subjectivity” of a biographer suggests ways of thinking anew about Sedgwick’s dialogue on love with a Platonic interlocutor. White’s exulting in a “genuine feminist and queer literature” is answered, and then some, by Wittig’s enthralling text. And so on. Compelling when delivered live on a special occasion, the lectures take on a new energy in provocative propinquity.
One significant aspect of the Kessler event could not be captured in this volume, but must be mentioned: the introductory tributes offered by colleagues of the lecturers, placing their works and lives in personal and political context. Vital thinkers and activists in their own rights, these introducers have provided analysis, warmth, and great sense of occasion. It’s important to name them: For Nestle, Cheryl Clarke, Deb Edel, and Liz Kennedy; for White, David Bergman, J. D. McClatchy, and Felice Picano; for Smith, Naomi Jaffe, Mattie Richardson, and Evelyn C. White; for Wittig, Judith Butler (in absentia), Erika Ostrovsky, and Namascar Shaktini; for Newton, Judith Halberstam and William Leap; for Delany, Jeffrey Escoffier, Robert Reid-Pharr, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; for Sedgwick, José Muñoz, Cindy Patton, and Michele Wallace; for D’Emilio, Allan Bérubé, Lisa Duggan, and Urvashi Vaid; for Moraga, Jacqui Alexander, Ricardo Bracho, and Irma Mayorga; for Butler, David Eng and Biddy Martin.
Along with the Kessler honorees, these speakers represent the vigor and variety of LGTBQ inquiry that course through CLAGS on a daily basis. Since its founding by Martin Duberman a dozen years ago, CLAGS has presented more than one hundred and twenty public programs where more than one thousand different people have offered their findings and posed new questions. We have awarded more than seventy fellowships and prizes for LGTBQ research. We have collaborated with dozens of academic, community, and activist organizations on programming. We have solidified LGTBQ studies at the CUNY Graduate Center—and beyond. The Kessler is the happy occasion when we celebrate not only the specific honorees, but also this explosion of activity that their work has been so instrumental in sparking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have helped make the Kessler such a stimulating and festive event over the years: first and foremost, David Kessler, through his generosity and vision; also, Martin Duberman, whose inspiration and indefatigable labors brought CLAGS into being and sustained it through its early years; his first successor as CLAGS’s executive director, Jill Dolan, who expanded CLAGS’s roots and reach; the graduate students who have staffed CLAGS over this decade and pulled off one classy event after another; and, not least, the hundreds of community members who have come to share in the ideas and the merriment. The Graduate Center—and especially President Frances Degen Horowitz and Provost Bill Kelly—has been consistently supportive of CLAGS and the Kessler Lecture. On behalf of CLAGS we extend warm thanks.
Great thanks are due, too, to those who have done so much to bring this book to fruition. CLAGS’s current staff—Preston Bautista, Hilla Dayan, Sara Ganter, Lavelle Porter, and Jordan Schildcrout—co-workers and comrades extraordinaire, gracefully did much of the nitty-gritty. It’s been a pleasure to work with the Feminist Press, not just because it is a sister institution at CUNY, our beleaguered public university that keeps thriving despite constant budget cuts. What’s more, our collaboration reasserts the foundational connection between feminism and LGTBQ investigation, recalling—as can’t be done too often these days—how feminism has fueled theories of gay liberation. For all of us at CLAGS, we want to express our gratitude to everyone at the Feminist Press, and especially to Livia Tenzer, editorial manager, for bringing the idea to us in the first place, and for working so hard, and with such magnanimousness, to make it happen. For helping her compile the volume, special acknowledgement is owed to editorial interns Abby Collier, Loryn Lipari, and Jamie Stock, and to Karin Ballauf, senior editor at Milena Verlag (Austria) who did a residency at the press in spring 2003. Thanks, too, to Sande Zeig and Diane Griffin Crowder, who provided crucial support in preparing the lecture and biographical sketch of Monique Wittig.
On a personal note: This book goes to press just as the directorship of CLAGS is changing hands—as Alisa Solomon steps down after four years to return to research, teaching, and writing, and Paisley Currah takes up the reins. It feels fitting that in this moment when both of us are thinking about CLAGS’s many accomplishments and future goals, we are called upon to offer these introductory remarks and acknowledgements to a book that invites just the sort of reflection we are in the mood to engage. Queer Ideas traces nothing short of a revolution in scholarship and social change. It’s been a privilege to be a fellow traveler.
That’s hardly to say that the transforming power of ideas has run its course. The Kessler’s second decade is well underway. In 2002 Jonathan Ned Katz pondered “Making Sexual History” and as we go to press, we are preparing for a December 2003 Kessler lecture by Gayle Rubin. We eagerly anticipate the second volume of Queer Ideas in 2013—and those that will surely follow.
Alisa Solomon and Paisley Currah
New York City
September 2003
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