Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The authors detail an educational ethnography of a university queer cultural center’s role on campus and in the surrounding community. The data include participant observation, in-depth interviews, and artifacts. The authors review lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, ally, and questioning (LGBTAQ) issues in higher education, heterosexual attitudes, and queer theory. The findings of barriers to the Center’s mission plus the suicide of a Center student prompted the authors to explore research poetry as a means to express the inexpressible. Furthermore, they illustrate tensions between contemporary queer and gay theories through the telling of a straight tale (traditional research report) and a …

This essay examines how poetic memorials by women writers written over the multiple generations of the Romantic period often seek to establish and sustain the individual writer's presence and authority as much as they aim to memorialize the memory of a lost forebear.