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Articles 301 - 330 of 393

Full-Text Articles in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies

Minding Our Q'S, Paisley Currah Jul 2003

Minding Our Q'S, Paisley Currah

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

A personal admission first—it's a scary thing to be stepping in as executive director, following in the very large footsteps of Alisa Solomon, Jill Dolan, and CLAGS's founder and first executive director, Martin Duberman, who have all worked so hard and accomplished so much to make CLAGS a major center for gay and lesbian studies. But, with the support of Alisa, the tremendous CLAGS board, its exceptional staff, and the many others who participate in its work, I am also looking forward to the challenge of building on their work.

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Media, Message And Meaning: The "Queer As...What?" Symposium, Andrew Ingall Jan 2003

Media, Message And Meaning: The "Queer As...What?" Symposium, Andrew Ingall

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

On October 11, scholars, journalists, media watch activists, and community intellectuals examined depictions and productions of LCTBQ people in television, the World Wide Web, and print journalism at a CLAGS symposium with the wily title, "Queer as . . . What?"

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"Fifty Years After" Symposium Explores The Legacy Of Christine Jorgensen, Omar Portillo Jan 2003

"Fifty Years After" Symposium Explores The Legacy Of Christine Jorgensen, Omar Portillo

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

There is a rich history of people who have deliberately constructed their bodies and challenged the binary sex-gender system. On November 22, CLAGS presented a symposium in which scholars, trans. activists, service providers, and artists revisited the life of one of the most famous of them — Christine Jorgensen — and considered her impact on our understanding of gender identities five decades after her "sex change" made headlines. Guest speakers - among them C. Jacob Hale, Hugh McGowan, Joanne Meyerowitz, Mariette Pathy-Allen, Ben Singer, Dean Spade, Chris Straayer, Susan Stryker, and Dinh Tu Tran — traced Jorgensen's life and the …

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"Sodoma, Sodoma, Thus Cried The Boys: A Reappraisal Of Gianantoni Bazzi's Life And Work, James Saslow Jan 2003

"Sodoma, Sodoma, Thus Cried The Boys: A Reappraisal Of Gianantoni Bazzi's Life And Work, James Saslow

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The farther back we go from modern into early modern history, the harder it gets to document those facets of an artist's personal life that might provide an anchor for claims to discern forms of homosexual authorial intention—without the probability of which, gay/lesbian studies might indeed collapse into the baldest claim of its detractors, that it is naught but meaningless psychospeculation.

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Queer/Crip: The First Queer Disability Conference, Walter (Peter) Penrose Jan 2003

Queer/Crip: The First Queer Disability Conference, Walter (Peter) Penrose

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The Queer Disability Conference, the first conference of its kind ever, held on June 2 and 3 at San Francisco State University, began with great enthusiasm of the participants, many of whom identified as both disabled and queer in some fashion or another. The opening plenary included an intersex activist, who discussed feelings of not being safe in a world where binary notions of sex and gender make being intersex perilous, and hoping that s/he would feel safe at the conference. A diverse group of activists, academics, and disabled queers provided for an interesting mix of perspectives.

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Vigorous Debate And Rigorous Inquiry, Alisa Solomon Jan 2003

Vigorous Debate And Rigorous Inquiry, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Our newsletter goes to press on the eve of President Bush's State of the Union address, in which he is expected to argue for going to war against Iraq. By the time this newsletter reaches you, the war may already have started. It's a frightening moment, to say the least. Meanwhile free speech and civil liberties are being curtailed in the name of security and scholars and researchers have special reasons to be wary: Archives are shutting off access; the Freedom of Information Act is being gutted; new laws are demanding that when asked by government officials, librarians must turn …

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Old Maids And Faeries: The Image Problem, Polly Thistlethwaite Jan 2003

Old Maids And Faeries: The Image Problem, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Librarian stereotypes are akin to those of gays and lesbians. Librarians battling negative professional images are in common cause with gays and lesbians battling similarly slanderous representations. This article proposes relationships between these varieties of maligned people and professionals.

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"More Love And More Desire": A History Of The Brazil Lesbian, Gay, And Transgendered Movement, James N. Green Jul 2002

"More Love And More Desire": A History Of The Brazil Lesbian, Gay, And Transgendered Movement, James N. Green

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

For many LGBT activists, the 1969 Stonewall rebellion marked the beginning of a modern international liberation movement. Diffusing outward from New York, so the prevalent notion goes, homosexuals began to organize political movements to demand equal rights, inspired by the militancy of U.S. queers. According to this widely held idea, the emergence of gay and lesbian groups was slower in "Third World countries" because of authoritarian regimes, patriarchal social structures, and backward societies.

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Harmful To Whom? Panelists Consider The Conservative Backlash Against Judith Levine's New Book, Patrick Mccreery Jul 2002

Harmful To Whom? Panelists Consider The Conservative Backlash Against Judith Levine's New Book, Patrick Mccreery

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Judith Levine jokingly says that at least she's in good company: Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, and Jocelyn Elders all were vilified for allegedly promoting sex between adults and children (though of course none of them did any such thing). Levine, a journalist and founder of the National Writers Union, has been vilified and worse because of her new book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press). In it, she argues that sex is not inherently harmful to teenagers, but can be healthy and empowering. Furthermore, she claims that society's responses to fears of …

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The Coolest Month, Alisa Solomon Jul 2002

The Coolest Month, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

If you hung around CLAGS during Spring semester, you ran into a lot of fruitfully provocative contradictions. Take late April, for instance. On the 24th, Marcia Gallo presented her work-in-progress -- a dissertation on the Daughters of Bilitis -- in our Colloquium Series and noted how many of the lesbians who were active in the organization since its founding in 1955 disavowed any serious political aims. "We just wanted to have fun," Gallo reported them saying to her in the extensive interviews she has been doing as part of her research.

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Expanding Horizons, Alisa Solomon Jan 2002

Expanding Horizons, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Happy New Year! Welcome to the new semester! Welcome to CLAGS's second decade! Such greetings would be heartfelt under any circumstances, but the artifices of the calendar seem especially useful now as we seek new beginnings after the trauma of the Fall.

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Anna Marie Smith On Welfare Reform And Sexual Regulation, Richard Blum Jan 2002

Anna Marie Smith On Welfare Reform And Sexual Regulation, Richard Blum

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

"Why is 'welfare reform' a queer issue?" That question was posed to a gathering of New York-based social services and LGBTQ advocates a couple of years ago at a meeting that launched the Queer Economic Justice Network (QEJN). Since then, QEJN has reached out to mainstream LGBTQ organizations to help them recognize the myriad ways that "welfare reform" has harmed poor queers.

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The Perils Of Queering The Curriculum, David William Foster Jan 2002

The Perils Of Queering The Curriculum, David William Foster

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

A student came into my office the other day who provided a direct challenge to my efforts to queer the curriculum. Let me say first that, although I respect the value of teaching courses on topics that are presented as queer-marked — indeed, I teach graduate courses in English on Queer Theory and Queer Filmmaking - my ideological preference in the courses I teach in both Spanish and Portuguese is to engage in queer readings across the canon, toward demonstrating that 1) sexual/gender identity is problematic in all texts, and any facile or obvious attribution is likely to be the …

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Violence, Mourning, Politics, Judith Butler Jan 2002

Violence, Mourning, Politics, Judith Butler

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

I’d like to speak to you this evening on the matter of politics and, specifically, how the struggles of gender and sexual minorities might offer a perspective on current issues that are before us, questions of mourning and violence, which we have to deal with as part of an international community. I'd like to start, and to end, with the question of the human, of who counts as the human, and the related question of whose lives count as lives, and with a question that has preoccupied many of us for years: what makes for a grievable life. I believe …

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"The Homosexual" As Problem Patron, Polly Thistlethwaite Jan 2002

"The Homosexual" As Problem Patron, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Libraries host a range of human activity, some of which is overtly sexual. What's a librarian to do about public displays of affection? cruising? public sex? First, we read up on the issue. Unfortunately, problem patron library literature is spotted with vivid illustrations of irrational bias against gay men, male-to-female transgender women, and men-cruising-men. It also discounts the private nature of most consensual sex in public places. This article discusses sex and gender biases in library literature, arguing that gender equitable, privacy-respecting practices will better serve librarians administering public space.

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Queer Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich Oct 2001

Queer Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

As people have mobilized in response to the September 11 attacks, I have found myself uncharacteristically dissatisfied by analysis of foreign policy and by teach-ins that consist of supplying information. They're absolutely crucial, and I applaud all of those who have coordinated their energies in this way. But I also want to see, as AIDS activist and theorist Douglas Crimp has argued, mourning and militancy brought together. Crimp has suggested that activism ignores mourning at its own peril, that it cannot simply displace mourning with militancy or fail to address the ways that anger is also motivated by loss.

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What's Medieval Got To Do With It?, Carolyn Dinshaw Oct 2001

What's Medieval Got To Do With It?, Carolyn Dinshaw

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

President Bush's response to September 11 — he has called this "war on terrorism" a "crusade" — is terrifying in its own right, framing the future as a reprise of the medieval past: several centuries of battle between Christianity and Islam. It's "going to take a while," Bush said. The White House may have subsequently backed off that rhetoric, but the metaphor (if it is one) draws on entrenched habits of thought.

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When The Local And The Global Are Too Close For Comfort, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes Oct 2001

When The Local And The Global Are Too Close For Comfort, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

In the early morning of August 15, 2001, Edgar Garzon, a 35-year-old Latino gay man better know as "Eddie," was viciously attacked with a "blunt instrument" by an unidentified assailant who jumped out of a red car. This occurred in Jackson Heights, Queens, an extremely diverse neighborhood with large concentrations of Latin Americans, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Koreans and a sizeable gay population. Garzon suffered three fractures in his cranium and was in a coma until September 4, when he passed away at Elmhurst Medical Center. His family, who reside mostly in Colombia and Florida, as well as his close …

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Towelheads, Diapers, And Faggots: Reviving The Turban, Jasbir Puar Oct 2001

Towelheads, Diapers, And Faggots: Reviving The Turban, Jasbir Puar

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

In the days and weeks following the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks on September 11, there has been a rapid proliferation of mocking images of a turbaned Osama bin Laden, not to mention of the turban itself. In a photo-montage circulating from Stileproject.com, even George Bush has been sporting a bin Laden-esque turban. Another internet favorite is a picture of bin Laden superimposed into a 7-11 convenience store scene as a cashier. Posters that appeared in midtown Manhattan only days after the attacks show a turbaned caricature of bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State building. The …

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Insisting On Inquiry, Alisa Solomon Oct 2001

Insisting On Inquiry, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

This special CLAGS newsletter goes to press exactly one month after hijackers rammed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and aimed for a third target before being brought down in the fields of Pennsylvania. In the days immediately following the attacks, pundits, politicians and plain folks asserted that our lives in America had been changed forever. Certainly all of us at CLAGS have been stunned and shaken. Gathering for our first board meeting of the year just days later, we expressed our grief, confusion, anxieties, and fears. Like everyone, no doubt, we questioned the meaning and purpose …

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Discovering, Again, The Meaning Of "American", Peter Hegarty Oct 2001

Discovering, Again, The Meaning Of "American", Peter Hegarty

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

In his essay, "The discovery of what it means to be an American," James Baldwin described how his exile in Paris led him to new self-knowledge about his national identity. Baldwin left the US to survive what he called "the color problem," but was surprised to find he shared a sense of being "not at home" with white Americans in Europe. He was American in ways he had not realized. Exile afforded him intellectual freedom, but his growing consciousness of the French-Algerian war led him to understand that "there are no untroubled countries in this fearfully troubled world." Leaving home …

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Lgbt Studies: Past, Presences And Futures, Richard M. Juang Jul 2001

Lgbt Studies: Past, Presences And Futures, Richard M. Juang

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

When I rolled out of bed at 4 am on April 20 to make the trip to New York for "Futures of the Field: Building LGBT Studies into the 21st Century University," the idea of discussing institutionalization was less than appealing. In a time of staff cutbacks, increasing courseloads and notoriously poor job markets, going back to sleep seemed a much better idea.

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Standing Against Censorship—Again, Alisa Solomon Jul 2001

Standing Against Censorship—Again, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Good afternoon. I'm Alisa Solomon, the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Cay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, and I'm glad to be here on behalf of CLAGS to voice our strong objection to Mayor Giuliani's so-called Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. We at CLAGS are not fooled by the Mayor's disingenuous assertions that this committee is merely a group of concerned citizens exercising their free speech in offering him their advice, for we recognize many of the members as long-time activists in the effort to squelch dissident viewpoints and legislate their own narrow morality. …

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Remembering Beyond The Self: Crossing Borders 2001, Jill Dolan Jul 2001

Remembering Beyond The Self: Crossing Borders 2001, Jill Dolan

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

In a passionate keynote address at the third in CLAGS's series of "Crossing Borders" conferences, Cherríe Moraga called on conference participants to "hold the pussy in public," to join otherwise isolated Latina/o artists in bringing racialized queerness into public debate. Presented at the University of Texas at Austin in February, "Crossing Borders 2001: U.S. Latina/o Queer Performance" was linked by its coalitional politics around race and ethnicity—broadly figured as latinidad—and gender and sexuality. This three-day gathering was sponsored by CLAGS through a generous gift from the Michael C.P. Ryan Estate and co-sponsored by the Center for Dramatic and Performance Studies …

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Challenging Assumptions: A Social Worker's View Of Future Of The Field, Lori Messinger Jul 2001

Challenging Assumptions: A Social Worker's View Of Future Of The Field, Lori Messinger

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

It was a pleasure to gather with other LGBT scholars from across the country, including some of the biggest names in the field, at the conference, "Futures of the Field: Building LGBT Studies into the 21 st Century." That said, I came away with some serious reservations about the state of our field, where we will be going, and who is leading us there. I spoke a few times at the conference, but I wanted to offer my thoughts in a more coherent and comprehensive manner.

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Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On, Alisa Solomon Jul 2001

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

I’ve just finished teaching an undergraduate Shakespeare class at Baruch College—CUNY to a class of mostly business majors. For many of the students, English is not their first language, so predictably, they had some trouble parsing Shakespeare's text. But they had no difficulty at all understanding what was going on between Patroclus and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, or, arguably, between Antonio and Sebastian—or Olivia and Viola or Orsino and Cesario—in Twelfth Night. In general, they were not in the slightest surprised to find homoeroticism in the works of the Greatest Writer Ever. (Indeed, critically analyzing Bardolatry was …

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The Sexual Democracy Of Miscegenation: Jossianna Arroyo Examines The Homoerotic Narratives Of The Father Of Racial Democracy, Marcelo Montes Penha Jul 2001

The Sexual Democracy Of Miscegenation: Jossianna Arroyo Examines The Homoerotic Narratives Of The Father Of Racial Democracy, Marcelo Montes Penha

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Investigations of the sexual Other generally attempt to explain sexual practices by characterizing their practitioners as "homosexual" or "gay." Jossianna Arroyo, Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan, went beyond this approach during her March 28 colloquium presentation, "Brazilian Homoerotics: Cultural Subjectivity and Representation in Gilberto Freyre." Arroyo explores not just sexual practices but also the construction of the Brazilian nation through a reading of Gilberto Freyre's two novels, Dona Sinha e o Filho Padre (1964) and O Outro Amor de Dr. Paulo (1977).

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Emerging Fields Of Study, Lesley C. Graydon Jan 2001

Emerging Fields Of Study, Lesley C. Graydon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

When I learned that CLAGS had secured an interdisciplinary program in Lesbian and Gay Studies and that the first course, An Introduction to Lesbian and Gay/Queer Studies, was to be offered in the Fall, I knew that I wanted to be in what I conceived as the first step in a much larger offering and celebration of critical ideas and counter-hegemonic discourse. I thought: finally, I won't be the only student reading and thinking from a radically left, feminist, lesbian, perspective - not that all of these four leanings must in any way accompany the position of lesbian, gay or …

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Why Do They Strike Us?, James Polchin Jan 2001

Why Do They Strike Us?, James Polchin

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Over the past two years since the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie Wyoming, the circumstances of his death have held a symbolic place in the story of violence against gay men and lesbians nationally. University of Wyoming Professor Beth Loffreda's book Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder is on the "Lambda Book Report" best-sellers list and MTV has recently premiered "Anatomy of a Hate Crime: The Matthew Shepard Story" that dramatized the events of October 6th, 1998. The telling and retelling of Shepard's murder in both academic books and popular culture suggests …

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Major Advances, Omar Portillo Jan 2001

Major Advances, Omar Portillo

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

When I receive copies of my college transcripts from CUNY these days, under my major it reads, "Gay and Lesbian Studies," followed by "Gender and Sexuality Studies." As far as I know, I am the first CUNY undergraduate to see such a major on his/her transcript. I have managed to build this major through the CUNY BA program — which allows students to fashion their own major if no campus provides it, by compiling courses at a range of CUNY campuses — and CLAGS has been instrumental in my achieving this goal. It makes me feel so proud to know …

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