Social Justice Commons^™

Lesbians In The 1970s, Sarah Chinn

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The 1970s was a period of intense excitement, change, activism, and activity for lesbians. As lesbian feminism redefined what qualified as a "political issue" and challenged every assumption about gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, and any number of other social categories, lesbians of all kinds created cultural, social, political, economic, and regional organizations and networks.

"I Am", Sonali Gulati

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

It was the summer of 1999 in Toronto at my very first public screening of my film titled "sum total" that someone asked me what my next film project was. And I had barely formalized my ideas in my head but I spoke from my heart and spoke of this film about parents of gay and lesbian youth living in India. It had only been a year and a half since my mother had passed away and that feeling of regret of not having come out to her before she died was on my mind.

An Excerpt From The 2009 Kessler Lecture: Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia And Its Consequences, Sarah Schulman

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Despite the emphasis on gay marriage and parenthood that has overwhelmed our freedom vision, how gays and lesbians are treated IN families, is far more influential on the quality of individual lives and the larger social order, than how we are treated AS families. Tonight I will try to articulate how and why systems of familial homophobia operate and more importantly, how they can be changed.

From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger

History

Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands's groundbreaking "Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature," with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be "the last one on the topic." Instead she hopes "fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes)" (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further "insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature" (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman …

Dying For Love: Homosexuality In The Middle East, Heather Simmons

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Today in the United States, the most frequent references to the Middle East are concerned with the War on Terrorism. However, there is another, hidden battle being waged: the war for human rights on the basis of sexuality. Homosexuality is a crime in many of the Middle Eastern states and is punishable by death in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iran (Ungar 2002). Chronic abuses and horrific incidences such as the 2009 systematic murders of hundreds of “gay” men in Iraq are seldom reported in the international media. Speculation as to why this population is hidden includes the …

Women For A Peaceful Christmas: Wisconsin Homemakers Seek To Remake American Culture, Nancy Unger

History

In the autumn of 1971, sixteen Madison homemakers, including Nan Cheney and Sharon Stein, began "Women for a Peaceful Christmas" (WPC), a unique attempt to do nothing less than remake American culture. Under the slogan "No More Shopping Days 'Til Peace," WPC organized ostensibly powerless homemakers into a "quiet revolt against 'an economy which thrives on war and the destruction of our earth's resources.'' WPC urged the public (especially women, the sex that did the vast bulk of holiday shopping) to take economic, political, and environmental matters into their own hands. "If you don't want your Christmas celebrations to be …

Introduction To Lgbtq America Today, John C. Hawley

English

l was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and learned from my classmates in seventh grade that boys who wrote with their left hand or wore green and yellow on Thursdays were homos. Because I did both, I knew I was in deep trouble from the start and might have some pretending to do. Such was the atmosphere for LGBTQ folks in the United States throughout the 1950s. Things loosened just a bit in the 1960s, when hippies were shaking society up. Then, in the 1970s, gay folks seemed to be-a lot more visible--disturbingly so, in the minds of many-and …

The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger

History

Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …

Teaching “Straight” Gay And Lesbian History, Nancy Unger

History

The importance of offering a lesbian and gay American history course was initially impressed upon me in 1986. A newly minted Ph.D., I was teaching my very first class: a U.S. history survey at San Francisco State University (sfsu). The course required each student to review a book of his or her choice on any topic in U.S. history. One student chose John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 from my list of suggested titles and wrote a thoughtful, enthusiastic review.1 At the bottom of the review was a handwritten …

Transgender Justice, Richard M. Juang

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Proceedings from CLAGS's Trans Politics, Social Change and Justice conference will be available in January 2007 under the title Transgender Justice.

Revisiting Queer Latinidad: A Clags Seminar Course Review, Anel Méndez Velázquez, Ileana Jiménez

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Anel: The construction of a latinà-queer "we" is very problematic. The construction of a "queer we" and a "latinà we" separately—and any attempt to add them up in a "queer-latinà we"—privileges and universalizes particular imagined identities at the expense and exclusion of specific cultural and personal practices and ways of being.

Letter From The Executive Director, Paisley Currah

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Heterosexuality is under attack--not by the authors of a new "I hate straights" broadsheet, not by vacationers in Provincetown, but by state judges in the US. In August, New York's highest court ruled that the New York State Constitution "does not compel recognition of marriages between members of the same-sex." Their reasoning? In part, the decision declared, because opposite-sex relationships are "often too casual," and thus result in the production of children by "accident or impulse." And so, "unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in …

The ‘We Say What We Think’ Club: Rural Wisconsin Women And The Development Of Environmental Ethics, Nancy Unger

History

The “We Say What We Think” Club: This article discusses the radio program “We Say What We Think Club” which aired on WIBA radio from 1937 to 1957. Though aimed at a female audience, it did not focus on homemaking tips or relationship advice but rather featured a topic-of-the-day. These included a wide range of subjects, such as "Better Clubs for Women" or "Feeding the Family in War Time,” about which the women held a folksy discussion. The author contends that the program reflected an increasing separation of gender spheres that emerged on farms during that era. The five Dane …

How Does Change Happen? Women's Rights And Development Conference, Kaushalya Perera

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

This was the question that was the central focus of the 10th International Forum of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID). The Forum was held in Bangkok, Thailand from October 27th-30th, 2005. The AWID is an international organization, founded in 1982, and hosts an international forum every three years.

Gendered Approaches To Environmental Justice: An Historical Sampling, Nancy Unger

History

While race and class are regularly addressed in environmental justice studies, scant attention has been paid to gender. The environmental justice movement formally recognized in the 1980s in no way, however, marks the beginning of the central role played by women in the long history of its concerns.' Abuses based in gender as well as race and class have subjected women to a variety of environmental injustices. However, women's responses to the ever-shifting responsibilities prescribed to their gender, as well as to their particular race and class, have consistently shaped their abilities to affect the environment in positive ways. Especially …

Trans Politics, Social Change, And Justice, Richard M. Juang

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

On May 6 and 7, 2005, Trans Politics, Social Change, and Justice brought over four hundred trans people and allies into a single building. A feeling of electricity was everywhere. Not because this was the first trans conference — it was not. Nor was it the largest. What participants felt came from the fact that the real lives of trans people were being addressed by trans people. For a time, the ground had shifted; the complex webs of institutions and politics that surround the lives of people everywhere were being addressed primarily from the perspective of transgender peoples and their …

Report From The National Lgbtq Students Of Color Summit, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

I've always imagined finding a space where gender is not assumed, where women are undeniably and understandably attracted to each other, and where men embrace without fear. I found this space at the National Summit for LGBTQ Students of Color on the day of my 22nd birthday, January 15th, 2005. Over two nights and three days, the United States Student Association hosted a national summit filled with grassroots organizing workshops, "how-tos" for your campus, methods on how to challenge homophobia from other student groups while still building alliances, and late night dialogues on art and freedom of expression.

Queer Studies In Eastern Europe: Lgbtq Scholars Convene In Fifth Conference In Poland, Tomek Kitlinski, Pawel Leszkowicz

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The International Conference of LGBTQ Studies was held in Poland from May 24-26, 2004. Themed as "Europe without Homophobia," the conference at Wroclaw University brought together an international group of scholars and activists to discuss homophobia, both in its global and East European forms.

How Did Belle La Follette Resist Racial Segregation In Washington D.C., 1913-1914?, Nancy Unger

History

Beginning in 1913, progressive reformer Belle Case La Follette wrote a series of articles for the "women's page" of her family's magazine, denouncing the sudden racial segregation in several departments of the federal government. Those articles reveal progressive efforts to appeal specifically to women to combat injustice, and also demonstrate the ability of women to voice important political opinions prior to suffrage.

From The Executive Director: Disability And Queerness: Centering The Outsider, Paisley Currah

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

When James Anastos, a transgender man, turned 21 and moved into a residential living environment for the neurologically impaired in Staten Island, his male gender identity became a problem. "Being transgender, they told me they could have me put away if I dressed like a boy. They didn't like the way I dressed—all boys' clothes," he told me during an interview.

Respect And Equality: Transsexual And Transgender Rights, Stephen Whittle

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The problem of who I legally am in the world I live in has been vexatious throughout my adult life. Like other transsexual people worldwide, I face an inadequate legal framework in which to exist. Some of us live within states and nations that recognise the difficulties and attempt to provide a route way through the morass of problems that arise; others barely, if not at all, even acknowledge our being. We are simply 'not' within a world that only permits two sexes, only allows two forms of gender role, identity or expression. Always falling outside of the 'norm,' our …

Appreciating Silence, Ronald C. Slye

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa by Fiona C. Ross. London: Pluto Press, 2003. 240pp.

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.

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 …

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.

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. …

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 …

Looking Back, Looking Ahead, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Vivien Ng said something at a roundtable discussion CLAGS hosted in October that has been ringing in my ears ever since. The roundtable had brought together a range of Women's Studies and LGTBQ Studies scholars, writers and teachers, to consider what lessons LGTBQ Studies might draw from its older sister as the younger field becomes further institutionalized at universities and colleges across the country. Was feminism still a motive force? we wondered. Did that field somehow speak to and from a vibrant movement, or at least to and from women's communities? Was it still accountable to them in some way? …

Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

Popular and official representations of the environment in Burkina Faso present soils as fragile and potentially subject to catastrophic collapse in fertility. In the cotton growing zone of southwestern Burkina Faso, researchers and policy makers attribute changes in land cover and land quality to population growth. This paper presents evidence questioning the dominant "population-degradation narrative" as applied to Burkina. We find that farmers are intensifying their production systems. While population has led to land scarcity, farmers are responding to both the resulting uncertainty in land rights and reductions in soil quality by intensifying the production process. Investments are used both …

At The Threshold, Alisa Solomon

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Hunter College professor Joan Tronto was sitting around her office one day, she told us at the Queer CUNY conference on May 6, and a student she'd never met dropped in and sort of just smiled at her. "Hi," the student said. "I saw your name on the flyer for the conference on Saturday," and that was all. The student flashed another moony grin, and then vanished. Over the course of a few days, several other students came by and did the same thing.