Sociology Commons^™

Building “A Home Of Our Own:” The Construction Of The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

This article traces the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the context of radical archiving and lesbian institution building. It includes an outline of problems presented by "extra-legal" or outlaw material in archival settings. Discussion of the New York Public Library's Becoming Visible exhibit reflects the 1990s growth of mainstream institutional interest in gay, lesbian, and transgender archives, and the complications this interest presents.

The Politics Of Racial Identity: A Pedagogy Of Invisibility, Stephanie Urso Spina, Robert H. Tai

Publications and Research

A Critical theory informed Review of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High by Signithia Fordham. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996; Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth by Stacey J. Lee. New York: Teachers College Press, 1996, and Latinos and Education: A Critical Reader by Antonia Darder, Rodolfo D. Torres, and Henry Gutierrez (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 1997.

A Note From The Development Director, Stephanie Grant

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

During the past two years, CLAGS has been educating itself about organizational development and fundraising. Grants from the New York City Lesbian and Gay Funding Collaborative and the Rockefeller Foundation have enabled board members and staff to attend workshops and conferences designed to expand our knowledge about non-profit management and to increase our fundraising and organizational skills.

Ackerman Lecture, Suzanne Iasenza

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The First Annual Dr. John Patten Memorial Lecture was held November 14 at the Hunter College of Social Work. CLAGS agreed to cosponsor the lecture, developed to honor the life and work of Dr. John Patten, faculty member of the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy, Medical Director of the Institute's AIDS Project, and co-founder and co-director f the Institute's Gay and Lesbian Family Study Project. Dr. Patten was also co-founder and senior editor of In The Family Magazine, a family therapy-oriented magazine for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and their relations. He died of AIDS on October 4, 1995.

A Letter From The Executive Director, Jill Dolan

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Working with CLAGS this last year at our quarterly Board meetings, at our monthly committee meetings, and with the daily operations of our office, I'm continually impressed by the sophistication of our programs, the depth of our discussions, and the passion of our arguments about gay and lesbian and queer studies and its relationship to our diverse communities. After a productive year of four conferences and our monthly colloquia, amplified by co-sponsored events that sometimes didn't even make it onto our annual calendar, I'm proud of the richness of the work we've sponsored and presented.

Colloquium Addresses Queer Pedagogy, Harriet Malinowitz

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

On Saturday, March 8, CLACS held a one-day event called Queer Pedagogy: A Colloquium on Sexuality and Curriculum. The colloquium addressed questions about the purposes, methods, language, applications, contexts, affiliations, and performance of queer studies in academic classrooms.

A Note From The Board Chair, Framji Minwalla

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

This has been a difficult, yet especially productive year for CLAGS. As most of you know, Jill Dolan stepped into Marty Duberman's shoes, becoming our first new Executive Director since the founding of the organization seven years ago. And while we all miss Marty, Jill has accomplished a daunting task brilliantly.

Graduate Students Explore Forms Of Desire, Jay Plum

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Last April, QUNY (the association for queer students at the CUNY Graduate Center) and CLAGS co-sponsored Forms of Desire: The Seventh Annual Queer Graduate Studies Conference, showcasing the research of more than 100 graduate students from across the country and around the world. With panels on such topics as "Sexuality and the State," "Pre-Modern Sexualities," "Lesbian Erotics," "Reading Bisexualities," "Queer Ethnographies," "AIDS and Its Narratives," "Queer(ing) Masculinities," and "Homo Hollywood," the conference approached the growing field of lesbian/gay/queer studies from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Michael C.P. Ryan Bequest, James Wilson

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

CLAGS has received a generous bequest from the from the estate of Michael C.P. Ryan. The executor of Mr. Ryan's estate, Ana-Mita Betancourt, announced that the $60,000 bequest will fund the Michael C.P. Ryan Latino/Latina Colloquium Series, a five-year program exploring political, cultural, and artistic questions facing lesbian and gay Latino/as in the United States and Latin America. The bequest follows an earlier gift from the Ryan estate that helped fund the historic conference. Crossing National and Sexual Borders: Queer Sexualities in Latin/o America, in October 1996.

The Myths And Justifications Of Sex Segregation In Higher Education: Vmi And The Citadel, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Publications and Research

Access to higher education, particularly to the specialized and elite education that is part of the tracking system leading to prestigious and highly remunerative positions, is a measure of equality. This article argues that segregated schooling for women limits their access to the same educational and associational opportunities men have, and that arguments supporting segregation are based on unsound criteria. It further argues that whatever the intent or ideological underpinning of such arguments, they ultimately have a negative outcome for women’s equality in society.

White Supremacist Movement(S) In A White Supremacist Context, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This chapter excerpt describes the relationship between so-called "extremist" groups of violent white supremacists and mainstream understandings of whiteness.

Three Film Reviews, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Reviews of Advertising Missionaries, directed by Chris Hilton and Gauthier Flauder; Chastie (Paradise), a film by Sergey Dvortsevoy; and Wilbert: Street Kid in Nicaragua, a video by Bent Erik Kroyer.

"The Teacher Would Call Me 'Piggy', 'Smelley', 'Dirty', Names Like That": Prying Open A Discussion Of Domestic Violence For Educators, Lois M. Weis, Michelle Fine

Publications and Research

(The Teacher) would call me "piggy", "smelly", "dirty", names like that, and the kids started following along with it. And I'd say, by the fourth grade, I started cleaning myself out. I didn't care anymore, but my father had this thing that you were allowed to take a bath once a week. He would measure the shampoo, he would measure the soap, and if he thought somebody was using the shampoo when he said you shouldn't, you'd get a beating. But I got sick of it, and the beatings almost became to be painless when hit with a belt or …

The Deculturation Of The Brunei Dusun, Jay H. Bernstein

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Demythifying Multicultural Education: Social Semiotics As A Tool Of Critical Pedagogy, Stephanie Urso Spina

Publications and Research

This article discusses the assumptions and curricular implications of a social semiotic approach to education. Semiotics refers to the meaning we make with language as well as other objects. events, and actions. Social semiotics emphasizes the social, cultural, historic, and political contexts that shape that meaning. A social semiotic approach to education can help teachers and teacher educators to deconstruct the reproduction of class, politicize the ideology of colonialism, and overcome the inequities they engender. By providing a way to challenge selectively reproduced cultural politics, social semiotics provides a way to reconstruct and democratize schools and society.

On Epistemology, Whiteness, And Sexual Politics: Personal Reflections On Standpoint And White Supremacist Discourse, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

The preface to White Lies in which the author explains her personal relationship to the work of scholarship in the book.

A Message From The New Executive Director, Jill Dolan

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

I'm honored and pleased to be succeeding Marty Duberman as Executive Director of CLAGS. I taught in theatre and drama and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before I accepted my present position in the PhD Program in Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center. At Madison, teaching and writing in lesbian performance theory, the fact that a national center for lesbian and gay studies had been established in New York gave me a sense that the field in which I worked was arriving, securing its legitimacy and its vibrancy and insisting on its visibility. In my two years at …

Women-Church And Egalitarianism: Revisioning "In Christ There Are No More Distinctions Between Male And Female", Susan A. Farrell

Publications and Research

This chapter from The Power of Gender in Religion (eds G.A. Weatherby and S.A. Farrell) illustrates how women in the Roman Catholic Church are expanding the roles of women and challenging the patriarchal and hierarchical Roman Catholic Church practices. They are accomplishing this through an umbrella organization of feminist groups which maintain their catholic identty while critiquing the church from within.

Gatekeepers To The Franchise: Election Administration And Voter Participation In New York, Ronald Joseph Hayduk

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Political scientists continue to debate the causes, consequences and remedies for America's exceptionally low voter turnout. While scholarly investigation has focused on several factors which produce low voter turnout, the machinery that administers elections in the U.S. has been ignored. Nor have the political influences and environments that determine these agencies' procedures and their place in the electoral system been adequately analyzed. There is, nevertheless, good reason to believe boards of elections play a greater role in shaping participation than is generally appreciated. Evidence indicates that in conducting elections and in implementing electoral rules–such as voter registration procedures–boards of elections …

The Invention Of "African Rhythm", Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"African ryhthm" was invented in the 1950s when, thanks to pioneering research by the Reverend A. M. Jones, Alan Merriam, Gilbert Rouget, Erich von Hornbostel, and John Blacking, among others, "African music" was construed as an essentially rhythmic phenomenon. Three decades and a sizable body of empirical research later, it is easy to see that an overriding ideology of difference (between "Africa" and the "West") motivated these early efforts. This essay reinvents "African rhythm" not by denying its own ideological construction but by engaging in an imaginary dialogue with earlier researchers in an effort to concretize that which was missing …

Black Nations/Queer Nations Conference, Cathy Cohen

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

Black lesbian and gay men have made significant accomplishments but continue to confront a number of urgent challenges, such as AIDS, unemployment, racism, and homophobia. Our future survival turns on our ability to break new ground toward overcoming these challenges. It is therefore necessary for us to dialogue, debate, and develop new strategies of resistance and community education that will advance the politics of lesbian and gay people of African descent, our communities, and society as a whole. To this end, we will sponsor an unprecedented three-day conference.

Asses And Wits: The Homoerotics Of Mastery In Satiric Comedy, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

This essay explores master-servant homoeroticism in three seventeenth-century satiric comedies: Ben Jonson's Epicoene and Volpone and George Chapman's The Gentleman Usher. Whereas "sodomy" always signifies social disorder, "homoerotic" useful for describing same-sex relations that are socially normative or orderly. Thus homoerotic master-servant relations become "sodomitical" only when they are perceived to threaten social order. In Epicoene, the character associated with the disorder of "sodomy" is neither Dauphine or Epicoene, but the "unnatural" Morose, even though he has not literally had sex with the boy he marries. The erotic master-servant relationship in Volpone is sodomitical because it transgresses against …

The Lesbian And Gay Past: An Interpretive Battleground, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

The lesbian and gay past is an interpretive battleground that mainstream archives have refused to enter, assuming few risks in collecting, naming, or identifying archival collections. At the same time, libraries offer up worlds to those who work to unearth the secrets there.

The New York Public Library's 1994 "Becoming Visible" exhibit trumpeted The Arrival of lesbian and gay history to New York's cultural mainstream. The NYPL exhibit denies the library's role in secreting lesbian and gay history, and diminished the contributions of community-based archives to the exhibit.

Child Sexual Abuse, Moral Panic, And The Mass Media: A Case Study In The Social Construction Of Deviance, Steven M. Gorelick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a case study of newswork in a moral panic. Specifically, Stanley Cohen's concept of "moral panic" is used to examine the practices of a group of reporters who covered a widely publicized case of alleged child sexual abuse in a day-care center. Moral panics occur when a perceived threat to the social order emerges with such force, and with such little overt warning, that routine discourse about right and wrong gives way to a flood of indignation about an extraordinary breach of normal moral boundaries. Suspending normal rules governing social control, officials rush to crack down on the …

Social Consequences Of Delayed Childbearing And Infertility, Joan Liebmann-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a qualitative longitudinal study of delayed childbearing and infertility. The initial sample consisted of 35 women. Although they knew they might never have biological children, most did not regret postponing parenthood.

Because infertility is a socially defined illness, the doctor-patient relationship was fraught with conflict. It tended to follow a set pattern: from dependency to disappointment to discord to dissociation. The optimal doctor-patient relationship was mutual participation.

Infertility adversely affected marriages. The "medicalization of masturbation" and intercourse caused many marital problems. Couples also argued over how often and with whom to discuss infertility, when to stop treatment and …

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender, Polly Thistlethwaite, Daniel C. Tsang

Publications and Research

The proliferation of publications in the lesbian, Gay, bisexual, and transgender press has allowed the weaving of a well-informed network of previously isolated individuals and communities, empowering and unifying lesbian, gay, and other sexual minorities," Dan Tsang and Polly Thistlethwaite wrote in the introduction to the 'Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender' section of Katzes' 1995 edition of Magazines for Libraries. This title review of the queer periodicals of the day was intended to serve as a guide and justification for 'mainstream' libraries' collection building. The number and range of titles in Thistlethwaite and Tsang's collaborative entries (1989, 1992, and …

Becoming Gentlemen: Women's Experiences At One Ivy League Law School, Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, Jane Balin, Ann Bartow, Deborah Lee Stachel

Publications and Research

In this Article we describe preliminary research by and about women law students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School—a typical, if elite, law school stratified deeply along gender lines. Our database draws from students enrolled at the Law School between 1987 and 1992, and includes academic performance data from 981 students, self-reported survey data from 366 students, written narratives from 104 students, and group-level interview data of approximately eighty female and male students.' From these data we conclude that the law school experience of women in the aggregate differs markedly from that of their male peers.

Gays And Lesbians In Library History, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Summarizes gay and lesbian activism in librarianship and the role of libraries in supporting gay and lesbian movements.

Implementation Of Congressional Intent: A Study Of Amnesty Policy And The Immigration And Naturalization Service, Sherrie Baver, William Arp Iii

Publications and Research

In 1990, the United States Border Patrol arrested approximately one million illegals (Dillin, 1990). Significant as this number may seem, it parallels the rate of arrest that existed prior to the passage of the Immigration and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). This phenomenon suggests that the Act has failed to accomplish one of its primary objectives: to control illegal immigration to the United States.

The IRCA represented the first major change in US immigration policy in twenty-two years. In seeking to prevent illegal entry and to gain control over the undocumented population already in the country, it contained two key …

Report From The Chair, Esther Katz

Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS)

The year 1992 proved to be an extraordinarily successful one for CLAGS. We mounted a series of exciting panels, conferences, and special events, and launched an ambitious program of grants and fellowships for scholars and students. A good portion of the credit for the success of these activities goes to CLAGS's hardworking Board of Directors which undertakes the myriad tasks required to plan and implement our various programs.