Paper Title
[Expletive Deleted]: Some Thoughts of Teaching Queer Theory at Ole Miss
Location
Evans Room, Third Floor, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
Start Date
April 2016
End Date
April 2016
Abstract
This presentation will consider the Ole Miss’s multi-year unfavorable ranking in the Princeton Review as an LGBTQ unfriendly institution. I question: is it possible to explore our negative past and critique our present climate without becoming consumed by it? Overwhelmingly, Ole Miss has come out and acknowledged its fraught past. We’ve taken visible steps toward ensuring equality and inclusiveness in LGBTQ student life, housing, and curriculum. Following Obergefell, Ole Miss acted swiftly to offer health insurance coverage to married employees’ same-sex partners. Just last year Ole Miss established an LGBTQ alumni group within the existing alumni organization, and I know alumni are interested in working toward developing scholarships specifically to attract LGBTQ students and allies. I’ve been both challenged and honored to be an integral part of the university’s recent decision to add a sexuality studies emphasis to their Women’s and Gender Studies undergraduate minor. My students are brave and generous in sharing their perspectives on LGBTQ studies; their viewpoints are deeply and powerfully informed by regional, racial, and ethnic identities. Students have collectively voiced their own desires for more transformational, coalition politics that value the specific lived experiences of distinct communities—theirs—as queer-identified (many) first-generation college students from the South. As a lesbian and first generation college graduate, I share their concerns. However, I am less apt to consider this institutional support with rose-colored glasses; indeed, this “proliferation of events and classes” have begun to illuminate the very injustices, prejudices, and ill-fitting sutures that have traditionally kept queer lives, bodies, and identities marginalized within academia.
[Expletive Deleted]: Some Thoughts of Teaching Queer Theory at Ole Miss
Evans Room, Third Floor, DiGiorgio Campus Center (DiGs)
This presentation will consider the Ole Miss’s multi-year unfavorable ranking in the Princeton Review as an LGBTQ unfriendly institution. I question: is it possible to explore our negative past and critique our present climate without becoming consumed by it? Overwhelmingly, Ole Miss has come out and acknowledged its fraught past. We’ve taken visible steps toward ensuring equality and inclusiveness in LGBTQ student life, housing, and curriculum. Following Obergefell, Ole Miss acted swiftly to offer health insurance coverage to married employees’ same-sex partners. Just last year Ole Miss established an LGBTQ alumni group within the existing alumni organization, and I know alumni are interested in working toward developing scholarships specifically to attract LGBTQ students and allies. I’ve been both challenged and honored to be an integral part of the university’s recent decision to add a sexuality studies emphasis to their Women’s and Gender Studies undergraduate minor. My students are brave and generous in sharing their perspectives on LGBTQ studies; their viewpoints are deeply and powerfully informed by regional, racial, and ethnic identities. Students have collectively voiced their own desires for more transformational, coalition politics that value the specific lived experiences of distinct communities—theirs—as queer-identified (many) first-generation college students from the South. As a lesbian and first generation college graduate, I share their concerns. However, I am less apt to consider this institutional support with rose-colored glasses; indeed, this “proliferation of events and classes” have begun to illuminate the very injustices, prejudices, and ill-fitting sutures that have traditionally kept queer lives, bodies, and identities marginalized within academia.
