Posted on 12/22/2010 1:00:45 PM PST by Academiadotorg
Gender Studies may never have had a clear focus but it is still susceptible to mission creep. And gender studies isnt focused on analyzing gays and lesbians as a specific subgroup, Paul Ketzle writes in the Winter issue of Continuum magazine. Instead, it investigates how a central concept like sexual identity is conceptualized through cultural artifacts (such as novels, poems, art, and film), and also how myriad aspects of our societyfrom architecture to economic theoryare (sometimes surprisingly) gendered.
Ketzle is an instructor in the University of Utah Honors College. Continuum is the magazine of The University of Utah.
No one would confuse the road to Salt Lake City with the one to Damascus, Ketzle writes. But for Kathryn Bond Stockton, the journey that brought her from a nearly ordained Episcopal priest to professor of English, celebrated queer theorist, and director of the University of Utah Gender Studies Program was, like the Apostle Pauls, a spiritual journey, one filled with unexpected revelations and inspiration.
There are many different stories we can tell about ourselves, Stockton points out. She shared quite a few of them with Ketzle.
What theyve defined as normalheterosexual, monogamous nuclear familyis not even normal, she said. If thats your idea of normal, then few would even qualify.
And you wouldnt have any need for the instruction and rigid rules they insist upon if it were natural.
Stocktons latest book, The Queer Child: Growing Sideways Through the Twentieth Century, observes that throughout the 20th century, there existed little public discourse on gay children, except among a very few major novelists and filmmakers in whose work the gay child lives and breathes, Ketzle claims. But now were a culture thats finally recognizing these children who may see themselves as gay and may have a relationship to that wordand that relationship might be happy, fearful, terrified, anxious, and/or excited, she argues.
This gay child could tell us about the interesting, complicated, painful, and pleasurable complications of childhood that we might otherwise tend to deny.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
No wonder a US college degree is worth very little.
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