CSGS Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University » Hot Gossip

An oldie but a goodie

Robert — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:50:58 +0000

Taylor Mac — “If You See Something Say Something”

Letter from the Director

ap — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:10:49 +0000

Welcome to the redesigned and interactive website of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Our many new features include a blog, “School for Scandal,” which we hope will serve as a conversation starter around issues concerning gender and sexuality. There will be regular posts from yours truly as well as from an exciting array of guest bloggers. Look here, too, for follow-up reports on the Center’s events throughout the year.

Our website makeover is deliberately—and playfully—tabloid in style, with the bubble gum colors reminiscent of US Weekly. Now, playful is not the opposite of serious. Indeed, if we are openly courting scandal, we do so to mark the ongoing caricature of gender and sexuality studies as at once too trivial to count as serious scholarship and too dangerous for impressionable students.

These two accusations may seem like throwbacks to the culture wars of the late 80s and 90s. But, when it comes to the combustible combination of queers, classrooms, and budgetary bad times, certain accusations, to quote the well-known ad from Master Card, are priceless. So, rather than refuse the charge, we thought we’d go straight at it (well, not exactly “straight,” but you know what I mean…). After all, critics of gender and sexuality studies are hardly pulling their punches.

For example, in February 2009, Republican legislators in the state of Georgia took aim at classes in queer theory and the sociology of sex at both Georgia State University and the University of Georgia, promising to team up with the Christian Coalition to rid public universities of faculty teaching these scandalously inappropriate topics. The Athens Banner Herald headlined the controversy, “Steamy sex courses fire GOP’s ire.” Luckily, “ire” was the only thing fired, and no faculty lost their jobs—this time round.

However, as historian and self-avowed “tenured radical” Claire Potter has pointed out in her blog, we should not be surprised by the return of these old-school attacks on queer and feminist faculty and queer and feminist studies. Let me quote her at some length: “In the face of declining state revenues, right wingers are once again ‘Mapplethorping’ the public. They are shilling their ideologically rigid view that even more school privatization, and deep cuts in higher education, are an appropriate fix for a plunging economy that has been jointly devastated by pirate capitalists, corporate lobbyists, and decades of neoliberal fiscal policies. How can the dismantling of higher education be turned into a happy thing, you might ask? Because you can get rid of fields of knowledge that students don’t need to know, and that might even harm them, like queer and feminist studies, while preserving the teaching of ‘universal values.’ And by doing this, you can divert attention from the real consequences to real people of policies that are turning our public universities into a simulacrum of the wretched, privatized Postal Service.”

Potter wrote these comments well before “death panels” and “abortion on demand” became rallying cries for right-wing talk show hosts, who urged on a “grassroots” social movement to oppose Obama’s “socialist” take-over of national health care. (We should be so lucky.)

No matter the actual facts of the matter, these particular attacks on health care reform have succeeded in sowing confusion, mistrust, and outright anger in no small part because of the way they link into morally loaded issues concerning bodily life, and sexual life remains a hot button issue no less under the Obama administration than during the Bush years, progressive hopes notwithstanding. There is already plenty of evidence that Obama’s much-trumpeted talent for finding the center falters when it comes to sexual equality, never mind sexual freedom. Attacks on gender and sexuality studies, and ongoing attempts to defund them, are thus part of larger battles over the meaning and limits of sexual justice and gender equality.

This is no laughing matter, to be sure, but it is all the more reason to make room for serious play as we dig in for the long haul. Social change is not built in one election cycle. Obviously, we need to do more than “just” laugh in the face of outlandish attacks on queers and feminists and anti-racist organizers, but laughter is one way to start girding our loins. (Thank you, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.) Otherwise it’s gonna be one unhappy march to the revolution.

– Ann Pellegrini
Director, CSGS

“There You Go Again:” Republicans Condemn Sex, Slash Education Budget

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:05:51 +0000

Thursday, February 19, 2009
Claire Potter

Arguably, it was Ronald Reagan shaking his head in the middle of a presidential debate with Jimmy Carter as he chuckled ruefully, “There you go again,” that created an emotional turning point in the 1980 campaign. It’s what we remember, anyway, that and the explosive, derisive response from the audience as Carter stood there unable to respond. This moment became symbolic of what many voters, not just right-wing voters, had come to think of Democratic governance: that the same old strategies, strategies that had not yet resolved a single social problem, were being presented as if they were new and innovative.

Well, it looks like no one is immune from regurgitating old, tired solutions to economic malaise. Having, for almost three decades, tried to deflect attention from the damage their economic policies have had on the vast majority of Americans, Republicans are once again turning to the vilification of gay sex, and knowledge about gay sex, to divert us from their past and present incompetence. I predict that future historians will find documented proof that such attacks are cynically intended to deflect the public view from the real consequences that cuts in public spending will have on education more generally. And just to give you some perspective, dear reader: for the price of incarcerating twenty undocumented immigrants for a year, you could probably fund four women’s studies programs granting the BA.

Attacks on women’s studies, sexuality studies and queer studies in the Georgia public university system are but one example of an urgent issue that few journalists, politicians or academics, for that matter, seem to care about yet. In the face of declining state revenues, right wingers are once again “Mapplethorping” the public. They are shilling their ideologically rigid view that even more school privatization, and deep cuts in higher education, are an appropriate fix for a plunging economy that has been jointly devastated by pirate capitalists, corporate lobbyists, and decades of neoliberal fiscal policies. How can the dismantling of higher education be turned into a happy thing, you might ask? Because you can get rid of fields of knowledge that students don’t need to know, and that might even harm them, like queer and feminist studies, while preserving the teaching of “universal values.” And by doing this, you can divert attention from the real consequences to real people of policies that are turning our public universities into a simulacrum of the wretched, privatized Postal Service .

Read the full story at Tenured Radical.

Steamy Sex Courses Fire GOP’s Ire

admin — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:58:20 +0000

Effort to oust profs
By Greg Bluestein | Associated Press | Story updated at 11:38 pm on 2/6/2009

ATLANTA – Upset House Republicans are mounting a campaign to purge Georgia’s higher education system of professors with an expertise in racy sexuality topics as the state grapples with a $2.2 billion shortfall.

State Rep. Charlice Byrd, R-Woodstock, took the House well on Friday to announce a “grassroots” effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex and “queer theory.”

“This is not considered higher education,” Byrd said. “If legislators are going to dole out the dollars, we should have a say-so in where they go.”

Byrd and her supporters, including state Rep. Calvin Hill, R-Canton, said they will team with the Christian Coalition and other religious groups to pressure fellow lawmakers and the University System Board of Regents to eliminate the jobs.

“Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math,” said Hill, a vice chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren’t going to meet those needs “by teaching a class in queer theory.”

The regents, who oversee the state’s colleges and universities, has bristled at attempts by legislators to dictate who they should hire. A regents spokesman said the university system’s mission – teaching, research and service – is a broad field.

He said the state’s schools hire faculty with expertise in a range of subjects as part of “a tradition of investigating the human experience.” And he noted that they aren’t teaching “how-to” courses, but rather they are experts on the sociological trends and risks.

“Certainly the mission of higher education is to broaden the field of knowledge and research,” said spokesman John Millsaps. “That covers a lot of topics. Some may be considered to some as controversial, but to others it could be considered needed.”

Hill and Byrd were incensed to learn a University of Georgia professor teaches a graduate course on “queer theory.” They also took aim at Georgia State University, where an annual guide to its faculty experts lists a sociology lecturer as an expert in oral sex and faculty member Kirk Elifson as an expert in male prostitution.

Georgia State spokeswoman Andrea Jones called the critics’ argument “flawed.”

“Teaching courses in criminal justice, for example, does not mean that our students are being prepared to become criminals. Quite the opposite,” said Jones. “Legitimate research and teaching are central to the development of relevant and effective policy.”

Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Saturday, February 07, 2009

School for Scandal!

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:27:56 +0000

Welcome to the new website of NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. The site is a work in progress: every day we are adding bells and whistles, gearing up for the big reveal at our 10th anniversary and website launch reception on September 22nd. Check the Events page for more info about what’s coming next as we kick off the Fall 2009 semester.

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