Word: queered
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Recent student demands for the increasing institutionalization of ethnic studies and queer studies at Harvard get at the heart of one of the central tensions in the idea of the university. It is possible in one sense to think of universities as institutions whose function is essentially conservative: they exist in order to preserve and transmit traditional forms of knowledge, and so maintain profound ties to the past. But at the same time, the relative autonomy of universities has allowed them to function historically as sites of critique and iconoclasm. The strange thing about universities in this sense is that...
...newly minted Ph.D. with a strong investment in the new disciplines—my research and teaching are primarily in the field of queer studies—I don’t think that such ambivalence is necessarily a problem. It is good for academics to struggle with such impossible demands: it makes them smarter. What is a problem, I’d suggest, is the synergy between academic ambivalence and institutional inertia. As in other large bureaucratic institutions, the rate of change in the university tends to be very slow. This is particularly true when what is at issue...
...once upon a time. The deck is stacked against upstart disciplines, but this is especially true of the so-called “identity-based disciplines,” a range of new and not-so-new fields including women’s studies, Afro-American studies, ethnic studies, queer or lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) studies, Latino studies, Native American studies and disability studies...
...color over the last hundred years. But the opening of the university to new fields of study has been more contentious: in this context, the ideology of diversity gives way to arguments about the dangers of the “slippery slope”: If we can integrate queer studies, Caribbean studies, south Asian studies, or Native American studies into the curriculum, then what will be next? This line of reasoning echoes anti-immigration arguments in troubling ways. Like such arguments, it claims to be about others who have not yet arrived, but it works effectively to de-legitimize...
Garber is a Shakespearean; all the better to carry on Harvard’s humanist tradition. She is a fixer; she was brought over from the English department to lift up the Visual and Environmental Sciences Department after the disastrous administration of its previous chair. Her work in film, queer studies, as well as her directorship of Harvard’s Humanities Center, have placed her at the center of numerous academic debates and faculty discussions. Finally, after the lukewarm reception of her last book Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses, Garber may want a decade-long break...