Month: May 2016

The Challenges of Being an LGBTQ Historian

Mary Louise Roberts recently published a short article describing some of the results of the recently completed American Historical Association LGBTQ Task Force Report. The article brings our attention to a number of issues facing both LGBTQ academics and academics who research LGBTQ issues (note that these two categories do not necessarily coincide). Roberts’s piece made me reflect a bit on my own experience as someone who inhabits both categories and has been lucky enough to have found himself a tenure-track position in a supportive department.

First, Roberts is right to emphasize the need for all universities to include relevant language protecting both sexual orientation and gender identity in their nondiscrimination policies. After a recent “religious freedom” law was passed in Mississippi, I was personally relieved when the president of USM reaffirmed our own non-discrimination policy. That said, universities also play a role in the broader community and have specific social missions; they should therefore actively promote the passage of legislation protecting their students and employees. It is not enough, in other words, for institutions to claim they do not discriminate when the actual law provides them with the opportunity to do so. In addition, universities are central players in local economies and they should fight the ability of businesses that rely on them for their very survival to discriminate against their students and employees.

Second, I think we tend to overestimate the impact of doing LGBTQ work on our success and failures on the job market. The examples Roberts provides of people feeling that their research on LGBTQ issues shaped their job market experience are largely anecdotal. So too, it is worth saying, are my own impressions, but I never felt that my specific research in the history of sexuality is what held me back in the four years I was on the market. Rather, I think it is more the case that people doing research in LGBTQ history or the history of sexuality run up against a much more general preference for “traditional” research interests within history departments. This preference reveals itself in many ways, sometimes in a desire for people doing particular kinds of history, sometimes for particular kinds of historians. This speaks to a broader traditionalism that has discriminatory effects on both the work that historians produce and the historians that get hired. Certainly, LGBTQ history has particular connotations and problems, but I see no reason to play oppression olympics with my friends and colleagues who have also struggled to find permanent employment. What we need is greater investment in the humanities and social sciences in order to enable departments to provide their students with a broad range of expertise, while also encouraging history departments to value new approaches and objects of study. I would argue, in fact, that these two issues are interdependent: the lack of resources is precisely what encourages departments to retrench and fear taking a chance on what they see as “new.”

But historians of sexuality also need to do more to showcase the importance of our research, even as we are often received with greater skepticism than is usually warranted. I hope to explore this issue more fully both here and in print, but put simply, I think that it is incumbent on historians of sexuality to begin moving beyond the kinds of identity-based histories we have become accustomed to completing. It was only, it seems to me, when many women’s historians moved to gender history that the field began being taken more seriously by the wider profession. This is not simply because this shift allowed for a wider range of inquiry, but because it also showed how gender is “a useful category of historical analysis.” We have to show that sexuality is as well. Doing so will gradually open space for departments to recognize that a specialist in sexuality is necessary to providing a well-rounded curriculum while also showcasing how the study of sexuality is actually necessary to understanding political, intellectual, and economic history (to name just three examples) as well.

Finally, Roberts reports on the unique frustrations of those who present differently or stand as the sole LGBTQ person in a department or even university. As a member of a department with significant lesbian and gay representation, I have not been as affected by this issue as my colleagues elsewhere (in fact, I am more unique for being Jewish than I am for being gay). That said, the two issues situate the struggles of LGBTQ folk in relation to the broader need for increasing the diversity of the professoriate and reshaping the culture of academia, which is more conservative than people on the outside tend to realize. I was particularly struck by the respondents who recognized the particular service roles that minority scholars end up playing, a phenomena that has been talked about in other contexts. The growing movement for social change in campuses around the country should be a source of empowerment for LGBTQ academics even as it is a call for us to engage in the broader range of issues affecting minorities in the professoriate. The AHA Task Force was hopefully a first step toward institutionalizing historians’ role in that process; as historians it is our responsibility to not only analyze change, but to enact it as well.

New Publication and a Blog

I neglected to note here that I recently co-authored a brief article the persecution of homosexuals at the University of Southern Mississippi during the late 1950s and early 1960s with my colleague Douglas Bristol. Douglas has also just begun a new blog documenting the lives of LGBTQ Mississippians, which is currently seeking contributors. Check it out!

Historicism and Erasure

I’ve recently come across a couple of blog posts on the problems of “erasure” in modern queer historiography, focusing particularly on that of lesbians and transgender individuals. In the first, Rachel Hope Cleves describes the recent “Gay American History @ 40” conference in celebration of Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History (1976), with an emphasis on an apparently quite fraught debate on lesbian identity, both historically and politically. In the second, Cheryl Morgan responds by emphasizing how the very debates over lesbianism can — sometimes purposefully — erase the historical existence of trans identity in turn. While some lesbian activists fear the elimination of their historical identity in the wake of trans, some trans activists argue that radical feminists and lesbians are trying to undo their own. This debate is obviously longstanding and I wasn’t driven to write a brief post by intervening in it. Rather, I found both responses to be good for thinking about my own approach to the historicization of sexuality and the ways in which I think it necessary to take the complexities of these debates and apply them to supposedly more “stable” or “dominant” subjects, in particular the study of male same-sex sexual activity in the past.

In her post, Cleves describes an “aggressive form of historicism directed by academics at the category of lesbians” that has not, she implies, really been applied to male homosexuality. If we have constantly and consistently asked whether women who lived with other women in the past were “actually” lesbians, we have have not seemed to have much trouble assuming the sexual nature of men who shared their bed with other men. While Cleves may be right to point out that these questions were initially raised as a way of “dismiss[ing]…the importance of women’s lives, lesbians’ lives, and trans lives too,” I think that rather than rejecting them, we should apply them to precisely those subjects of history we think we already know. What if, in other words, evidence of male same-sex sexual activity was not, ipso facto, evidence of male homosexuality or even its precursors? It is precisely historical work on women’s sexual relationships that has prodded my own critical approach to the existence of male homosexuality in the recent past (for example, Sharon Marcus’s Between Women and Laura Doan’s Disturbing Practices). In some ways this claim seems obvious in the wake of the debates over social construction, but it seems to me that it is not taken as seriously by scholars of men’s sexual relations as it should be. The “aggressive form of historicism” levied at lesbians should, in other words, be also directed at gay men.

This approach contrasts with Morgan’s call to recognize the existence of trans identity in the past. Both Morgan and Cleves recognize the ongoing desire of marginal sexual subjects to have a recognizable history and as Morgan points out “there is massive of evidence of people having cross-gender and third-gender identities in history, and even of medical intervention.” That evidence, however, does not by itself mean that trans identity itself existed prior to the twentieth century. Transgender identity itself is not a singular thing, but just as with other gender and sexual configurations — including heterosexuality and cis-identity (itself a creation in some measure of the emergence of trans) — relies on a specific social and cultural relationship attributable not just to modern science and medicine, but to broader discourses about the body, the individual, and desire. In any case, I would argue that the kind of historicization that some see as erasing certain forms of identity actually acknowledges a past that acknowledges the complexities of sexual identity. Perhaps there is no transhistorical trans subject to look for in the past (just as there is no lesbian or gay male one either), but there is a trans history, comprised of the multiple forms of cross-gender identification that existed in the past, ones that intersected uneasily as well with other kinds of sexual dissidence, such as same-sex sexual desire.

Resisting the stability of the sexual past, therefore, seems necessary to achieve the “opening [of] the past” that Cleves calls for at the end of her piece. Questioning rather than assuming the existence of our own identities in the past highlights other kinds of relationships that may have existed. The very kind of historicization deemed suspect in this debate may be precisely the tool we need to revitalize the connections that cross contemporary identity categories. In other words, breaking down contemporary modes of being or refusing to approach the past only to confirm those identities, may be precisely what is necessary to showcase the connections we have lost in the wake of modern sexual politics that always seems so ready to put us back into self-contained boxes.