Author: aiross

Some New Stuff

I had a couple items appear over the winter holidays. First, I reviewed Jeffrey Merrick’s Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in Eighteenth-Century France, an invaluable source collection for those interested in the history of sexuality in eighteenth century France:

Merrick’s contribution is unique in its ambition. Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades in EighteenthCentury France forms one part of a broader reconceptualization of eighteenth-century sexual lives that explicitly invites readers to “track down, dig up, root out, and take in as much as we can about the operations and regulation of sexual desire and networks in eighteenth-century France and to locate the patterns and insights we extract from the sources in the context of the society that produced them and of larger issues in the history of sexuality” (p. 2). The give-and-take between Merrick, the documents, and readers thus produce new understandings of what the history of sexuality could mean to professional historians and students. As both a research intervention and a teaching tool, Sodomites, Pederasts, and Tribades accomplishes a rare feat. It simultaneously showcases the process and the results of archival research. It does so, however, without foreclosing the ways its readers will respond to and interpret the history it reveals.

Read the whole thing here.

Second, I was interviewed by Beth Mauldin of the New Books in History Podcast about Public City/Public Sex. I hate hearing my own voice, but I think it came out pretty well! Enjoy!

Book Publicity

I’ve been lucky to have been invited to talk about my recently published book in a few forums (Amazon link).

First, I was interviewed for 19 Cents, the blog of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

I also discussed the book with Notches, a blog devoted to the History of Sexuality.

You can check out an excerpt of Public City/Public Sex in Lapham’s Quarterly.

New Syllabi

I was a bit behind updating my course syllabi, but new examples are now available.

Reading Tara Westover’s Educated as a Professor

I don’t often read memoirs (or non-fiction more generally) for pleasure, preferring to keep business and pleasure separate, but I had heard nothing but good — rapturous really — things about Tara Westover’s Educated and decided to check it out (of my amazing local library). The book vividly retells Westover’s life as a child growing up in an isolated family in Idaho, the daughter of an abusive father whose paranoia drives him to reject any interaction with the government, including, most importantly, public education. As we follow Westover’s path to college at Brigham Young University and then onward to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and then to a Ph.D., we witness in gross detail the mental and physical abuse that Westover suffered not simply before she “escaped” but as she worked to figure out just what escaping meant to her. Indeed, the book is particularly evocative and complex in the way it gets the reader into Westover’s head, underscoring her own doubts, struggles and, most powerfully and disturbingly, complicity in the cycles of abuse that so defined her family. In this respect, I can only compare it favorably with another memoir of overcoming struggle in order to achieve an education, Undocumented, which sometimes felt like it was effacing complexity in favor of narrative-pacing. Undocumented felt, for lack of a better term, teleological. Educated underscores how difficult is it to escape one’s past, how even as we are succeeding we may feel like we aren’t or don’t deserve to, and, most of all, that we sometimes are our worst enemies. Educated is often uncertain about its own conclusions, the memories it presents, and the finality of its story.

Obviously, the book has a great deal to say about Westover herself, as well as the social forces that created the conditions for the paranoia, mental illness, and misogyny that gave rise to her particular circumstances (in this respect, I highly recommend listening to the podcast Bundyville as a complementary story about the kind of Mormon fundamentalism that Westover’s father subscribed to). It also has a great deal to say about how one becomes educated in the first place and the complicated ways her education forces her to reevaluate her identity. Westover, it is worth noting, did not simply “choose” to go to school; she had to be pushed. Reading it on the cusp of a new school year, however, cannot help but reverse the analysis somewhat: to focus on some of the people around her, especially her teachers. 

Continue reading “Reading Tara Westover’s Educated as a Professor”

Pre-Order my Book!

I am very pleased to announce that my book Public City/Public Sex: Homosexuality, Prostitution, and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris, is now available for pre-order! You can buy it on Amazon, but you can get 20% off the paperback by ordering directly from Temple University Press with code T20P.

Strangers on a Plane

[Warning: Discussion of sexual abuse in this post]

Do not talk to me on an airplane. When I sit down, normally with headphones already on, book in hand, I am not inviting a conversation with a stranger. And yet, my most recent trip (a short hour and change flight, thankfully) these standard strategies utterly failed in the face of an older woman who just needed to chat. I could tell, 20-minutes in, that I was not escaping this so I settled into a rhythm of “uh huhs” that I figured I could keep up for the rest of the flight. The worst that would happen, I assumed, was that I lost an hour while providing some company to a lady who, at most, lacked the self-awareness necessary to realize that I just wanted to finish my novel. But what a chat it became.

It started innocuously enough. She told me about her life, her children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren. She was a retired teacher and school superintendent and a pastor. She told me about beginning teaching at 19, barely older than her students, and some of the problems and difficulties that entailed. She worked for 42 years before retiring. Things took a turn, however, when she began tell me why she doesn’t substitute teach any longer. She told me about an incident when she had to call a young kindergartner’s parents after the child had swore at her (“bitch, don’t touch me,” she claimed she said). Obviously not a good look for a five-year old, though who knows if that’s what was actually said. In any case, my airline companion proceeds to explain that she called in the students parents and it turns out that it was two dads. The child, who the teacher assumed was a girl, turned out to be a boy wearing girls’ clothes.

Continue reading “Strangers on a Plane”

Presentation at TCU

I gave a talk last week at the Art Gallery at Texas Christian University on the “queer gaze” in late nineteenth-century Paris. I arrived at an argument about the police’s relationship to that gaze that I didn’t necessarily expect. Here’s Part 1:

And Part 2:

On Being Jewish in the Deep South

I came across the following tweet this morning and couldn’t help but think of all the times this has happened to me:

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while now, so I’ll take the tweet (the whole thread, really) as an opportunity.

When this has happened to me, it’s usually either been because I am Jewish (my mom says I don’t “look Jewish,” but I’m not so sure) or because of random bad luck. The most vivid time it happened was when I was about 14, trapped on a ski lift with a random guy who just asked what my faith was and when I answered “Jewish,” launched into a speech (one he clearly delivered frequently) about how I should accept Jesus Christ. It shook me. Since moving to Mississippi, I’ve encountered proselytizing with more frequency than I had in Michigan or Ohio, but not by a huge amount. I remember sitting in a grocery store parking lot in Ann Arbor once, when a guy knocked on the car window in order to ask if I accepted Jesus. What has differed, however, is the way those moments have combined with other interactions to reinforce just how “weird” it seems to people to find a Jew down here.

Granted, part of this is my own doing insofar as I don’t attend the local synagogue (there is one). And yet, I’ve been surprised at how frequently I’ve felt that it was not my sexuality that rendered me different living in the Deep South, but rather my existence as a (secular) Jew. One time, after being approached by a stranger in a restaurant who asked if I had “found Jesus,” I tried to explain to someone who had grown up here their whole life why I found it so offensive. Namely, that it reeks of anti-Semitism to assume that Jews need “saving” and that it is incredibly condescending to assume that I haven’t considered my own spirituality just because I don’t practice a religion or haven’t turned toward Christianity. I understand that some forms of Christianity are more given to proselytizing than others, but such practices rely on a myopia about other people that helps explain some of the broader fears about strangers of all kinds that is so prominent in today’s conservative politics.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand throughout my four years in Hattiesburg, as again and again I encountered behavior that came out of ignorance much more than malice. During my first year here, I attended a university function that opened with a Christian prayer. A student asked me why the “Jews decided to go into the ghettos.” A burlesque show of all things told the audience they “loved their Jew friends” before peppering the crowd with basic trivia about Hanukah. Another student asked if I was “of the Jewish race,” while a third declared that Jews are more likely to get typhus “because of the Holocaust.”

Though these comments often set me back on my heels, I tried to use them as learning opportunities, especially with my students. That said, they reveal the ways in which the evangelism practiced in so many local churches is born out of a kind of ignorance that renders Jews something totally foreign. This only makes these encounters more uncomfortable: you know that if you engage you’re going to have a one-sided conversation. I honestly don’t think those who do this kind of thing really think about its actual (versus imagined) effects of those they approach. The assumption that all others share the same spiritual goals (we don’t) is reinforced by the notion that anyone who hasn’t found the “correct” path simply needs to be shown the way (we don’t). This is not to say that racism doesn’t also shape my life in the north, but this specific kind was unique to my experience in the south. Others’ mileage may vary.

I’ve just agreed to participate in a proposed workshop on personal identity, diversity, and academia at this year’s Western Society for French History. I certainly have some things to say about my work in sexuality studies, but ultimately it has been these experiences that have been most troublesome in the past few years. I should say very clearly that I have met wonderful people in Mississippi. But at the same time, I have never felt more “other” for being a Jew than I have while living here.

Professional Update

Chalk this up to the disadvantages of the move to social media and away from the blog, but while I announced this a while ago on Twitter and Facebook, I neglected to note here that beginning next year I will begin as Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University, Maryland. I’ve valued my time here at the University of Southern Mississippi and will miss my friends and colleagues, but I am very excited about my new position and my move to Baltimore.

Teaching The History of Sexuality in the Undergraduate Classroom

As I mention below, I’ve had the opportunity to talk and think about bit more about my teaching this academic year than is ordinary. I sometimes mention that I teach Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality to undergraduates without actually assigning The History of Sexuality, which is usually too difficult (but also too central) a text to treat as just another course reading. Now that I’ve shared my strategy and materials for doing so with a couple colleagues and friends, I thought I’d just put them here. As always, feel free to adapt and use with acknowledgment.

First, it’s worth noting that I have a very specific goal when I introduce Foucault: to help students understand sexuality as a social construction. I most recently used the lesson in my Gay and Lesbian History course, but I’ve also used it in advanced seminars that may have broader themes. But the goal remains focused on that single task, rather than a broader introduction to Foucault’s thought. Of course, getting at that central point requires some discussion of Foucault’s understanding of power (for instance), but his broader theoretical insights often fall out of the conversation. I’m not really trying to introduce Foucault, but rather a central idea by way of a key thinker in the field.

My strategy follows the goal. Rather than taking up the book as I whole, I choose four individual paragraphs that (step-by-step) take us through Foucault’s line of thought on that particular issue (if time, I also include a fifth, on “resistance” on the PowerPoint as well). Breaking apart the argument allows me to simplify the claim (overly simplify, perhaps): that Foucault wanted us to focus not on the ways that sexuality has been “repressed,” but rather how it was “produced.” I reduce this idea to a mantra that I repeat over and over: “production, not repression.” I emphasize the idea because of the ways we (not just students) can so often find ourselves sliding into analyses and interpretations that emphasize repression. When we see the police encountering men who sought sex with other men, for instance, we tend to move them into the boxes of oppressor and oppressed. That may be, in part, the case, but it doesn’t capture Foucault’s argument. (This is, it is worth emphasizing, how I get at some of Foucault’s notions of power without directly addressing it in class or bogging down our conversation).

The four chosen paragraphs (see the handout) emphasize four parts of the overall claim and proceed in order of the book (as well as, I believe, order of difficulty): The “Repressive Hypothesis,” the “Incitement to Discourse,” the “Multiplication of Perversions,” and the “Production of Sexuality.” After introducing Foucault’s basic biography and his contribution to the field (so to explain why we’re going to spend so much effort understanding him), I get students into groups with a single task: explain what one of these paragraphs mean. By removing the argument from the overall context of the book, students are able to better focus on the sentence-level argument being made, without worrying about not grasping the whole thing. That’s not to say that this is easy (it is definitely not). But it is easier to show students that they can break apart difficult texts, isolate the parts from the whole, and, only after understanding them on their own terms, bring them back together.

So, to take one example, the first paragraph lays out the “Repressive Hypothesis.” The paragraph lays out the idea that, beginning in the seventeenth century, the modern West laid out a series of “prohibitions” on how one could take about sex. The Victorian era in particular had an approach to sex could be defined by a single word: “Censorship” (17). For students who have encountered something of Victorian history, they get this on the basis of their vision of the period. For students without such a background, they get it on an intuitive level.

But then, we move to the next paragraph (which follows very closely in the book itself), which directly contradicts the point of the first. This paragraph usually requires more work. The language is more jargony (you have to be ready to define “discourse,” “power,” and other complexities) and the paragraph is constructed on the basis of rejecting the assumptions of the reader. Students need to learn how to read closely to catch the various signs of internal disagreement, of Foucault moving through the argument himself. Take the first sentence. The keyword “however” tells us that the prior point may not be correct. But then rather than telling the reader what he actually believes, Foucault introduces another statement that may be wrong (“I am thinking not so much of the probable increase in ‘illicit’ discourses…” [emphasis added]).  The final sentence, beginning with “But,” finally gets to the actual claim: That “an institutional incitement to speak” during the period contradicts the idea of “censorship” (lots of words to define here too). Lesson 1 then: Foucault believes that the “Repressive Hypothesis” is wrong and that in fact people were encouraged to speak about sex in “endlessly accumulated detail” (18). If students remember just that point, I am more successful than the first time I taught the book.

Breaking the book into simple(r) pieces and then breaking those pieces into smaller bits allows us to slowly scaffold a fuller understanding of the material. It took two class periods and change (so perhaps about 2.5-3 hours total) to go through all four paragraphs last time I did this. That length of time wouldn’t be necessary (or wouldn’t happen naturally) with a less talkative group, but the time is well worth it because of how well it builds a foundation to which we can constantly go back.