I reviewed this book for the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics (review still in the middle of the editorial process), so I don’t want to write too much about it here. I originally didn’t have this on my orals lists. I bought it near the beginning of the pandemic because Duke UP was having a sale and I wanted to stress-buy books, basically. Then I signed up to review it just because it was one of the two books on the call for reviewers that I already owned. It was only after I started reading that I discovered that it’s not only BY someone at CUNY, but it’s ABOUT CUNY (in part). And that one of my own classmates is in the acknowledgements.
I think it’s a pretty mixed-methods book. There’s university case study, there’s some archival work, there’s some auto-ethnography, there’s some classroom case study, there’s examples from student statements. Some of his own descriptions of his methods include “queer narrative case study” and “queer archival practice,” as well as “making poor queer studies imaginable” as a methodological intervention
One thing I really like is Brim’s deliberate choice to include a partial bibliography within the main text of the chapter, to really put front and center the queer scholarship taking place at the College of Staten Island. I thought that was really effective.
The book also surprised me in how Brim frames the Graduate Center as largely separate from the CUNY undergraduate colleges (GC is “rich queer studies” and CSI is “poor queer studies”), since my experience of CUNY is that there’s so much overlap between campuses, given how we’re farmed out to the other colleges as part of our teaching fellowships and how a large number of GC students work part time at other colleges to pay the bills. And how lots (idk if most) GC faculty are primarily appointed at other colleges, their “home campuses.” So it was interesting to me that Brim feels quite differently from me. Since he received his own GC appointment not very long before the book was published, I assume he wrote those sections before he joined the GC faculty, and I wonder if his feelings about the relationship between the schools have changed at all.
When he started out saying how he was going to talk about how rich queer studies schools ought to collaborate with and give resources to and learn from poor queer studies schools, I automatically assumed the rich queer studies school in question was going to be Columbia, not my own school. My friend whose wife is a Columbia medical student says that lots of Columbia students apparently view the GC as romantic since we’re teaching the working class or something.
But anyway, I found the book really helpful in terms of learning about the field of queer studies and the tensions within it, and it helped me think about CUNY through new eyes (I certainly never would have thought of CSI as a queer school), and it’s compositionally interesting re: the mixed methods stuff I talked about above. I also like that he starts the book with a Virginia Woolf quote. Because I love her.
Some Quotes I Marked
(p.9) [Discussing the notion of queer studies faculty as subversive rebels in the academy] “The problem with our story is that when Robin Hood stole, he gave to the poor. And he didn’t get paid to do it.” This is like the whole paradox of being a Marxist (me, not Brim) queer academic. It’s impossible to not contribute to all the ways the academy upholds capitalism and oppression in all of its forms, if you’re going to be working in the academy. As one of my MA teachers told us, “Once you have a PhD, you are part of The System. And you have to deal with that.”
(p.10) “….the undervalued queer methodology of critical compromise— that we both are and are not our institutions. Critical compromise both isolates and dramatizes a problem and promotes a mode of relative questioning.” I don’t know what I think about this but it’s something I need to think about more
(p.10) “Kristen A. Renn discerns a key tension created by the incorporation of queer methods in higher education research, namely, that ‘colleges and universities have evolved to tolerate the generation of queer theory from within but have stalwartly resisted the queering of higher education itself.’ ‘What is more nonqueer,’ she asks, ‘than traditional doctoral education or the tenure stream?’” I really don’t know how you could queer higher ed without making it just…something entirely different than what it is. Which is probably a good thing that needs to happen, but I’m resistant to it for the obvious reasons of how I’m already invested in it.
(p.12) “Less often, queer scholars have navigated class issues methodologically by finding ways to subvert the researcher/researched divide through, for instance, participatory action research in which knowledge making becomes a shared, cross-class endeavor of coinvestigators from inside and outside institutions of higher ed”
(p.13) [In Inside the Ivory Closet], the author “posited a split between the post-Stonewall scholars who increasingly enjoyed and industriously courted institutional status within the academy and pre-Stonewall writers and activists whose primary commitments were to their communities and to making scholarship accessible beyond the academy”
(p.14) (quoting someone else’s quote of another quote from a listserv) “Much of queer theory seems radical only as long as we ignore the class-base of its production and dissemination” YEP
(p.15) “One of the key functions of disciplinarity is to distinguish between the expert and the novice…We need to ask why the rise of interdisciplinarity, so critical of knowledge silos, did not de-stratify higher education in class terms, especially as the supposedly class-attuned framework of intersectionality has been the methodological byword for much interdisciplinary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences”
(p.15) “Attempts at queer-class disordering of the academy often look like relatively enfranchised LGBTQ scholars studying disenfranchised queer people or cultural forms extrinsic to the academy but with whom and which we feel personal/political connections and intellectual attractions”
(p.15) [again quoting from someone else] “As we descend deeper into the ivory tower we must ask ourselves at what cost. To what degree does incorporation challenge our relevance to the same communities who find themselves at the heart of our research?
(p.19) “socioaffective histories of arrival” (this is accompanied by an endnote referencing Queer Phenomenology)
(p.23) “the ‘problem of impossible evidence’ that attends queer scholarship, which is characteristically concerned with elucidating the ‘vagaries of embodied life’”
(p. 71) “higher education might be more closely aligned with class relations and racial capitalism (including the political economies of slavery) than with democracy (its governing political logic).”
(p.77) “…in other words, class analysis might well produce a critical cul de sac. This is one of the dangers of criticality, our prized method of exposing a problem: that we create a critical space to dwell in. But what if criticality prolongs the problem? What if queer criticality loves a hierarchy?”
(p.78) “What would it mean to stop dwelling in criticality, without merely withdrawing from it, thereby untroubling ourselves and entrenching upper-class white silence as the norm?”
(p.79) “Why pick on ourselves, why investigate our own status-based divisions, when others so passionately underplay our queer contributions? Why not just keep shouting ‘neoliberalism’ into the strongest winds blowing against us?”
(p.80-81) “…how do Queer Studies status agents avoid the contradictions that surely arise between being afforded the most elite education in the world and, at best, making unproblematized claims to white middle-class identity, or at worst, not? My guess is that, compared to their rich students, many White Queer Studies status agents actually feel middle class. Does such a comparison measure in miles differences that scale down to inches when the entire racialized hierarchy of the academy is surveyed? How are we to gauge class status in the academy?” I don’t have a good answer to this but I think it’s important
This quote is actually from Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” but it’s on page 98 of Brim: “If one’s desire lines up with the normative compulsion to heterosexuality, how does one ever separate that desire from that compulsion?”
(p.102) “mainstream Queer Studies likes to pretend that its job is not to prepare students to be workers or part of the working class”
(p.103) “Jobs in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union became queer because they were union jobs. In other words, queers were protected, together, by a solidarity that exceeded their sexual and gender identity but that was inseparable from it.”
(p.116) “Queer Studies can reorient itself to the intellectual work of making better employees in the very real sense that it can enable people to recognize and confront the conditions of their employment that undermine them as queer, of color, gender nonconforming, women workers, and people.”
Sources To Look Up
Kristen A. Renn, “LGBT and Queer Research in Higher Education”
Jeffrey Escoffier, “Inside the Ivory Closet: The Challenge Facing Lesbian and Gay Studies”
Resilience: Queer Professors from the Working Class
“The Racialized Erotics of Participatory Research” Jessica Fields
Tilting the Tower: Lesbians, Teaching, Queer Subjects, by Linda Garber
“Queering the Profession, or Just Professionalizing Queers?” by Sarah Chinn
Coming Out Under Fire, by Allan Berube
The Universities and the Gay Experience (intro is by John D’Emilio, idk if the whole thing is by him)
The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism, by Kevin Floyd
Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (Anne Balay)
Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Steel Workers (Anne Balay)
Irresistible Revolution, by Urvashi Vaid
Our in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America, by Miriam Frank
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, by tz karakashian