Kind of a Senior Post; or Who Really Knows Anything, Anyway?

Y’all, I kind of don’t know what to write. I’ve entered that point in the semester where I don’t have enough time to sit down and go over all the things I have to do because I have so many things to do. I know I’m not alone in that – so many of my friends are writing theses, or applying for jobs or study abroad, or rehearsing for recitals, or preparing furiously for yet another round of midterms. (Seriously, though – what is up with multiple midterms? It’s my senior year here and I still don’t understand the point. But I digress.) In addition to all of that, those of us who are nearing graduation are starting to think about what we’ll be doing after college, when we’re not trying desperately to forget that there is life after college.

I actually have it pretty easy: I know that, barring something apocalyptic, I’m going to graduate school next year to eventually earn my PhD. But everything other than that hard fact is in a scary state of flux. I don’t know where I’m going to live – there are no Room Picks for apartments, and I’m not even 100% sure where I’ll be, geographically speaking. I don’t know anybody at any of the schools to which I have applied, and I’ll be leaving most of my friends – and my girlfriend - here in North Carolina (or wherever they’re going after graduation). I don’t even know what my place will be within the LGBTQA community at my future institution. A good deal of my sense of self and personal growth is due to my involvement, however much or little over the years, in Duke’s LGBTQA community. I know where I fit at Duke, and now, just as I’ve gotten comfortable, I must leave to make a new place for myself somewhere else. So, given all of that uncertainty, is it any wonder that I don’t know what to write for this blog?

Why Sexualilty Studies Matter

[Editor's Note: Earlier this year, we announced that we would be including faculty voices on the blog. We've been fortunate to have Dr. G contribute several posts over the year, and we are thrilled to introduce you to our newest and first "out" faculty blog writer, Dr. Ara Wilson. Stay tuned for more faculty posts before the end of the year!]

Given my position as a faculty member at Duke, not only a queer faculty member but also the director of the program in the study of sexualities, it is my duty to write about knowledge. Often when we talk about sexuality or lgbt issues in the university, we do so without noticing the location, as an institution dedicated to knowledge production. I think this misses out on the particular nature of the university and particularly when that university hosts a free-standing academic program focused on sexuality. Very few colleges can say that.

Duke’s program in the study of sexualities has a longer history, dating to gay and lesbian faculty interest in the 1990s. Somewhere along the way efforts, the program’s title evolved into the current, lower-case form. In 2006, Duke hired a professor to develop a skeletal set-up into a functional certificate program. The program at Duke is for now anchored in the certificate program, the curriculum of six courses that end with a capstone in Queer Theory. But really the program is larger than the institutional form of the certificate program. The SXL program reaches many students through the four or so courses we offer each semester, which range from Primate Sexuality to the Dr. Janie Long’s popular seminar on Clinical Issues for LGBTQ to seminars on race and sexuality. It also offers a regular slate of programming, including a series co-sponsored with the LGBT Center called Profiles in Sexuality Research that showcases Duke faculty research from such fields as Economics, the Medical School, African and African American Studies, and Evolutionary Anthropology. SXL also holds an annual queer theory lecture. This year’s lecture is by Tim Dean, the author of a controversial book on the subculture of barebacking.


Rather than tell you everything the SXL program does, though-–you can find that on our handsome website--I want to invite reflection on the place of all sorts of knowledge that are relevant to non-normative sexual and gender lives. How do we know what we know about sexual orientation? Where does the knowledge come from? The scholarship of faculty working on queer issues, like Antonio Viego, Robyn Wiegman, or Sean Metzger, offers a mode of knowledge that falls under the category of critical theory, which essentially means a knowledge that examines received categories, including the categories used in the LGBT world. Studies in neuropsychology or evolutionary anthropology will emphasize biological dimensions of sexuality. These two domains, of critical queer theory and biological frameworks, hold starkly different views of what human sexuality is. But in truth, most people do not get their everyday working sense of sexuality from coursework even if they were not subject to an abstinence-only education in high school. Most people draw on a kind of folk knowledge of sexuality, an amalgam of popular science, currents in thinking, and the idioms available to frame their own experience.

The point of having a program dedicated to the study of sexuality is not only to provide institutional space to learn about academic scholarship on the issue but also more generally, to recognize the significance of knowledge itself for queer life and sexuality in general. After all, the knowledge of experts in religion or psychiatry were key to shaping Western societies’ view of homosexuality. Of course we may think some knowledge about sexuality is truer or more liberating or politically more effective than other versions (I know I do). But beyond questions of true or false, liberal or conservative, it is worth recognizing that the domain of knowledge has a powerful influence on how we understand our own erotic life and the place of alternative sex/gender expressions in society.

LGBTQ Female Role Models: Dorothy Allison [at DUKE!]

Who is Dorothy Allison?

To begin, Dorothy Allison is the feminist and queer writer who is COMING to DUKE this Friday, September 23rd to give presentations around campus! [See the bottom of the post for event times and dates.]

Duke acquired Dorothy Allison's papers September of last year, and was excited to bring her work to our Rare Books and Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) here at Duke. Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison is a natural fit as a Southern writer who is one of the foremost queer and feminist American writers of the 21st century in her fields.

As the first person in her family to graduate from high school or college, Allison studied anthropology in Eckerd College on a National Merit scholarship, and pursued graduate studies at Florida State University. She held a variety of jobs, and later

moved to NYC, where she enrolled in The New School (a historically progressive academic college in NYC) and in 1981 recieved her M.A. in urban anthropology. While in college, Allison credits a feminist "collective" for introducing her to feminism and credits "militant feminists" for encouraging her to write.

Allison is both a non-fiction and fiction writer, writing novels such as Cavedweller, which brings up issues on class, sexuality, female bonds, domestic violence, Southern society, child sexual abuse, and non-fiction pieces such as "The Women Who Hate Me", which was a response of Allison to critics of her political and social activism. Winner of three Lambda Book Awards, the Lesbian Book award and the National Book Award (p.s. Alice Walker won the National Book Award too! Notice a queer women's authorship trend??) today she continues to write and is a visiting professor at Emory University and Davidson College.

Her social activism takes varied forms, and she is one of the co-founders of the "Lesbian Sex Mafia" in New York City, a LGBTQ women's support group that promotes safer sex regardless of sexual preferences and type of sexual act, emphasizing a woman's choice, unihibited gender and sexual expression, consent, and BDSM.

After realizing Dorothy Allison was coming to Duke-I decided to start reading her collection of semi-autobiographical short stories, "Trash", which has won the Lambda and Lesbian Book Awards. It's moving and powerful and vulnerability and strength all in the same text:

"There was a day in my life when I decided to live..."

"I became an escapee-one of the ones others talk about. I became the one who got away, who got glasses from the Lions Club, a job from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and finally went to college on a scholarship."

"Even now I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die."

"I wrote out my memories of the women. My terror and lust for my own kind; the souts and arguments; the long, slow glances and slower approaches; the way my hands always shook when I would finally touch the flesh I could barely admit I wanted, the way I could never ask for what I wanted, never accept it if they offered....-all the stories of my family, my childhood, and the relentless deadening poverty and shame I had always tried to hide because I knew no one would believe what I could tell them about it."

"I write stories...I put on a page a third look at what I've seen in life-the condensed and reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working clas lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine."

-Dorothy Allison, "Trash" (1988).

Here at Duke we are lucky enough to have prominent scholars and leaders in various fields come to our campus, to give lectures to students, engage us, and allow us to ask questions that explore their works. Don't miss this chance to meet Dorothy Allison and discuss her works in person!

Where can we meet Dorothy Allison?

Two or Three Things: Readings from the Works of Dorothy Allison

Thursday, September 22, 4:00 p.m.

Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library

Dorothy Allison in Conversation with Students

Friday, September 23, 12:00 p.m.

Center for LGBT Life

Out in the South: Writers in Conversation Featuring Dorothy Allison, Shirlette Ammons, Jim Grimsley, and Minnie Bruce Pratt

Friday, September 23, 7:00 p.m.

White Lecture Hall, East Campus

[See the Duke University Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture in the RBMSCL website for more information, here.]