Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies
The Graduate Center offers an interdisciplinary concentration in Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies, a rapidly growing, multi-disciplinary enterprise whose goal is the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered peoples and their histories and cultures, as well as the study of sexuality and its role in the deployment of cultural and social power. Lesbian and Gay Studies is a system of inquiry that examines the roles of same-sex desire across and among cultures and histories. Queer Studies views sexuality not as a stable category of identification or as merely a series of physical acts, but sees desire itself as a cultural construction that is central to the institutionalization and normalization of certain practices and discourses that organize social relations and hierarchies. Together, the two constitute a field whose best work often weaves together both types of analysis. The concentration offers a core course, Introduction to Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies.
As an interdisciplinary concentration, Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies insists on a pluralistic, multicultural, and comparative approach in its negotiation within national, racial, ethnic, religious, economic, gender, and age-defined communities. More than a response to this demographic imperative, this field actively seeks to collapse fields of inquiry, to reveal contradictions and confrontations within and among disciplines, and to suggest a new model for academic study within the university. Its development has paralleled the fields of women’s studies and race studies, emerging as a separate area of inquiry in the 1980s, although much work was being done by individual scholars prior to that time. The various names of already institutionalized programs in the field—“Sexuality Studies,” “Queer Studies,” and “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Studies”—reflect the plurality of the field’s methodological approaches.
The field traverses the arts, humanities, and the social sciences—including literary theory, film theory, cultural and social history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science, theatre, economics—as well as the natural sciences—biology, epidemiology, immunology, genetics. Its antecedents can be traced back to the emergence of “sexology” as a legitimate field of academic investigation and scholarship in the nineteenth century. Sexology coincided with the institution of many now-traditional scientific and humanistic disciplines within the academy. The rationalization of knowledge into discrete disciplines corresponded with the construction of “the homosexual” within these newly emerging discourses as a crime, an illness, a person, and a problem to be solved. In Lesbian/Gay/Queer Studies, heterosexuality and homosexuality are viewed as identities and social statuses, as categories of knowledge, and as languages that frame what we understand as bodies; as such, the domain of inquiry transcends traditional disciplinary constructs and demands new forms of scholastic endeavors.
Students are required to matriculate in one of the Graduate Center’s established doctoral programs.
For further information, interested students should contact Professor Sarah Chinn , Ph.D. Program in English, The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016, 1-212-817-1955.
