With so much affect percolating in the public discourse around the recent spate of gay teen suicides, what can an academic teach-in offer vis-à-vis these events? This Periscope dossier features an eclectic collection of essays, blogs, position papers, and op-eds from a multidisciplinary group of scholars zeroing in on a spectrum of issues, from gay rage and new technologies of sexuality to anti-bullying legislation. It organizes a kind of online teach-in, a portal to the multiple conversations and action happening around the country about gay teen suicide.>>
Queer Suicide: A Teach-In
This Periscope dossier features an eclectic collection of essays, blogs, position papers, and op-eds from a multidisciplinary group of scholars zeroing in on a spectrum of issues related to queer suicide, from gay rage and new technologies of sexuality to anti-bullying legislation. It organizes a kind of online teach-in, a portal to the multiple conversations and action happening around the country about gay teen suicide.
Photo by Jill H. Casid, 2010
There are many things lost in the naming of a death as a "gay youth suicide." I want to focus on two aspects of this naming: one, what is contained in the category of sexuality and two, what kinds of normative temporal assumptions are produced through the "event" of suicide. As a faculty member of Rutgers University, where the most spectacular of the suicides to date occurred, that of Tyler Clementi, I cannot help but want to provide better context for the local circumstances of his death. All three students (Clementi, Ravi, and Wei) involved in the sex surveillance leading up to the suicide were living on Busch campus in Piscataway, New Jersey, already codified as the science/engineer/pre-med "geek" campus (some...>>
I have been teaching a lecture class on "Religion, Sexuality, and American Public Life" at New York University since 2004. I love teaching this class. The students (the class size is usually capped at 60) are uniformly engaged and always manage to surprise me -- in the very best way. Some share of the students are religious studies or gender and sexuality studies majors. But the vast majority of the students take the class as an elective. Their motives are diverse. Some are drawn by the chance to investigate the intersection of religious and sexual politics. Other students, both queer and straight, are struggling with the place of religion in their own lives. There are avowed atheists in the class,...>>
At bullybloggers, the blogging site that Lisa Duggan, Jose Munoz and Tavia Nyong'o and I sometimes call our internet home, we believe in bullies. No, not those kinds of bullies, not Tennessee Williams' no-necked monsters, the brutish boys who make it their business to keep everyone else in line. We believe in a queer breed of bullies, bullies who bash back. In actual fact, lots of queer girls (and I speak from experience) do begin their lives as bullying types as they fight their way out of the restrictions of femininity. Some find queerness to be a refuge from the ravages of teenage heterosexuality. And their queerness, especially if it comes with certain forms of social rejection from boys, while...>>
Suicide is an act of violence. Most of the recent spate of suicides committed by young gay men have been attributed to homophobic bullying. But killing oneself is not necessarily an act of fear and escape. The one who is bullied or harassed certainly feels threatened, and desires flight, but this is also accompanied by a feeling of anger at the world for allowing this, allowing this injustice, allowing such pain to exist. The gay youth is overwhelmed by a feeling of rage but cannot find a suitable outlet for his violent feeling that is compatible with the desire not to harm others. Because he is a gay youth and knows firsthand what it is to suffer at the hand...>>
It is difficult but nonetheless urgent for all of us who engage with or impact young people in various ways to respond to the many terrible events of the last several weeks: the devastating spate of LBGTQ teen suicides, as well as horrific cases of gay bashing and torture, homophobic remarks and hate speech. Further, it is urgent for us to do so in ways that demonstrate the imperative of response across all areas of our work and our lives. As someone who works teaching college students in a department of "Modern Culture and Media" and a program in "Gender and Sexuality Studies," I feel that it is crucial for me, along with my students, to think through the intersection of...>>
At this point in my career I find myself situated in two different worlds of the university: I teach for gender and sexuality studies (my course at the moment is called "Bodies Out of Bounds"), and I co-edit a journal on feminist pedagogy; at the same, I direct the campus women's center, a place where students come to develop programs on issues around gender. I see my job as helping students contextualize their activist work within their academic work, and talking with classes at times about how to turn their theoretical work into practice. In other words, I see my work as a continuous series of questions about the intersections of theory and practice. The two sides of my academic...>>
Of the many questions raised in the academy as well as the blogosphere, one stands out for its poignancy and compassion: are we as a society capable of loving queer kids? Artist David Wojnarowicz's 1990 image, Untitled (One Day This Kid...), takes on this difficult question by juxtaposing a generic image of an all-American white boy (a self-image) with a litany of subjunctive projections ("One day this kid will...") marking the queer child's body as the site upon which institutionalized and internalized homophobia would inevitably rear its ugly head. The narrative inevitability of violence experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth that this artwork chillingly encapsulates is not merely a kid issue.In our so-called adult world, the range...>>
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