Subject to Identity

You Have 0 Item(s) In Cart |

My Account |

Order Status |

Check Out |

Subject to Identity
Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education

Click on image to enlarge

Susan Talburt - Author

SUNY series, Identities in the Classroom

Price: $55.50
Hardcover - 296 pages

Release Date: March 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4571-2
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4571-6

Price: $29.95
Paperback - 296 pages

Release Date: March 2000

ISBN10: 0-7914-4572-0
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-4572-3

Summary

Challenges the ways "lesbian academics" have been socially constructed.

"A carefully conceived, brilliantly executed piece of work." -- William F. Pinar, coeditor of Understanding Curriculum as Racial Text: Representations of Identity and Difference in Education

This interpretive ethnography explores the academic practices of three lesbian faculty members at Liberal U., a public research university. Drawing on poststructural theories, the text takes readers beyond constructions of lesbian faculty that rely on identity, voices, and visibility to consider the construction and shifting meanings of academic research, teaching, and collegial relations in practice. Talburt depicts the complicated relations of knowledge, identity, and sexuality as interrelated terms whose meanings are constructed as contingent possibilities. This book challenges us to rethink policy and practice, identity and difference, and knowledge and ignorance as lived and created in constantly shifting networks of relation.

"The combination of respect for participant stories and sophisticated methodological understanding of the limits of 'authenticity' and 'voice' kept me turning the pages. The crisis of representation cuts across disciplines. This book enacts a way to use the ruins of correspondence theories of the real as a fruitful site for practices of doing and reporting feminist qualitative research that is lively, readable, and focused." -- Patti Lather, author of Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy within the Postmodern

"I find this book compelling on a number of levels. Perhaps most interesting to me are the ways in which the author renders complex performances that depict three very different women--each a 'lesbian academic'--putting the codified space of the academy to new uses, thereby engendering new modes of thought that bring us beyond identity categories, visibility politics and a reliance on tropes of voice. These are extraordinary achievements." --Paula M. Salvio, University of New Hampshire

Susan Talburt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She is coeditor of Thinking Queer: Sexuality, Culture, and Education.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Haunted Questions, Inhabited Spaces

Seeking to Found a Locatin: The Gay Academic Union
Lesbian Identity Politics: The Limitations of Full Disclosure
Identity into Practice
Intellectual Practice among the Ruins
Delimiting Lesbian Academic Spaces
Entering the Inquiry
Narrative Knowing as Practice

2. Social and Institutional Places and Spaces

Entering Oasis and Liberal U: Island Communities
Finding a Place for Diversity
Centering Gays and Lesbians
Centering Liberal U: "The Circles in Which We Move"
Confessing Sins: The Work of Faculty
Locating Knowledges and Identities

3. Displacing Pedagogical Positionings

Opening Scenes
Im/Personal Pedagogies
Carol: Critical Enlightenment
Cross-Directions: Carol's Performances of Authority and Identity
Julie: Complications as Response
Stirring Them Up: Julie's "Particular Kind of Embodiment"
Olivia: Is There a Text in This Class?
"We Can't Reduce the Play [or Olivia] to One Message"
Less Euclidean Spaces

4. Departmental Academic and Social Knowledges

Other/Same
Julie and the Liminal Gap
Carol and Shifting Authority
Olivia and the Performance of Locations
Appropriation and Practice

5. Lesbian/Intellectual

Olivia: "The Cranky Lesbian Critic"
Carol: "You Don't Just Stay in a Place and Wallow in It"
Julie: "Responding to a Real Concrete Problem"
Exceeding Locations: Practices of the Self
Queer Ethnographic Spaces

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Related Subjects

Gender Studies
Higher Education
Identity
Lesbian / Gay Studies

36181/36182(PR/SG/)