Before class on Tuesday, please post a comment that explores and/or explains the question you'll be answering in your major blog post that is due on Thursday. As you share with us the direction you'll be moving in, include at least two quotations or examples (with citations) from our course reading that you think will help you anchor your major blog post in evidence.
Aim for 250 words. I look forward to seeing how your major blog post is evolving.
Aim for 250 words. I look forward to seeing how your major blog post is evolving.
For my blog post on Thursday, I’m thinking about elaborating on the questions: why is it important for contemporary queer activists to know and understand queer history? What examples from the past are especially important to consider? Why? And What has made (and makes queer resistance possible and effective? Which stories of resistance seem especially important and appropriate for our current context? Why? With these questions, I’m planning on starting off by discussing the history of the LGBTQ+ community, but starting with the Stonewall riot. To me, Stonewall was particularly significant because it sparked the creations of various of equal rights group; it was the “turning point” for the LGBTQ+ movement. I have a couple quotes from Leila Rupp that I wanted to include explaining the significance of Stonewall. The first quote explains how Stonewall “came to symbolize self-acceptance, pride, and resistance” (Rupp, 177). The second quote talks about the increase of equal rights groups and how before 1973 “there were only fifty lesbian or gay groups across the country, but by 1973 these had proliferated into more than a thousand (Rupp, 178). As I progress with my blog post, I’m hoping to include more quotes from Lillian Faderman because I think she does a good job explaining the AIDS epidemic and how the LGBTQ+ community continued to fight for their rights even when it seems like all hopes was lost. My plan right now is to start with the Stonewall riot and gradually make my way to the AIDS epidemic.
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ReplyDeleteThe question I want to elaborate on for the second major blog post is what should we be teaching about queer history in high school and why? The reason I want to write about this is because as a WAGS major, my goal is to become a sex education teacher. I don’t believe it’s right that we, as educators, don’t teach minors how to have safe sex and healthy relationships. The reason I want to focus on queer youth the most is because even straight kids have some sex education, in things like biology classes. Queer youth don’t get any type of sex education. Some may counter this argument by stating that people don’t come out sometimes until they’re full grown adults. This is why it’s more important than ever to teach kids about safe sex for queer people as well as for straight people. As they get older, if they do come out when they are older they will have this education to be safe while having sex. People already stigmatize sex education because they believe that children don’t need to learn about it because they’re not having it. In Faderman’s book she states, “[Ronald] Reagen himself wouldn’t even utter the words AIDS until his good friend from Hollywood days, Rock Hudson, died of it in 1985”(pg 418). This helps prove that just because we don’t talk about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. People still die even if it’s not talked about which is why if we have this conversation, people will understand that change will happen if people are educated. On page 439 Faderman talks about how that once drugs started to become available in 1996, the deaths caused by AIDS were dropped by about 50%. This was caused by people becoming educated even when they didn’t want to be. This is why we need LGBTQIA+ sex education in schools. If people become educated then we can prevent epidemics like this happening. We can also prevent AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases in LGBTQIA+ youth because they’ll be educated in safe sex.
Thank you for your comment!
DeleteFor my blog post on Thursday, I want to explore answers to these questions: Why is it important for contemporary queer activists to know and understand queer history? What examples from the past are especially important to consider? Why?
ReplyDeleteI am hoping to use a bit of Kelli Peterson’s story from the documentary, Out Of The Past because before she knew about the journeys people like her face, she thought she was alone. In the end, she was not after she took the time to research queer history. It also empowered her to fight for the Gay-Straight Alliance at her high school. I am also wanting to talk about how events such as the existence of Boston Marriages and World War II were contributing factors to queer history, and why they should be brought up more within LGBTQIA+ history. To add on, I will bring up larger news such as Stonewall and the AIDS epidemic.
One quote I will add is from Rupp’s Becoming a People:
“From the very beginning of wartime mobilization in 1941, attempts to eliminate homosexuals from the ranks of fighting men called attention to their existence.” (Rupp 134).
This one not only goes for the history aspect, but it made people in that time that they were not alone with these feelings as well. I’m also planning on using another Rupp quote from her conclusion chapter:
“The events at Greenwich Village came to symbolize self-acceptance, pride, and resistance in contrast to assimilationist tendencies of the homophile movement.” (Rupp 177).
This event inspired many people who do not identify as straight or with the biological gender to come out of the shadows and fight for their right to be with whoever they choose to be with.
Thanks for your comment and getting started on your major blog post!
DeleteA question which I wish to explore for my blogpost this Thursday is: What has made (and makes) queer resistance possible and effective? Which stories of resistance seem especially important and appropriate for our current context? Why? I was planning on using Faderman's and Rupp's discussions and insights on the activists and individuals who sacrificed everything in order to give a name to queer resistance.
ReplyDeleteFaderman's The Gay Revolution embarked on the theme of intersectionality that faced a part of the LGBTQ community that has a long way (personal experience of growing up in a Latino home around this culture) to come for queer resistance, "Ramirez and Palencia…would be a bridge to represent Latinos to the mainstream gay and lesbian world, and gays and lesbians to the Latino world" (Faderman 420).
Stories of those during, before, and after the Stonewall riots are important for current context because they paved the way of independence and freedom of being able to educate and express need for change such as the ACT UP-ers who's "energy and impudence were reminiscent of the first days of the old Gay Liberation Front" (Faderman 430). History of resistance allows for a shift in consciousness especially though how activists were taught to talk through the media, not to them. I will then go more in depth on how media plays a significant role in how we are educated and even how we see first-hand, what politicians in office do for the people who are asking for change.
For my major blog post I will be focusing on the questions "What makes writing queer history so challenging? What moments from these histories provide us with especially vexing challenges to make sense of? Why is it important to grapple with them?" I would like for the focus of this blog post to be on the fact that queer history gone unrecorded and look into why that is. I also want to look into the effects that lack of exposure to queer history has had on the queer community. on page 21 Hall says, “…queers have lived often in ignorance of each other and and of queer-relevant historical information from the near, as well as distant, past.” By looking into why queer history has gone unrecorded and unreported for so long, I think it will give us a lense through which to look at sexual expression and identity. I think that the failure to record queer history has affected the way that each generation has expressed and claimed their queer identity. Hall does a good job of explaining this when he says, “But certainly naming something and giving it a history does make it available as a way of organizing one’s identity and of seeing and proactively creating affiliations.”
ReplyDeleteThanks for letting us know how you're getting started on your major blog post!
DeleteThe question that I am interested in answering on my major blog post is imagine you are writing to an audience of social studies students and history teachers. What should they be teaching about queer history in high school, and why? How might they best approach developing and delivering a curriculum? I think that this is important because I did most of the queer history that I had learned within in the last few weeks. I was surprised to see just how damaging that queer history has been to the LGBTQA community and I think if students learned a little about it in high school then in the future more people might realize just how important queer justice is. I think high school students would benefit from seeing just how much courage queer people had in history and hopefully encourage them to get involved. As Rupp says, “even for those that remain closeted or who disdain politics or who find the movement inhospitable, the world has undergone a sea of change as a result of new forms of activism.” (181) I think it is important for high school students to see just how powerful activism in queer history is because at the very least maybe it could show students how activism can be effective to create change in the world. I think history in general is important to learn about because history can repeat itself and hopefully queer history can avoid repeating queer history if they knew more about it. Faderman says in the Plague, “they knew that all the progress that had been made in the 1970s could be reversed and history could easily repeat itself. So they fought with all their might against that happening, and they won.” (440) If the general public knew of the fights that queer people had to fight through history then maybe we can avoid history reversing itself and avoid making all the fighting that the LGBTQA community did ineffective.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment and your initial thoughts on this next major blog post!
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ReplyDeleteFirst frame the lessons around encouragement for critical thinking, teaching students to question everything, especially things that we consider “normal.” Maybe begin with David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water,” and frame sexuality as water, or the air we breathe- There are things we are so entrenched in, link hetero and cis normativity, that many of us do not question their origin, or even relevance in our lives. We ought to question these things in pursuit of truth, for our collective wellbeing and transcend oppressive, restrictive structures and systems. Using this premise, a general call to action, then transition into Queer Theory, a valuable example of this in real time. As Donald Hall expresses about the work of queer theory, “If it is to retain its ability to abrade the natural, queer must be continuously denaturalized itself, And this means posing and continuing to pose some very hard questions about its omissions, blindspots, normal practices,and nervous avoidances.” (Hall 88).The way we act as well as the way we speak is significant, and sustaining and building on queer history allows for historically marginalized communities, past and present, to develop their own identity relative to the world around them, and to get the sense that they are not alone. Becoming familiar with queer history, integrating it into other histories taught so as not to frame it as other, is important for everyone in understanding who they are, particularly in these formative years. Queerness is complex, and despite our societal tendency to make things black and white, we can benefit from complicating our simplistic understandings of words and attached ideas. Language, though often taken for granted, holds weight. Furthermore, “All language is language that encodes the interest of a specialized group,” (Hall 56) so in order to work to understand all groups in our society, we must work to understand terminology contextually, and in order to foster an inclusive society we must work to deconstruct all that goes into coding language, supporting the interests of certain groups. In order to know anything with a degree of certainty, we must first question everything. What better time to deconstruct everything you thought you knew than high school?
Thank you for your thinking here about your next major blog post!
DeleteFor my blog post on Thursday, I want to further explore the questions- “Why is it important for contemporary queer activists to know and understand queer history?” And “What examples from the past are especially important to consider?” I want to use Kelli Peterson as my main example of a contemporary queer activist. For Kelli, during her fight for equality, especially at the beginning, she felt very alone and under supported by her larger community and the world. It took Kelli until she was deeper in her fight to look back at queer history. I think if she would have had more context and historical events to back her up, she could have proven her point even further. For example, Kelli could have deeply looked into and reflected on the history of Lesbian Feminism as described in (Rupp 183-189). And not only drawn on the triumphs for inspiration, but also see their setbacks as a lesson.
ReplyDeleteSecondly I want to draw on Rupp’s Becoming a People and specifically, Stonewall. “What happened at Stonewall Inn reflected butch resistance and drag queen humor as well as the growing militance of homophile activism and the impact of the civil-rights movement, the New Left, and the women’s movement. That night bridged old and new” (Rupp 178). I think this quote highlights the importance of using and studying queer history, mainly for future resistance.
Thanks for getting started on your next major blog post and sharing your thinking about these questions!
DeleteI will be exploring "What makes writing queer history so challenging? What moments from these histories provide us with especially vexing challenges to make sense of? Why is it important to grapple with them?". I will be going into why it is so hard to call something queer history and how you would be able to define events as such. An example of a part of history that lies in the grey area is transgender history. For a long time their rights and voices were not heard or respected even within the community. Activist Namaste explains that other queer members, "have often oppressed gender nonconformists",(97). Going further to explain that this extends to other members of LGBTQIA+ that do not fit certain norms or criteria for the community.
ReplyDeleteWhile reading Faderman, I started to wonder about the invisibility of people with AIDS and people who are HIV+, and how much of their history must have been erased due to the widespread panic. Faderman talks about how "[Ronald] Regan himself wouldn't even utter the word AIDS until his good friend from Hollywood days, Rocky Hudson died of it in 1985" (418). I think it's important to highlights the huge chunks that are missing.
Thank you for your comment and for sharing some of your emerging thoughts on your next blog post!
DeleteThe questions I will be focusing on for part of my essay is Why is it important for contemporary queer activists to know and understand queer history? I think that it is important to study the history of queer activism due to the fact that it has shaped a lot of history even if it has not been shown throughout the textbooks used in regular classes. An example that is not talked about in text books is the Homophile Years where, “Various branches and agencies of the national government in Washington investigated, exposed, excluded, harassed, purged, and spied upon gay Americans.” (D’Emilio, 3) This is not included within the history textbooks which is a larger part of the 50’s and empowered the 60’s movements post stonewall. Post stonewall transformations are also not shown within the textbooks, “There was less discrimination and harassment, greater visibility, and a much larger and more congenial gay world.” (D’Emilio 19) I plan to discuss how this effects the history of activism at this time. I plan on focusing mainly on post stonewall D’Emilio because that it is where i see the most active and public activism.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment and for your initial thoughts on your next major blog post!
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