This talk contributes to the understanding of queer studies as a class-based knowledge project. Brim traces the relationship between queer academia’s aspirational mood and the increasing extraction and relocation of queer faculty and students from working-class places to elitist ones. What do such simultaneous acts of community building and busting mean for the field? Brim suggests that within this complicated dynamic the need—and the opportunity— to bolster cross-class queer studies relationships comes into focus. The video recording is available to view here.
Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies in the English department at Colllege of Staten Island, City University of New York, with a faculty appointment at the Graduate Center in the Women’s and Gender Studies M.A. Program. His most recent book, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University(Duke University Press, 2020), reorients the field of queer studies away from elite institutions of higher education and toward working-class schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. Poor Queer Studies won the Working-Class Studies Association’s 2021 Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey Award and was a finalist for the O.L. Davis Jr. Outstanding Book in Education Award, presented by the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum.
Duke’s annual Queer Theory Lectures honor and celebrate the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Over the last decade, the Sedgwick lecture has featured leading scholars in queer theory, including Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Lee Edelman, and Samuel R. Delany. Previously recorded Queer Theory Lectures can be viewed here.