"A New Generation Will See the Facts in a New Light": A Queer Retrospective

• In Event: 61.020 - Looking Back, Moving Forward: LGBTQ Research in the History of Education

Abstract

In this presentation I draw from ongoing work to assess the status of the field of queer education history, forty years after the publication of the first book dealing significantly with Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer (LGBTQ) themes in the history of higher education. Pioneering scholar Anna Mary Wells predicted in 1978 that succeeding generations of scholars who encounter issues regarding sexuality in their studies “will see the facts in a new light.” In this retrospective I trace the different ways that education historians have dealt with sexuality in their research. In advancing the argument I briefly review major themes in LGBTQ education history as it has been written over the last four decades, and note political and professional events that marked advances and challenges in the production of LGBTQ scholarship. I have argued elsewhere that education historians were relatively late to incorporate questions regarding sexuality into their research. Now, based in part on the contributions of members of this proposed panel, the field rests on a solid foundation and our attention necessarily turns to consider how LGBTQ history contributes to a more refined understanding of broader questions of historical and educational significance. The wider scope of that question includes our teaching.

Although the academy is more welcoming of research in LGBTQ education history than it was even a decade ago, it is not clear how much of the new scholarship is informing the teaching of undergraduate and graduate students in education history. Therefore, my second objective in this paper is to survey the presence of LGBTQ literature in undergraduate and graduate courses in education history based on a search of course catalogs and survey data.

Rather than a lack of interest in LGBTQ history on the part of education historians or reticence on the part of journal and book editors to publish LGBTQ education history, the current status of the field may reflect a broader problem in the academy, the diminishing institutional presence of education historians, and regard for the humanities in general in higher education. If History Departments and Colleges of Education offer fewer tenure-track lines to education historians, then we face a similar dilemma as that confronted by the early gay historians: too little institutional support in terms of teacher salaries and other resources to maintain scholarly trajectories in LGBTQ education history. We need a clear vision of the terrain to know how to proceed.

Author

• Karen L. Graves, Denison University