Doing Otherwise: CLAGS @ 40 in the Late-Stage Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at The Graduate Center, CUNY is the first university-based research center in the United States explicitly devoted to the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer issues. CUNY is the nation’s largest urban public university, serving predominantly students of color, first generation, immigrant, poor and working-class students. Under resourced and overextended, in its 40 years CLAGS has nonetheless transformed the field. This roundtable considers CLAGS's history with an eye to its present–and future.

CLAGS was birthed in 1986, amongst friends in the living room of the legendary historian and gay rights activist, Martin B. Duberman. Against the backdrop of the genocidal AIDS epidemic, CLAGS aimed to center the study of sexuality and to build an archive of queer epistemologies, politics, and living deemed aberrant and disallowed within academic spaces. CLAGS found a space within CUNY where Black, queer, and working-class academic workers had already fought to make room for Black and ethnic studies. And over the years, through cutting edge conferences and symposia, free public programming, flagship lectures, and a broad range of fellowships and awards (from 1995’s Black Nations/Queer Nations and 1998’s Queer Globalizations conferences, to the David R. Kessler and José Esteban Muñoz awardees, to the free, public Seminars in the City), CLAGS has become an intellectual home for LGBTQ academics and everyone interested in the study of gender and sexuality across the nation.

Over the years, CLAGS has helped us imagine American studies otherwise by centering the study of sexuality to understand what queer studies might “have to say about empire, globalization, neoliberalism, sovereignty, terrorism.” Highlighting the intersections of race, ethnicity, nation, disability, gender, and sexuality, CLAGS has nurtured todays queer and trans studies -- including queer of color critique, transnational and diasporic queer studies, trans theory, and razor-sharp critiques of the political and public sphere. CLAGS has helped us understand the links between sexuality and the processes of normalization and immobilization through which the American late stage empire ensures its legitimacy and longevity–in order to unravel them.

Today we face a new era of attacks – both on queer and trans lives and on our scholarship by the current federal administration. CLAGS must continue to fight for its survival in the face of increasing institutional divestment. In this context, this roundtable considers the role CLAGS could play over the next 40 years. We ask: what does it mean to be the first university-based research center devoted to LGBTQ issues in the face of recent public demonization of these very issues and identities? How do we not only survive this moment but adjust and adapt to more effectively serve the needs of all of our communities? What do queer and trans studies offer now and can we draw on our past to guide us into different futures – perhaps ones portending the demise of empire? How can we imagine queer and trans frameworks within American Studies otherwise?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Terrance Wooten, Davidson College

Panelists

• Debarati Biswas, City Tech, CUNY

• Matt Brim, CUNY College of Staten Island

• Justin T Brown, LaGuardia Community College

• James K Harris, CUNY Bronx Community College

• Laura Westengard, CUNY New York City College of Technology

Comment

• Margot Weiss, Wesleyan University

Biographical Information

Chair: Terrance Wooten
Terrance Wooten’s interdisciplinary research focuses on intersectional approaches to examining structural inequality through a number of varied sites: homelessness, the law, and institutions of higher education. Wooten’s research is rooted in Black queer and feminist scholarship and activism to offer alternative ways of addressing structural inequality as well as make legible various gaps in pre-existing models for addressing structural inequality. Wooten is currently working on his first book manuscript, Registered: Homelessness, Sex Offense, and Carceral Sexuality (under contract, University of California Press), which examines how those who “register” as sex offenders and homeless in the DC metropolitan area are regulated and managed through racialized modes of social control. Wooten has published articles in differences, Feminist Formations, The Black Scholar, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, American Psychologist, and Kalfou.


Panelist: Debarati Biswas
Debarati Biswas (she/her) is assistant professor of African American studies and the coordinator of the Black Visual Cultures minor at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Her teaching and research interests include contemporary Black and U.S. ethnic literatures, queer theory, radical Black feminism, climate fictions, and decolonial thought. Biswas is currently working on her first book monograph about the affective and embodied dimensions of Blackness and queerness in carceral spaces—prison, inner city, and single-room-occupancy hotel—in African American literature and culture. She serves on the editorial board of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and is the co-chair of the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. She is a co-guest editor of the WSQ special issue, "Unbearable Being(s)." Her writing appears in or is forthcoming in Social Text, WSQ, Public Books, and Teen Vogue. Biswas has also co-produced an award-winning docu-fictional webseries, Three Trembling Cities, on immigrants of color in NYC.

Panelist: James Harris
Dr. James K. Harris received his PhD in English from The Ohio State University in 2017. Since 2018 he has been an Assistant Professor of English specializing in African American Literature at Bronx Community College, part of the City University of New York. His current book project, Forbidden Youth: Black Young Adult Literature, and Other Provocations, explores the creation and development of a distinctly Black tradition of YA literature. His research has appeared in the edited collection Future Humans in Fiction and Film (Cambridge Scholars Press 2018) as well as the Journal of Popular Culture. In his spare time, he hosts a podcast with Dr. Nic Flores about navigating higher education as queer POC, Learning on the Job. Harris is co-chair of the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.

Panelist: Matthew Brim
Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies. Brim is currently working on a material history of queer studies that envisions ways of redistributing resources around the queer academy. He is author of the award-winning Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020), as well as James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (U of Michigan P, 2014). His edited collections include Queer Sharing in the Marketized University (Routledge, 2023), Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education: Challenging Institutional Structures (Bloomsbury Academics, 2023), and Imagining Queer Methods (NYU P, 2019). Brim has published in venues including Feminist Theory, Journal of Homosexuality, Journal of Modern Literature, Gay and Lesbian Review, and The Baffler, and he wrote an interactive online study guide for teaching the HIV/AIDS documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. He is an associate editor for the open access James Baldwin Review and a reader for the open access Amerikastudien/American Studies.

Panelist: Laura Westengard
Laura Westengard (she/they) is a professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. She serves on the board of directors at CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and as Coordinator and inaugural faculty member of the Advanced Certificate in LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. Laura sits on the advisory board for WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, on the editorial board for the Peter Lang book series Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead, and is the co-editor of the Fall/Winter 2024 special issue of WSQ on "Unbearable Being(s).” Her book Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) shows how queer culture adopts gothicism to challenge heteronormative and racialized systems and practices and to acknowledge the effects of microaggression and insidious trauma on queer communities.

Panelist: Justin Brown
Justin T. Brown, PhD, MPH (he/him) currently is the Interim University Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for Academic Programming and Policy, at The City University of New York, CUNY. Prior to his current role, he was the 2023-2024 CUNY University Faculty Leadership Fellow within the CUNY Office of Faculty Affairs. Additionally, he is also a Professor of Health Sciences at LaGuardia Community College. Also, Brown is faculty within the Women’s and Gender Studies M.A. program and Psychology, Critical Social-Personality Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Also, as part of his work at the Graduate Center, he co-developed the new Advanced Certificate in LGBTQ Studies and received funding to co-create a foundational course, Anti-racist Methodologies & Research Ethics for Black Participatory Community Engaged Research, for the forthcoming Black, Race, & Ethnic Studies doctoral program. Brown served as the program director for Public & Community Health, and Co-Director of the Liberal Arts Health Humanities program at LaGuardia. Dr. Brown has previously held several institutional leadership positions. Among them are as the Executive Director of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and as the Deputy Director of the CUNY Institute for Health Equity. Prior to CUNY, he worked for several years directing one of the only national social service agencies dedicated exclusively to working with LGBTQ youth of color in Boston. Dr. Brown’s research and intervention background is in culturally-responsive implementation science, curriculum design, and higher educational policy development. His collaborative and asset-based research applies decolonial black feminist intersectional praxis to address social inequities among persons of color, LGBTQIA+ communities, and youth. His most recent funded projects focused on implementing intensive educational mentorship programs for cross-disciplinary undergraduate students centering restorative, experiential learning activities designed to nurture counternarratives and scaffolded engagement in social justice-oriented inquiry through reflective practice.

Comment: Margot Weiss
Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan, where she coordinates Queer Studies. Her scholarship brings together queer theory and anthropology to understand the contradictory relationships between queer sexual cultures/politics and contemporary US capitalism. Her books include Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the Ruth Benedict Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies; Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020 (The Feminist Press, 2023); and Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke University Press, 2024). She has published over 20 articles and essays in a range of anthropology, queer studies, and American studies journals, including GLQ, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, New Labor Forum, Sexualities, American Anthropologist, and Feminist Anthropology. Currently, she is writing a book about the politics of institutional knowledge production and the place of desire in queer/left activism. Past president of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA), Margot Weiss currently serves on the board of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and the Society for Cultural Anthropology. She is a founding member of the Wesleyan University Chapter of the AAUP.