To loud applause from a raucous — and mostly female — audience, the UO celebrated a triple play of sorts last spring: the launch of a new Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, a new Queer Studies minor and a brand-new lecture series on lesbian studies.
The lecture series, named after noted professor and activist Sally Miller Gearhart, opened with a talk by Arlene Stein, a one-time UO sociologist who now teaches at Rutgers University. In her lecture, entitled The Incredible Shrinking Lesbian World and Other Queer Conundra, Stein turned her analytical eye to a conflict occurring within lesbian communities.
While the collective lesbian world has always included a healthy group of softball playing, Birkenstock-wearing women (the classic butch), said Stein, sex reassignment surgery is presumably changing the mix, with some butch women choosing to become male. Stein explored the claim from lesbian communities that they are now being drained of women who find it increasingly easy to alter their gender through surgery. They fear that a growing segment of their loyal base is “defecting” — passing as men and embracing “male privilege.”
While Stein predicted that the gay and lesbian world would become ever more finely divided under new labels and new identities, the 150-person audience, which included women from every generation, shared their hopes for new solidarities between these groups.
Fittingly, Stein’s lecture was held in Gerlinger Hall, historically UO’s women’s dormitory. Stein was also a fitting choice to kick off the Gearhart lecture series. She has published a list of titles related to lesbian and gay culture, including The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights, which tracks a gay community’s fight for equal treatment in small-town Oregon.
The lecture series was founded alongside the UO’s new Queer Studies minor, which examines the history of political activism, as well as sexuality’s meaning in legal, medical and religious contexts.
It’s a new program under the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, which is a new department devoted to the study of gender in national and international contexts. Classes are available both in feminist theory and in the history of women’s advancement in the arts and sciences.
– Chrisanne Beckner
While the collective lesbian world has always included a healthy group of softball playing, Birkenstock-wearing women (the classic butch), said Stein, sex reassignment surgery is presumably changing the mix, with some butch women choosing to become male. Stein explored the claim from lesbian communities that they are now being drained of women who find it increasingly easy to alter their gender through surgery. They fear that a growing segment of their loyal base is “defecting” — passing as men and embracing “male privilege.”
While Stein predicted that the gay and lesbian world would become ever more finely divided under new labels and new identities, the 150-person audience, which included women from every generation, shared their hopes for new solidarities between these groups.
Fittingly, Stein’s lecture was held in Gerlinger Hall, historically UO’s women’s dormitory. Stein was also a fitting choice to kick off the Gearhart lecture series. She has published a list of titles related to lesbian and gay culture, including The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community’s Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights, which tracks a gay community’s fight for equal treatment in small-town Oregon.
The lecture series was founded alongside the UO’s new Queer Studies minor, which examines the history of political activism, as well as sexuality’s meaning in legal, medical and religious contexts.
It’s a new program under the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, which is a new department devoted to the study of gender in national and international contexts. Classes are available both in feminist theory and in the history of women’s advancement in the arts and sciences.
– Chrisanne Beckner
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