Racks of ornate tapestries, slinky minidresses and spiky jewelry lure fashion forward students to Urban Outfitters on State Street, and the retailer’s college discount days and extensive sale section make it a dream for those on a budget. Unless, that is, you operate at a social frequency more attuned to the politically suggestive undertones coursing throughout the popular clothing outlet, at which point it becomes a nightmare.
Urban Outfitters Inc. employs a keen marketing strategy to attract artistic types in their early twenties, whose ideologies tend to align with liberal ideals, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison senior Jackie Bolduan. However, Bolduan said “the reality of Urban Outfitters is that it’s owned by really conservative people who donate incredible sums of money to institutions that might harm the people who shop there or harm people who don’t shop there.”
The contradictory executive opinion of Urban Outfitters is woven into the merchandise the company produces, subtle things Bolduan said she now notices immediately upon entering the store. For example, she mentioned insensitive appropriations of native designs on fabrics, the selling of which jeopardized the Urban Outfitters brand in 2011 in what became a highly publicized legal dispute.
Bolduan attributes her acute societal awareness to time she spent in the classroom earning her Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies Certificate through UW-Madison’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. There, Bolduan said she was afforded the tools to make sense of the world around her in a more informed way, from professors who changed her perspective by expanding the idea of queerness to other cultural ideas such as race, gender and ethnicity, among other things.
UW-Madison first formulated a Women’s Studies Program in 1975, but it was not deemed a department until 2008. Since 2004, UW-Madison’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies has provided students in all disciplines access to an LGBT certificate. The program requires students to complete 15 credits of coursework focused on queer theory, including a three-credit introductory LGBT studies class, nine additional credits from a list of 17 three-credit classes and a three-credit LGBT studies capstone seminar.
Among the 17 elective classes LGBT certificate students can choose from is a 400-level “Feminism and Cultural and Social Theory” lecture Assistant Professor Ellen Samuels teaches entitled “The Body in Theory.” Bolduan said Samuels’ class stands out as one of her particularly “radical ... and transformative” experiences in the department.
“I think what was really cool about her class was that she explained theory like Foucault and Judith Butler in a way that made a lot of sense, because she connected it really well to TLC, like shows about people who are conjoined or people who have disabilities, or have non-normative bodies or have queer bodies,” Bolduan said. “And sort of expanding the idea of queerness to a lot of different things outside of gender and sexuality.”
Bolduan said the way Samuels connected the contemporary, cultural research she conducts to critical theories within the field of queer studies inspired Bolduan to more seriously consider attending graduate school, which she said she is still undecided about. In addition to an upper-level history class she took with Finn Enke, the Director of the LGBT Studies Certificate program, Bolduan said another thing Samuels’ class helped her do is reconstruct her perspective in a way she said is inextricable from the everyday application of her education to seemingly noncontroversial actions, such as buying clothes. She said coming away from these kinds of classes, during which instructors pushed her to make sense of the world and interpersonal relationships through this new lens has been “really amazing.”
“As a student and now as a person, I feel like my politics and who I am personally is so connected to my coursework that it’s very hard for me to separate theory from who I am, and who everyone is, and why the world works in these really intricate ways,” Bolduan said. “So I think that way of thinking is really priceless, because I think it really is a field that no matter how you identify or whatever, really forces you to think about the world critically.”
Undergraduate studies of queer theory is a relatively new academic endeavor. There are only two American institutions that currently offer a full undergraduate bachelor’s degree in LGBT studies: Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., and San Diego State University.
Hobart and William Smith Colleges became the first university to develop an LGBT/Queer undergraduate degree in 2002. However, the private colleges, which are made up of a men’s and a women’s sector, offered a “Lesbian Cosmologies” class first in 1970, following a national trend of gay and lesbian studies seminars appearing in the curriculums of other institutions. San Diego State became the first public institute to offer an LGBT undergraduate degree in the spring of 2012.
However, the establishment of bachelor’s degrees is not the only advancement administrators are making in the realm of undergraduate queer studies. According to LB Hannahs, the Outreach and Advocacy Chair for the Consortium of Higher Education Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Professionals, Arizona State University recently added four new tenured positions for experts in transgender research.
“Ideally, people would wake up and realize that this is something that we need to be talking about on all levels of education,” Hannahs said. “I think we’re slowly moving toward that but in a perfect world we’d have someone doing LGBT work on every single campus in the country, but we are very far from that.”
More than two decades ago, Ardel Thomas was among the early wave of students to formally study queer theory while a graduate student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she wrote her English Literature thesis on author Toni Morrison “through a queer studies lens,” according to Thomas.
“Many of my classmates did not take what I was doing seriously at all. Especially the queer studies stuff, because it was brand new,” Thomas said. “And a lot of folks ... were just downright kind of in my face thinking it was stupid,” she added. “But I had some—this is why it’s really kind of cool—I had a couple of amazing, young professors ... who thought outside of the box, and they were phenomenal, and were supportive of me.”
Now the chair of the acclaimed LGBT studies department at the City College of San Francisco, Thomas said the emerging frameworks supporting queer theory studies is progress compared to her experience, when queer theorists were pioneers of their own educations. However, she said it is still a discipline frequently marginalized by ignorance.
“I think some people are like ‘LGBT studies,’ well that’s what, 10 minutes of one class?’ or ‘What, you learn how to be gay?’ I mean, I’ve had some humorous questions,” Thomas said. “But you’re looking at centuries and centuries of people who’ve been left out of history ... so yeah, we have a lot to educate.”
The Department of LGBT Studies at The City College of San Francisco, established in 1990, was the first in the country to have administrative independence, from a gender and women’s studies department, for instance. According to Thomas, the independent status of the LGBT Studies Department is critical to the evolvement of its queer theory coursework.
Although each minority studies department at City College is part of a larger diversity collaborative on campus, Thomas said administrators in each program consciously maintain academic autonomy to honor the specific oppressions different cultural groups historically faced. In doing so, Thomas said she is able to provide City College LGBT Studies students with a more in-depth understanding about the important distinctions of queerness and homophobia.
For instance, Thomas said City College currently offers many specialized classes, including a completely transgender-focused class, a Latin American and Latino LGBT studies course, another on LGBT American artists and a class centered on AIDS in America.
“[The AIDS class] focuses specifically on the fact that the disease was originally labeled a gay disease and how we’re still reeling from that fact,” according to Thomas. “And looking at the ways it has affected LGBT culture but also larger health care issues. I just get a lot more creativity by having an independent program.”
The LGBT Studies Department originated at City College because people wanted a safe place where they could explore sexuality through coursework, “and maybe not feel so alone,” Thomas said.
“Half of the students in my trans class are there because they’ve never been able to talk about trans stuff really before in an academic setting, and it’s empowering,” she added.
However, City College did not have an LGBT degree track until the state chancellor’s office approved Thomas’s request in 2010, at which time City College also became the first community college to offer an Associate of Arts degree in the field. Thomas said student demand played a pivotal role in legitimizing the LGBT degree program on campus.
According to Thomas, the program at City College serves as a model for other academic institutions looking to develop similar practices. Thomas said she often works with administrators from different four-year or research institutes on how to create and introduce a queer studies program into their respective universities.
Furthermore, Thomas said the strong LGBT community and resources at UW-Madison create an environment in which a bachelor’s degree program would flourish.
Thomas said the respective climates of the city and the university, especially because it has a strong women’s studies program, make UW-Madison a “natural” place to offer a bachelor’s degree. “It would be great to have a Midwest institution, and it’d be nice to see Wisconsin beat Michigan or Chicago to the punch, quite frankly,” Thomas said.
Bolduan, having lived in and interacted with the local sociopolitical atmosphere, said “Madison posits itself as a progressive paradise, but I think it has it’s own political problems that are sometimes overlooked.”
However, she did not discount the ability of UW-Madison to formulate an LGBT Studies bachelor’s degree or the value of such, and said “there definitely needs to be more explicit and visible efforts to make the campus itself aware of who’s on it, for ... students to make each other aware of what all of our experiences are and to address those, and work against the oppressions that happen on campus,” she said. “And I think that there’s a lot of potential for that to come from academics.”
