Recognize Queer Studies

After years of informal debate, two Harvard educators are developing plans for queer studies to become the subject of a formal academic program at Harvard. We applaud this progress towards a Faculty committee on queer studies, an emerging discipline dealing with important issues concerning sexuality and identity.

Even though the proposal does not advocate a degree-granting standing committee, this effort is an encouraging first step toward that goal. Queer studies is a viable academic discipline that deals with ideological issues surrounding questions of homosexual identity. An increasing number of universities, including Yale, Cornell and Brown have similar programs in this relatively new academic field, and Harvard’s failure to acknowledge it as a legitimate course of study lags behind the times.

Some argue that the queer studies program does not encompass a broad enough subject to establish an entirely new field of study. But as a discipline that explores the identity of a distinct social group, queer studies is as legitimate as, say, Afro-American studies. The fact that queer studies is devoted to a group defined by its sexuality rather than its cultural and historical background does not make it less worthy of academic pursuit.

Sex and sexuality constitute axes of political and social identity, but also modes of intellectual inquiry. These issues of sexuality have profound and far-reaching influences on life and society. Studying these influences and interactions is a broad and rich field of study that can reveal previously marginalized discourses, perspectives and theories.

This proposal is far from an effort to follow trendy new academic studies. Over the years, a number of students have been interested in writing theses or research papers relating to queer studies, but they have faced a lack of coordinated advising. Though there are courses and professors interested in the discipline, the lack of a set curriculum and permanent faculty advisers discourages students from pursuing their interests in this field.

So far, 18 Faculty have endorsed a committee on queer studies—a testament to the discipline’s significant support. To ensure the high quality of the program, it is essential that interested permanent Faculty should be on the committee and that courses included in this program do not fluctuate excessively. Today, the few courses relating to queer studies are grouped under several different departments, inhibiting students from finding related courses.

Though queer studies shares some interests with women’s studies—such as issues of gender identity and sexuality—the two ought to be separate and distinct committees. While women’s studies deal with issues confronting the female gender, queer studies includes studies of both men and women who share a particular lifestyle and confront similar issues of identity. And since women’s studies is a committee with limited resources, any further burdens upon it would hurt both programs.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, when students and Faculty have called for a new committee. The University should evaluate these requests in an expeditious fashion. Harvard prides itself as an innovative, cutting-edge leader in the academic world; viable emerging fields such as queer studies should be open for Harvard students to pursue.