Resize Text: 
T he news was devastating. Last year, my fellow students and I received word that our beloved professor of queer and American ethnic studies was going on terminal leave. Startled and upset, we wanted to voice our support for the professor and for his innovative scholarship at the intersections of disciplines and identities. Suddenly, to ensure the future of such work at Macalester College, we students were thrown into the position of making the case for queer studies to the broader campus community.
This was a pivotal moment for me personally as well. Until then, I had been able to deflect questions about queer studies when a family member or friend from home would ask me about my coursework. Of course, I felt deeply that what I was learning was both important and practical, but I had never really forced myself to articulate why.
Not anymore. Suddenly, these questions were on the front line: What exactly is so important about interdisciplinary scholarship grounded in analyses of the intersections of sexualized and gendered identities? What does any of this have to do with “the real world”?
Interdisciplinary and intersectional scholarship, to the extent that I understand it, has to do with challenging foundational norms of sexuality and gender, as well as of race, class, and liberal political economy. This scholarship is grounded in the feminist tradition of recuperating histories, of hearing the lived experience of differently situated people as they have experienced marginalization and asserted their power.
Although critics of “local studies” (conservative and liberal) often charge that they represent a fetishization of the marginalized, the study of power relations implicates everyone—people living at both the center and the margins. Experiences of oppression implicate those experiencing privilege, and vice versa. Moreover, we all have not one but a multiplicity of intersecting identities, some privileged and some not, that we experience not one at a time but simultaneously, as they are written onto our bodies and selves.
This matters to me because it challenges and inspires me to ground my academic, political, and personal commitments in what white feminist poet Adrienne Rich calls the “politics of location.” No scholarship—or activism, or day-to-day living—takes place outside of politics, outside of that web of social identities. Conversely, politics plays out on many scales, including the scale of our daily lives.
When I first came to college, I was largely focused on my own painful experience of social injustice as a gay man. Though I was supported in high school, I felt isolated, had little space to even talk about my sexuality, and was still subject to harassment. After working hard on a spirited referendum campaign to defeat a ban on same-sex marriage in my home state of Wisconsin, I saw the ban pass by a wide margin. Feeling exhausted and hurt, the only kind of conversation about social injustice I was interested in having was a conversation about me.
Then, in the second semester of my first year, I took a course called “Race/Class/Nation: Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Queer Studies.” Cutting across traditional distinctions between the humanities and the social sciences, the course brought together a challenging assemblage of materials—literature, political theory, and film—largely created by LGBT/Q artists and scholars of color. There, I first woke up to the ways in which sexuality and gender are shaped by multiple power relations, including those of race, class, and nationality.
In the process, I also woke up to the fact that my own social position was not just that of a queer person but also that of a white, middle-class man and a United States citizen. And the realization of my partial privilege meant that I couldn’t relegate social theory to the classroom; it wasn’t something I could think about for three hours a week and otherwise ignore. Through class activities ranging from essays to art, I was learning with my eyes, my hands, and my heart, as well as through textual analysis, from activist artists and scholars who were working not from a detached perspective but for their very lives.
It was in that course that I first read the germinal Chicana lesbian feminist, Cherrie Moraga. A poet, essayist, and playwright, Moraga writes powerfully about her struggles to access higher education; to write; and to find a home as a woman, a lesbian, and a person of both Chicano and Anglo heritage. But even then, she writes, “Whoever I am / I must believe / I am not / and will never be / the only / one / who suffers.” In Moraga’s work, I heard the challenge and invitation to analyze intersectionally, to work coalitionally, to honor struggles interlinked with mine. In short, poetry changed my politics.
As I’ve grappled with theory, I’ve also done work that is also very practical, thus answering critics’ other favorite charge: that local studies are “uselessly self-indulgent.” Starting that semester, I started writing in local alternative media, challenging myself and the publications I worked with to create journalistic writing with—rather than about —my interview subjects. This summer, I partnered with the faith branch of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to create a documentary about challenges, successes, and strategies in coalition work across differences in race, class, sexuality, gender identity, and religion.
More than once, in studying the theoretical and practical limits of activist strategies, I’ve hit moments of hopelessness. As someone with a background in electoral political science—and as someone who grew up with a strong sense of entitlement to access political institutions—I found my definition of politics, my very sense of agency, pulled out from under me. Thinking about daily life as political—and critiquing the sordid, oppressive histories of dominant institutions—can be overwhelming.
But it can also be liberating. When I began to realize that the potential to work for social change wasn’t limited to institutional politics, I started to see how people working in and across the fine and performing arts, media, public health, education, and faith communities can challenge convention. There are more potential allies working in the world—and a richer field of possibilities for challenging injustice—than I could have ever thought possible before I began my studies at Macalester College.
By many measures, my fellow students and I succeeded in making the case for interdisciplinarity. Thanks to the efforts of our department chair, a tenure-track position to replace the beloved professor who taught my introductory course has been re-allocated to the department, which is again seeking a scholar and teacher working at the intersection of the social sciences and queer studies and in multiple American ethnic-studies contexts.
But the very fact of the professor’s departure—and of the need to engage in campus-wide dialogue about the importance and legitimacy of interdisciplinarity and local studies—testifies to the stark reality that these fields continue to struggle for a place in academy. That struggle means that students, faculty, and staff need to not only explain and defend but share, celebrate, and—yes—advertise their transformative and self-reflexive work. Whether building political and social coalitions, choreographing dances, administering HIV tests, or writing poems, students and scholars from very different social locations find something profoundly useful and liberating in challenging oppressive convention through interdisciplinary, intersectional work. We need to make sure our colleagues know why.
David Seitz is a third-year student at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, studying political science, gender studies, and American studies. As a writer, activist and student, he is interested in anti-racist, feminist, and queer approaches to community journalism, coalitional politics, spirituality, and social geography.