Queer Studies professor Ernesto Martinez has had students come to his office and cry several times this year. They aren’t crying out of sadness or because he’s a tough grader, he said. They cry out of relief for having a place to talk and think seriously about their sexuality.
The Queer Studies minor, offered for the first time at the University this year, is attracting professors and students from across departments and touching students’ lives, participants said.
The minor is offered through the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and while the plan for it started being developed several years ago, the University started offering Queer Studies in September 2008. So far, it has been a success, Martinez said.
Martinez said classes are full to the point of overflowing, and that most students in them identify as straight rather than gay and lesbian, although there are gays and lesbians as well.
“There’s this new generation of students who want to have more information about how sexuality works in our society,” Martinez said.
Professor Elizabeth Reis, who helped design the program, said in her proposal to the University that other schools, such as Yale
University, Cornell University, the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara and New York Universities all already offer Queer Studies as a minor in their women’s studies departments.
“A minor in Queer Studies at these institutions and at the University of Oregon recognizes that this course of study is interdisciplinary and does not exist in any of the existing core disciplines,” Reis wrote in the proposal.
The University is already seeing the minor take on an interdisciplinary identity, Reis wrote in an e-mail. For example, next year, a faculty member in the art department will teach a class called All That Glitters: Visualizing Queerness.
Reis said it’s “nice to collaborate between faculty when we can encourage them to participate in our program and offer classes that they might not get a chance to teach in their own departments.”
While many students take the classes, not all are minors. Some take the classes because they qualify for Women’s and Gender Studies major requirements; some take them for fun. Reis said at least one student is graduating in 2009 with the minor.
Junior Laura Tran has taken two classes that qualify for the minor – Queer Studies and Queer Migration, both taught by Martinez.
Tran said the classes focus less on sexuality and more on how history has shaped and marginalized certain groups. She said the classes have been a pleasant experience for her, because it’s good to be in a group of people who share an interest in the same thing and keep a collectively open mind about it.
Martinez said the students have made the program meaningful for him. “For some students, these classes are life-changing,” he said.
Tran, who identifies as a lesbian, said she has learned about herself and her identity in her queer studies classes. She has realized that claiming a queer identity is about more than claiming a sexuality – it’s about claiming a history.
“We need to learn to live our lives politically,” she said, “and realize the implications instead of living blind.”
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