October 28, 2024
This day was presentations on Women’s and Gender history.
The only bit of Queer historiography that was covered in class was the last presentation. The book talked about is called Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World. It was an interesting presentation but it just made me realize how little queerness is talked about ever. I was hoping it would be mentioned during our lectures but it just wasn’t, which left me lost as I wanted to write my paper comparing Queer historiography and Marxist historiography.
With that in mind I went to office hours, which I have been avoiding since I feel like I am taking up too much time and am a bit of a nuisance. I asked him if I would even be allowed to do my paper on Queer historiography since it wasn’t covered at all in our lectures, he said I could but there were caveats. I needed to understand that it would be covered under the “gender” category and what not. That’s fine, I suppose. I also needed to be careful with language as well since terms like cisgender weren’t really used in the 60s and 70s. I then asked him questions about courses for next year but that doesn’t really need to be talked about here. He just told me to talk to a special guy for the history department to get that all sorted.
I read a really cool book recently: A short history of trans misogyny. It has some super important concepts for queer historiography, for instance it notes that transgender as a concept is very very new and people who would call themselves trans would not do so as recently as 1980s.
Thanks for the recommendation! I think it could really help in my research for books related to my topic and narrowing things down. I think I have settled on a location and point in history but I am finding it difficult finding monographs related to queerness on it, which is a shame. I will most likely make a post about it asking if anyone can point me in a good direction.
Again, thank you for the book, I will try to read it as soon as I can (most likely over reading week).