Resilience

Queer Professors from the Working Class

Kenneth Oldfield, Richard Greggory Johnson III

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780791476383, 9780791476376
• eBook ISBN: 9780791477410
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

First collection of essays by queer scholars with working-class backgrounds.

Academia can be overwhelmingly foreign and hostile to those who have poor or working-class backgrounds. For people who are from the working class and also queer, the obstacles to earning a graduate degree may prove insurmountable. Frequently discouraged from attending college in the first place, these students often struggle to pay for their education while they simultaneously battle prejudice and discrimination because of their sexual orientation and blue-collar backgrounds. Resilience offers inspiring personal stories of those who made it: thirteen professors and administrators provide their moving accounts of struggle, marginalization, and triumph in the accomplishments that their parents, guidance counselors, and sometimes even they themselves would have thought out of reach. These scholars write in a manner that will enable readers to reconsider their own assumptions and to empathize with the oppression that accompanies being defined as "other."

Table of contents

• Resilence
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Class, Sexuality, and Academia
• 3. Middle-Class Drag
• 4. From The Altar Boy’s Robesto the Professor’s Cap and Gown
• 5. One in Ten
• 6. Flying the Coop
• 7. NO MORE RENTED ROOMS
• 8. Escape from the Bronx
• 9. My First Closet Was the Class Closet
• 10. One Bad Lecture Away from Guarding a Bank
• 11. Becoming (Almost) One of Those: “Damn, New York, Pinko Intellectuals”
• 12. Weaving the Self with Gender
• 13. Possibilities
• 14. Hate Is Not a Family Value
• Contributors
• Index