As weekly scandals and decades of scholarly studies make clear, few institutions in the United States sort people by socioeconomic class as effectively as does higher education, even as academia simultaneously proclaims and often fulfills its democratizing promise. The evidence argues that the university is increasingly for racialized class distinction—whatever else it may also be for.

Being clear-eyed about educational inequity as a structural feature of the U.S. academy allows for other important interventions. Specifically, it contextualizes the tension addressed by this panel: the role of queer studies in the class-stratifying mission of higher education. Although it has long been associated with academic elitism, queer studies has less often been understood as a mechanism for producing class inequity in the university world. Yet the knowledge that defines the field has been created at precisely those institutions that most resolutely exclude poor students and, therefore, poor queer/of color students: elite and selective colleges and universities. Epistemic inequalities arise from the alignment of a queer disciplinary vanguard with anti-poor, anti-POC academic community formations at “top” colleges and universities.

This panel responds to this surprising norm—the high-class material and psychic production of the field of queer studies—by reorienting the discipline toward its working-class and low-status academic locations, its underserved students of color and student workers, and its overlooked class-based pedagogies. Four scholars will give 15-minute paper presentations that speak to these very different material conditions that inform their queer studies teaching, research, and place-based educational experiences.

Presider and participant Matt Brim will contextualize the work of the panel, as above, by identifying “poor queer studies” as an urgent reformulation of the queer studies along queer-class-race lines. Brim will describe how he came to understand that intersection only when he was hired as a queer studies professor at a breathtakingly underfunded, open-admissions, two- and four-year college, the College of Staten island, CUNY. The academy does not prepare PhDs for this queer studies work, even though most queer professors and queer students teach and attend working-class, unranked, non-selective institutions of higher education. Yet is at just such a school that Brim finds valuable queer ideas circulating through the overlooked classed and raced intersections where student precarity and institutional marginality meet queer pedagogy—in night school; after a three-hour commute on public transportation; in overflowing classrooms; with overflowing restrooms; without access to decent food; without adequate research or travel funds; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness; on “the forgotten borough.” “Poor queer studies” attempts to name that which is so easily forgotten within the field and within the academy more generally.

The class locations of queer studies can be hard to track not only because queer-class intersections are slippery because queer studies takes so many disciplinary shapes. A Longoria locates their queer-class study at selected state-level Pacific Northwest colleges and universities and from within the interdisciplinary field of teacher education. From these overlapping institutional locations, Longoria investigates how class-based assumptions and barriers impact UndocuQueer identities, that is, community members who are both undocumented and queer. Longoria argues that a greater coordination of university resources—both material and ideological—is required in such intersectional queer-class contexts.

Laura Westengard pinpoints another invisibilized queer-class intersection: it is commonly assumed that students at a college of technology with a focus on applied and professional degrees are uninterested in queer studies. She argues, however, that queer studies programs are particularly important at poorly funded public institutions and at colleges of technology, specifically, because of their potential to intervene in what she calls “bureaucratic trauma,” or the accumulated and unacknowledged traumatic effects of navigating educational systems that invalidate and isolate certain students. Westengard’s talk will focus on her experience building a concentration in gender and sexuality studies at New York City College of Technology (City Tech) by outlining how she has worked within existing CUNY structures and reflecting on the particular challenges of developing this type of program at a college of technology. Building queer studies at a college such as City Tech not only responds to underrecognized student interest but also acknowledges that vulnerable students exist in a state of on-going bureaucratic trauma, a crisis that queer studies is particularly positioned to interrogate and mitigate.

Asking “Which students and professors does queer studies serve in our current moment?”, Eric Solomon turns to autoethnography to ground his analysis of this question. As a native of the Mississippi Delta, the poorest region in the United States, Solomon knows firsthand the difficult path the economically underprivileged must take to attain doctoral degrees in queer studies-related fields, as well as the challenges they face on the academic job market and across the southern collegiate landscape as a result of their visible sexualities and classed positions. Through personal testimony, oral history, literary surveys, and analysis of Southern queer studies programs, Solomon explores the intersection of poor-southern-queer in higher education. In so doing, he reorients the conversation: how do elite institutions in the South and their institutionalized queer studies programs fail working-class queer people and those who strive to do queer studies? Are some still too perverse to be granted full entry into the profession?

After each of the four 15-minute paper presentations, Brim will facilitate a 15-minute question and answer period. A typical MLA session room (theater-style seating) will suffice, and we will need a projector and internet access.

PLEASE NOTE: Laura Westengard has also proposed a special session, and if it’s accepted she’ll withdraw from the "Queer Studies and Its Class Locations" special session (should it move forward) and the panel will proceed with three presenters. I would then cite Laura (a CUNY colleague) and her very interesting work on queer studies at a technical school in my own presentation. Laura's (and my) first preference, of course, is that her own special session be approved. She agreed to be part of my special session proposal at my request, and I don't want that to negatively affect the chances of her special session being approved. Thanks very much for understanding this situation.