The House That Queer Theory Built:
By Matt Brim.
The low-class problems of high-class queer theory
"...queer theory had already formulated what I take to be its best and most forgotten lesson: because all kinds of people need it in all kinds of ways, queer theory is a fundamentally shared and inevitably contested space. From that comes my definition of the discipline: the project of queer theory is to explore and respond to the universe of queer need, including the need to reimagine the universe of queer need."
"But queer theory seems not to know the depths of its success, and this is because the field’s signal provocations have been irresistibly yoked to high-class places and pedigrees. With this top-down orientation, queer theory has a class problem. More precisely, the academic field has a class stratification problem, situated as it is within a higher education system hellbent on sorting the rich from the poor and the already privileged from the already abandoned."
"The real point of these pairings is not to draw out a similarity but rather to trace a structural, disciplinary relationship between queer studies at poor schools like CSI and queer studies at rich schools like Harvard. At the extremes of a university hierarchy that—whatever else it may do—most efficiently reproduces socioeconomic disparity and racial inequality, queer theory is a field utterly, materially divided from itself."
"The field must draw on its history of self-reflexivity to interrupt the small and insular networks of institutional prestige that further distort the already battered academic job market. It must orient itself downward, outward, toward the full complement of queer ideas being produced not only across the tiers of academe but beyond its gates. So much about class-based queer life has been purposefully made unknown that a good deal of corrective work has been cut out for us; it will require reimagining not only the “what” of queer theory but also the “who” and the “where.”"
"If you want to earn a PhD and become a professor, you must first secure access to a selective undergraduate college and then attend a top-flight PhD program, both of which will go a long way toward determining one’s eventual placement in what Val Burris calls “the academic caste system.” Though jobs in academia are far from guaranteed, working-class studies scholar Lynn Arner similarly names pedigree as “a monumental determinant of what jobs which candidates will be offered.”"