Lez Be Honest: Queer Feelings about Women’s Studies at a Public Regional University in the Southeastern United States

This article recounts recent legislative and administrative pressures to close the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina Upstate, a senior comprehensive public institution in the state university system experiencing a period of instability marked by budget mismanagement, austerity cuts, and diversity initiatives that appear to serve as cover for a noticeably anti-diversity moment in the history of the institution, leading to an eventual vote of no confidence in the university’s chancellor. Working at the intersection of queerness and emotional disability and routing my story through selected ideas from lesbian-trauma theorists Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, and Heather Love, the article conveys the personal toll exacted by the work of tilting the tower and asks whether the discipline of women’s studies offers any reprieve, revisiting meta-disciplinary disavowals of crisis rhetoric, melodrama, and besiegement mentalities that might foreclose such a narrative along the way. Moreover, the article introduces two critical terms to the field of diversity/university studies—“befuddlement” and “circumlesbianlocution”—to encapsulate affective strategies that derail conversations about queerness in this particular location and more generally in higher education today.