The Easy Way Out: Gays and Lesbians in Academia

Academic Outlaws: Queer Theory and Cultural Studies in the Academy. William G. Tierney. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. xxiii + 186 pp. $64.95 cloth, $32.95 paper

Poisoned Ivy: Lesbian and Gay Academics Confronting Homophobia. Toni A. H. McNaron. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. xiv + 234 pp. $54.95 cloth, $19.95 paper

Lesbians in Academia: Degrees of Freedom. Beth Mintz and Esther Rothblum, eds.. New York: Routledge, 1997. 298 pp. $78.99 cloth, $24.95 paper

In his deservedly lauded book, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings asks a particularly challenging question of gay and lesbian academics: how has our "success" been made possible by the crisis of the postnational university? ¹ According to Readings, when the processes of economic globalization render the nation-state no longer the primary site at which capital reproduces itself, the university no longer needs to fulfill the role of producing subjects for that nation-state. It thus opens its doors to new kinds of subjects, including so-called cultural minorities, and plays a role in their continuing formation. The three books under review are symptomatic of this shift in the university's role in that their theme is a subject--the self-identified nonheterosexual academic--that might be said not even to have existed forty years ago.

As its title suggests, William G. Tierney's book brings together a discussion of queer theory and cultural studies to develop strategies for changing life in the academy for gays and lesbians. Apparently responding to charges often leveled at literary and cultural theory by its detractors--that it is unnecessarily obtuse, that it does not provide blueprints for change, that it is disconnected from real-world politics--Tierney attempts to use insights gained from what he terms postmodernism to read his experience as an out queer academic. He then presents ways to change the institutional culture of today's university. One of the goals of his book is "to outline how the lives we live and the matter of with whom we live help determine what counts for knowledge, which in turn becomes tied to institutional policies and framed as parameters of power" (xviii).

Tierney is trained in administration and policy analysis, and much of his book is devoted to strategizing ways to make the university a more gay- and lesbian-friendly place. In pursuing this goal, however, he criticizes what he terms the "assimilationist" perspective of writers such as Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan. This perspective suggests that homosexuals are no different from heterosexuals and that "the way to convince heterosexuals that we are similar is to minimize differences and accentuate similarities with the mainstream" (48). While Tierney is "well aware of the cultural and political capital necessary to advance a particular cause" (he reassures us that he wears his Armani suit when he meets with his university's president), ultimately, he considers the assimilationist stance flawed (51).

According to Tierney, the problem with this stance is that it ratifies rather than disrupts repressive cultural norms. For Tierney, "the work of cultural studies is to investigate the mediating aspects of culture, to interrogate its grammar and decenter its norms" (53). Heterosexist norms necessarily silence gay and lesbian individuals and make invisible the unique talents they bring to the university (5).

Central to Tierney's strategy for disrupting heterosexist cultural norms is agape, "the Greek word referred to in the New Testament and used by philosophers to speak of a specific form of love." Agape involves the search for community, a "fundamental value that speaks to the worth and importance of every individual." For Tierney, then, the use to which queer theory and cultural studies ought to be put is "the advancement of democracy" in general and the making of the university into a more democratic place for sexual minorities in particular (175). One of the reviewers quoted on the...