Stretching and Strategizing: Refashioning Queer Studies from the Outside In

In Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University, Matt Brim offers a critique of and a wish for Queer Studies. Drawing on his role as a professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island (CSI), “one of the queerest colleges” he knows, Brim lays out a necessary and new direction for Queer Studies, emphasizing the need to inject a multifaceted class and status critique and for “mak[ing] the field stretchy enough to accommodate and respond to its many class locations” (27, 26). Brim demonstrates this adherence to stretchiness by playing with academic form, identifying untold and unsaid weaknesses in the discipline of Queer Studies, and utilizing a diversity of source materials to reconstruct the field from the outside in and anoint a hidden (but not new) field: Poor Queer Studies.

In the introduction, Brim distinguishes between “Poor Queer Studies” and “Rich Queer Studies,” arguing that Rich Queer Studies has served as the silent default of the field. Rich Queer Studies is shaped by “choosiness,” pedigree, and inability or unwillingness (or some combination thereof) to recognize and grapple with class and status as constitutive factors of queerness. Further, the field “claims radicality” while uplifting varying allegiances to elitism (38). To define Poor Queer Studies, Brim deploys “poor” strategically, dissecting the stigma of the term and maintaining that “because ‘poor’ cannot be precisely defined, I am able . . . to use the term in a much more inclusive way than a strict definition permits” (25). He asks,

What if we connected our queer ideas and pedagogies to the material realities of their production (our research budgets and our college websites, our course loads and our commutes, our embodiments and our built environments, our leave time and our overwork, our library holdings and our bathroom gender policies, our raced work sites and our service work, our salaries and our second jobs) in order to understand those ideas and pedagogies as class- and status-based knowledges that cannot be universalized?

(17)

Using his CSI classroom as a site of inquiry, Brim proceeds to answer this question (and many others) over the course of five chapters to rework and nuance the field of Queer Studies.

Brim also gently plays with the form of the monograph as a mode of scholarly production. For example, in chapter 1, he pauses to include a bibliography of queer CSI work, including traditional publications, media exhibitions, novels, plays, and films. He explains that the inclusion of these sources “do[es] not interrupt our ability to learn the story of Poor Queer Studies. Rather, they are the listy evidence of the existence of such a story” (46). Indeed, the list did not disrupt my reading experience. I slowed my pace, taking time to trail the list with my index finger and note specific texts to return to later. Brim’s inclusion of this mid-chapter list resonates with Sara Ahmed’s understanding of citation as “a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies” by emphasizing previously unnoticed bodies of work (Ahmed 2013). Moreover, his “listy evidence” represents a “conscientious citational practice,” defined by historian Andrea Eidinger (who was in turn inspired by colleagues Joanna L. Pearce and Krista McCracken) as “a political practice that academic disciplines used to establish and uphold legitimacy and authority. Regardless of field, this authority tends to attach itself overwhelmingly to white, male scholars” (Eidinger 2019). While Eidinger and McCracken emphasize the roles that race, gender, and status play in the politics of citation, Brim’s analysis pushes this practice into more nuanced territory to suggest ways for scholars to think critically about who and why we cite and how a conscious practice might reshape a discipline.

In chapter 2, Brim invites the reader on an unconventional college tour, introducing us to his classroom and the Black, Brown, White, queer, trans, poor, working-class, and first-generation people who number among his students. The journey includes a view into the (crumbling) campus of CSI, where...