New professor of eljeebeetycue history
The Guardian is still resorting to the gender uncritical framing.
Oxford University’s new professor of LGBTQ+ history has accused the government of “fanning a culture war” over freedom of speech, insisting it is alive and well in higher education.
Is there such a thing as LGBTQ+ history? I suppose you can lump two or more unrelated things together and then do history of both of them, but is that a genre of history or just a random list?
Matt Cook, who was this week named as the first Jonathan Cooper chair of the history of sexualities, a newly created post at Mansfield College, was speaking only days after the appointment of the government’s first “free speech tsar” for higher education.
Oh him. He’s the guy who went on the radio and made such an exhibition of himself by being unable to stop repeating “kind of” and “you know” multiple times in every sentence.
Cook, a renowned cultural historian who has written extensively on queer urban life, the Aids crisis and queer domesticity, denied that free speech was under threat in higher education.
“Of course there’s protests about certain people speaking and there has been historically, about figures as diverse as David Icke and Enoch Powell, and that’s right,” he said.
“But these people still spoke in university contexts, despite the protests and despite the calls for people not to speak in university forums. It’s only a tiny fraction of cases where people actually don’t speak.
“So my sense is that it’s not a huge problem. I think the issue has been blown out of proportion. I also think there’s some political expediency in this. It’s a way of fanning a culture war. I don’t think we need additional protections for free speech in the university. Free speech is pretty alive and well.”
I wonder if that’s really what he said. I wonder if the Guardian cleaned it up for him.
You mean Lesbian Gender-Bending Trans-sexual Quasimodal + history? There most certainly is.! But what, do I hear someone ask, does the ‘+’ stand for.? Why that’s easy: The rise and fall of all those empires: Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Mongol, British, French, etc, etc. Those we learn at school about, including the legendary and disputed mass-castration of the Italian army at Adwa in 1895.
QED
Indeed, on UK TV is an advert for a programme that is about gay men and women drummed out of the forces when it was illegal to be gay in the forces. According to the advert it was “when it was illegal to be LGBT…”.
I suspect that at the time it wasn’t actually illegal to be T in the army, I suspect that there wasn’t any T in the army, just persecuted gay men and women.
But now any history of the LGB is actually a history of the LGBT…
No. I do not think there is even such a thing as ‘LGB’ history in a general sense. There is a history of joint lesbian and gay activism, and the gradual shifting of public attitudes towards much greater acceptance. Otherwise, there is lesbian history and gay history, and these, though related, are not one thing.
The T are a divided group. Both present as members of the opposite sex, but some are homosexual people presenting as heterosexual and some are heterosexual people presenting as homosexual. Back in the day a small number of ‘transsexual’ activists (I use the term they used themselves at that time) set out to persuade lesbians and gay men to support them in their campaign to be legally identified as members of the sex to which they did not actually belong. They said we’d achieved our liberation, so we owed it to them. We thought they were all or mostly lesbians and gays who couldn’t cope with the social opprobrium. It was not then apparent that the majority of male ‘trans’ people would turn out to be heterosexual cross-dressers. The history of the T and the LGB is largely the history of how one group hoodwinked and exploited another.
As for the Q+ – it seems to be intended to reassure anyone and everyone that they too can be speshul in some unspecified way.
I wonder if Cook is going to teach that it that way. Methinks not. If he did, he might gain a somewhat different perspective and understanding of the limitations on free speech in higher ed.