Subject to Identity

Susan Talburt is Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University. She is coeditor of Thinking Queer: Sexuality, Culture, and Education.

"A carefully conceived, brilliantly executed piece of work." — William F. Pinar, coeditor of Understanding Curriculum as Racial Text: Representations of Identity and Difference in Education"…by means of elegantly executed fieldwork, Talburt has produced a compelling portrait of the practices that both constitute, and are constituted by, successful female academics who are ambivalent about taking up lesbian identity in their professional culture." — Qualitative Studies in Education"The combination of respect for participant stories and sophisticated methodological understanding of the limits of 'authenticity' and 'voice' kept me turning the pages. The crisis of representation cuts across disciplines. This book enacts a way to use the ruins of correspondence theories of the real as a fruitful site for practices of doing and reporting feminist qualitative research that is lively, readable, and focused." — Patti Lather, author of Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy within the Postmodern"I find this book compelling on a number of levels. Perhaps most interesting to me are the ways in which the author renders complex performances that depict three very different women—each a 'lesbian academic'—putting the codified space of the academy to new uses, thereby engendering new modes of thought that bring us beyond identity categories, visibility politics and a reliance on tropes of voice. These are extraordinary achievements." —Paula M. Salvio, University of New Hampshire

• Acknowledgments 1. Haunted Questions, Inhabited Spaces Seeking to Found a Locatin: The Gay Academic UnionLesbian Identity Politics: The Limitations of Full DisclosureIdentity into PracticeIntellectual Practice among the RuinsDelimiting Lesbian Academic SpacesEntering the InquiryNarrative Knowing as Practice 2. Social and Institutional Places and Spaces Entering Oasis and Liberal U: Island CommunitiesFinding a Place for DiversityCentering Gays and LesbiansCentering Liberal U: "The Circles in Which We Move"Confessing Sins: The Work of FacultyLocating Knowledges and Identities 3. Displacing Pedagogical Positionings Opening ScenesIm/Personal PedagogiesCarol: Critical EnlightenmentCross-Directions: Carol's Performances of Authority and IdentityJulie: Complications as ResponseStirring Them Up: Julie's "Particular Kind of Embodiment"Olivia: Is There a Text in This Class?"We Can't Reduce the Play [or Olivia] to One Message"Less Euclidean Spaces 4. Departmental Academic and Social Knowledges Other/SameJulie and the Liminal GapCarol and Shifting AuthorityOlivia and the Performance of LocationsAppropriation and Practice 5. Lesbian/Intellectual Olivia: "The Cranky Lesbian Critic"Carol: "You Don't Just Stay in a Place and Wallow in It"Julie: "Responding to a Real Concrete Problem"Exceeding Locations: Practices of the SelfQueer Ethnographic Spaces Notes Bibliography Index