Announcement: Lauren Gutterman gives talk on lesbian sexuality in postwar America this Monday

This coming Monday, February 23, Lauren Gutterman will give a lecture here in the Department of American Studies at UT. Gutterman is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Her talk is titled, "Her Neighbor's Wife: Lesbian Sexuality, Marriage, and the Household in Postwar America," and it will take place at 4:30pm in Burdine 436A.Here's what Gutterman has to say about her upcoming talk:

Most scholarship on lesbian history in the postwar United States has focused on unmarried women and portrayed the urban gay bar as the center of lesbian life. While there is ample evidence that married men were able to engage in homosexual sex in this period, historians have tended to assume that married women had little opportunity to act on their same-sex desires. This presentation will demonstrate that wives could and did engage in lesbian affairs at midcentury by making use of the seemingly straight spaces within which their lives were circumscribed, and by negotiating unconventional arrangements with their husbands. Ultimately, this talk argues that the spaces, routines, and structures of heterosexual normalcy enabled married women’s same-sex affairs. In the broadest terms, it demonstrates the potential for queerness within the very heart of the normal.

Alumni Voices: Jessie Swigger, Associate Professor, Western Carolina University

Last summer, UT AMS alum Jessie Swigger put out a book called History is Bunk about the historical development of the Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. We recently spoke to Jessie, who is currently teaching at in the history department at Western Carolina University, about the book and her time at UT.Can you tell us a little bit about your book, History is Bunk, and how you came to the project?My interest in public history started when I took Steve Hoelscher's Place and Memory course. My research paper in that course formed the basis of my Master's Report. After comps, I knew that I wanted to continue to work with Steve Hoelscher and to grapple with issues of place, memory, and history.It was around this time that I took a trip to Detroit, where I visited Henry Ford's outdoor history museum Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I had read about Ford's project and knew that it was one of America's first outdoor history museums, but was struck by what seemed to be its unique landscape. The village mixes replicas and preserved buildings from across the country. Among the many buildings, Henry Ford's birthplace, the Wright brothers' cycle shop, and a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory populate the space along with two brick slave cabins from Georgia, a tenement farmer's house, and a Cotswold cottage from England; an eclectic group of structures, to be sure. I was also surprised that so many people were eager to visit a museum that celebrated Ford given Detroit's economic struggles. I wanted to understand the village and it became the focus of my dissertation.Contrary to my initial reaction to the village, I found that in many ways Henry Ford's conception of preservation was not atypical. Instead, Ford's approach was similar to nineteenth century preservationists who defined the activity broadly. Preservation might mean, for example, creating a replica. The village's interpretation of the past was, however, clearly linked to Ford's own complex, and at times contradictory worldview. The village's history after Ford's death also proved fascinating. New administrators tried to maintain Ford's vision while continuing to attract new audiences. Throughout the village's history, administrators tracked visitor reactions to the site. Using journals written by guides, marketing surveys, and internal reports, I was able to consider how visitors encountered the village and how their responses informed the site¹s interpretive programming. Finally, the archives showed how the site's marketing approach and interpretation were entangled with the history of the Detroit metro area. My book is a substantial revision of my dissertation and uses the village as a case study to examine the many contexts that shape history museums.How is the work that you're doing right now, as a scholar or a teacher or both, informed by the work that you did as a student in American Studies at UT?My approach to teaching is influenced by the work I did at UT as an undergraduate and graduate student. As an undergraduate I took Main Currents with Mark Smith and as a graduate student I was a teaching assistant for Julia Mickenberg, Janet Davis, and Elizabeth Engelhardt. I still have my notes from all of these courses and have consulted them many, many times when writing my own lectures. We are also extraordinarily lucky that our program allows graduate students to design and teach their own courses. I still use much of the material that I developed during my time as an assistant instructor.Do you have any words of wisdom or advice for students in our department about how to get the most out of their time here?The AMS Department does a great job of offering graduate students professional development opportunities. Take advantage of these. Take time to talk to faculty about how they approach research, teaching, and service. These conversations may not help you the next day, but will prove invaluable as you start your career. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there professionally--attend talks, work on publications, present at conferences, and definitely attend all happy hours.

Announcement: Ramzi Fawaz gives lecture on queer artistic responses to the AIDS crisis

This coming Monday, Ramzi Fawaz will give a talk called, "The Visceral States of America: Queer Cultural Production and the Digestive Life of AIDS." Fawaz visited UT last year and we sat down and interviewed him right here on AMS::ATX. Fawaz is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at The University of Wisconsin in Madison. The talk will take place at 4:30pm on Monday, February 16, in Burdine 436A.Fawaz sent us the following description of his talk:

This talk explores how queer cultural producers in the late 1980s deployed viscerally charged language around the digestive dysfunctions of AIDS to galvanize a political response to the disease and its social effects. I coin the phrase “the digestive politics and poetics of AIDS” to describe writers' and artists' use of metaphors that linked the digestive dysfunctions associated with HIV/AIDS to a political aversion, or disgust, for the state of American politics at the height of the AIDS epidemic. Specifically, I develop a close reading of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America that examines how the play’s linguistic and performative engagement with alimentary processes (ingestion, defecation, and excretion) worked to rearticulate public culture’s disgust with the dying bodies of AIDS victims to a disgust with government neglect. I argue that the play’s affective investment in the gut as a site for intuiting one’s response to American political life helped imagine a new form of liberal politics attuned to bodily vulnerability, disease, and disability as the wellspring for new kinds of ethical responses to both the biomedical and social consequences of AIDS. Ultimately, I show how this project resonated with an array of contemporaneous queer literary, artistic, and visual responses to the AIDS crisis that collectively forged a powerful visceral rhetoric intended to have political results."I cherish my bile duct almost as much as any other organ. I take good care of it. I make sure it gets its daily vitamins and antioxidants and invigorating exposure to news of ... everyone working for the Bush family."- Tony Kushner, speech to the graduating class of Bard College (2005)

Announcement: The winter edition of The End of Austin is here!

The End of Austin is back in action with its Winter 2015 edition, which features articles, photographs, and video on chicken shit bingo, the light rail, Plaza Saltillo, and lots of other Austin-y things. In case you haven't heard, The End of Austin is an award-winning digital humanities project based in the Department of American Studies at UT that explores urban identity in Austin. This edition features an article on the Colorado River and water in Austin by UT AMS alumnus Andrew Busch and an article by PhD candidate Brendan Gaughen on Dazed and Confused.Check it all out here!