Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis on the History of Animal Activism
Dr. Janet Davis's next book, The Gospel of Kindness, is coming out in April from Oxford University Press. Recently, she published a preview of sorts in The American Historian. We've printed an excerpt below, and you can find the whole article here.
American animal protectionists from earlier centuries might seem unrecognizable today. Most ate meat. They believed in euthanasia as a humane end to creaturely suffering. They justified humanity's kinship with animals through biblical ideas of gentle stewardship. They accepted animal labor as a compulsory burden of human need. Their sites of activism included urban streets, Sunday schools, church pulpits, classrooms, temperance meetings, and the transnational missionary field. Committed to animal welfare, they strove to prevent pain and suffering. Contemporary animal rights activists, by contrast, believe that animals possess the right to exist free from human use and consumption. Consequently, current activists and their scholarly associates often miss the historical significance of earlier eras of activism. A growing historiography, however, demonstrates the centrality of animal protection to major American transformations such as Protestant revivalism and reform, the growth of science and technology, the rise of modern liberalism, child protectionism, and the development of American ideologies of benevolence.
Faculty Research: Dr. Lauren Gutterman writes on Christmas and queerness
With Christmas a mere 11 days away, we're very pleased to bring you such a timely piece from Dr. Lauren Gutterman. Dr. Gutterman has penned a thoughtful, fascinating discussion for Notches about how historic periodicals conveyed how "Christmas felt different for queers," drawing upon publications like ONE, The Mattachine Review, and The Ladder.The whole piece can be found here; we've printed an excerpt below:
As many scholars have pointed out, with the emergence of gay liberation such expressions of sadness and loss faded from view, replaced, at least publicly, with more politically “useful” feelings of righteous anger and pride. But the queer holiday blues have persisted, and they have even been a source of theorizing about sexuality. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in Tendencies, “The depressing thing about the Christmas season—isn’t it?—is that it’s the time when all the institutions are speaking with one voice…They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year.” During the holidays “Christmas” and “the family” become one and the same; they are constituted in and through each other. Writing from the margins as queer identified and as Jewish, Sedgwick held that the fascinating—and exciting—thing about sexuality is the extent to which individuals’ bodies, appearances, identities, experiences, and fantasies fail to align so easily. It is precisely this messiness, this inconsistency, Sedgwick argues, that the concept “queer” aims to bring into focus. In other words, Christmas is queerness’s opposite.
Teaching Stories: AMS students create 1990s zine
[gallery columns="2" ids="3802,3804,3803,3805"]It's no secret that American Studies courses are among the most fascinating, enriching, and fun at UT. Today, we bring you a feature on a unique creative assignment that one of our Ph.D. candidates and Assistant Instructors, Brendan Gaughen, created for his undergraduate 311s course, "America in the 1990s": a 1990s era zine.Here's what Brendan had to say about the project:
During the semester, students read about and discussed the activist and community-building potential of zines and this assignment was inspired by a desire to have students participate in something creative and collective, using a format that was quite popular in the 1990s. In addition to creating a single-page visual representation of their final paper (a topic they had been researching and writing about for most of the semester), students submitted a 2-3 page reflection paper describing why they chose particular images and text and how this creative visual format allows them to convey something different about their project than a typical research paper. Being a class about the cultural history of the 1990s, having students contribute to a collective zine seemed like an obvious choice for an assignment and I am quite impressed at what they created. Doing the layout was more complicated than I anticipated (it required cutting everything in half and reassembling four different halves per two-sided page), but the result is something tangible that students can hang onto as a memento.
Faculty Research: Dr. Janet Davis on Jaws and First Blood
We love a good blockbuster action movie as much as the next guy and gal, so we're thrilled to share with you some new research from Dr. Janet Davis. Recently, Dr. Davis presented a talk about the relationship between cultural memory, the Vietnam War, Jaws, and First Blood, and she also provided a write-up of the talk to the the blog Not Even Past. We've printed an excerpt below; the full shebang can be found here. Enjoy!
The theme of the abandoned soldier is blasted writ large in the film’s first sequel, Rambo (First Blood Part II): Rambo is released from prison to return to Vietnam on a special mission to search for American POWs. Released in 1985, the film was an international box office hit—the first of three sequels, which Morrell likened to “westerns or Tarzan films.” First Blood Part II’s celebration of Rambo’s massively muscled heroics and its erasure of ambivalence about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam, gave popular form to President Reagan’s full-throated declarations of whipping the “Vietnam Syndrome.”At the time of First Blood’s publication in 1972, a writer named Peter Benchley was drafting an “Untitled Novel” about the social and economic chaos unleashed by a murderous great white shark that eats five people at a beach community on Long Island. A member of the celebrated Benchley literary family, Peter grew up watching marine life at his family’s summer home in Nantucket. His childhood fascination with sharks endured at Harvard, and his subsequent career as a journalist and a speechwriter in the Johnson Administration. Benchley’s privileged background gave him an intimate sense of the WASPY summer people who populate his fictional seaside community of Amity in the novel that he finally named Jaws. References to Vietnam punctuate the novel. In an early draft, Benchley describes the young adult summer people, the lifeblood of this struggling seaside community, as virtually immune to the shocks of war and socioeconomic upheaval because of their wealth and their ready access to college draft deferments, or through desirable draft assignments as naval officers or reservists: “If their IQs could be tested en masse, they would show native ability well within the top ten percent of all mankind…. Intellectually, they know a great deal. Practically, they choose to know almost nothing. For they have been subtly conditioned to believe (or, if not to believe, to sense) that the world is really quite irrelevant to them. And they are right…. They are invulnerable to the emotions of war.”