An Inclusive Litany

2/14/00

A catalog description of Susan Talburt's Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education, to be published by the State University of New York Press in May, 2000.
This interpretive ethnography explores the academic practices of three lesbian faculty members at Liberal U., a public research university. Drawing on poststructural theories, the text takes readers beyond constructions of lesbian faculty that rely on identity, voices, and visibility to consider the construction and shifting meanings of academic research, teaching, and collegial relations in practice. Talburt depicts the complicated relations of knowledge, identity, and sexuality as interrelated terms whose meanings are constructed as contingent possibilities. This book challenges us to rethink policy and practice, identity and difference, and knowledge and ignorance as lived and created in constantly shifting networks of relation.

[Ed.: Talburt is also co-editing a volume entitled, Thinking Queer: Sexuality, Culture, and Education.]