History of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Essay Sample)

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History of Gay and Lesbian Studies
The texts selected for juxtaposition in this discussion are “Forget Stonewall: Making Gay History Perfectly Queer” by Thomas Piontek and “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” by Evelynn Hammonds. Both texts examine queer studies, showing multiple similarities and differences. They illustrate that minority history encompasses the struggles of various subordinate groups to recover previously excluded or overlooked records. The texts complement each other to show that acknowledging more past queer fictions and literature will allow society to recognize the diversity among queer historical subjects and increase the number of approaches to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) liberation.
Both texts acknowledge that queer studies have been historically excluded from mainstream literature. This exclusion explains why the queer studies discourse still reflects the dominant white culture. According to Hammonds, text by gay writers of color does not express the differences in the black experience; thus, they cannot theorize about the black experience. The author notes that this silence eradicates and makes black lesbians doubly invisible, first as African American women and second as lesbians (Hammonds). Similarly, Piontek considers minority history a recent phenomenon. The author notes that minority history has encountered considerable resistance from consensus historians who assert that the political deployment of history jeopardizes the historian’s scholarly integrity (7). This historical perspective resulted in excluding gay history, failing to represent history as a pluralistic enterprise targeting the vastest possible combination of perspectives (Piontek 8). These commonalities indicate that the exclusion of queer history has caused an incomprehensive account that does contain the views of the GLBT members of society. Therefore, incorporating the queer studies discourse into the mainstream historical studies make history a