The Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Program launched a Queer Studies Certificate in May. As the first undergraduate certificate at Illinois State, the curriculum builds off the existing queer studies concentration, and students currently pursuing the concentration can transfer into the formal certificate.
“The Certificate recognizes students’ advanced coursework in LGBTQ+ and sexuality studies,” said Assistant Director Dr. Jacklyn Weier. “It will appear on transcripts and indicate students’ preparedness to professionally engage with people regardless of their backgrounds.”
Having taught the core sequence of classes in Queer Studies for many years, Interim Director Dr. Jason Whitesel said, “Courses in the certificate program, like Intro to LGBTQ Studies, honor queer people precisely because of who they are and what they bring to broaden and deepen our communities, including their unique contributions to history and the culture, and how they reconfigure discomfort with the norms as socially and politically productive.”
The Queer Studies certificate follows the longstanding success of the WGSS minor offered to undergraduate students starting in 1991 as a Women’s Studies minor. Initial courses on queer sexualities and genders began in 2014 and 2015 with WGS 292: Introduction to LGBTQ Studies and WGS 392: Queer and Transgender Theory. In 2016, the WGSS Program created the Queer Studies Concentration, an advising-based plan of study that drew dozens of students.
The certificate is the most recent effort to represent non-cishet- people and knowledge at Illinois State. LGBTQ+ activism on campus dates back to the organization of a Gay Liberation Front college chapter in 1969. In 2009, the LGBT/Queer Studies and Services Institute was formed on South Main Street and operated with contributions from donors and the volunteered labor of dedicated faculty, staff, and students. The Institute also hosted the first QUEERtalks speaker series, which brought emerging queer-studies scholars to campus. By 2020, The Queer Coalition was formed to combine the work of The Institute and the faculty/staff affinity group, ISU Triangle Association. Programming for the Pride student organization shifted to being a community sponsored by the Multicultural Center (formerly Diversity Advocacy). Much of the academic mission of the Institute was assumed by the WGSS program.
Over the years, new queer studies courses have been developed across departments in the College of Arts and Sciences that can be taken toward the QS certificate. More recent additions, such as WGS 177: Queer Theatre, a course developed by popular instructional assistant professor in WGSS, Dr. Bridget Sundin Nowicki, can be taken to fulfill general education requirements. Most of the classes associated with the certificate are designated as IDEAS or AMALI courses, like ANT 270: Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality.
Queer Studies relies on a “scavenger methodology” to collect and produce information on subjects who (and which) have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional study of human behavior and rights. “Faculty teach radical ideas, empowering counternarratives, and suppressed knowledge essential to many students’ survival. In the Queer and Transgender Theory course, students gain a capacious notion of ‘Queer’ beyond nonnormative sex, gender, and sexual identity, with queerness and queering based on experiences and interpretations of those rendered ‘Queer’ by social and political norms and bodies of inquiry so vast in scope they become tantalizingly unruly. ‘Queer’ is ‘good to think with’ because it opens up provocative avenues for understanding abjection and marginality, and imagining a world of pure possibility,” said Whitesel.
Amid nationwide efforts to undo LGBTQ+ civil rights, the Queer Studies Certificate is an important reminder that the histories and knowledge of Queer people are enduring. Supporters of the certificate hope to develop additional classes on LGBT and Queer studies that will represent Queer and transgender knowledge in the ISU curriculum.
If this article sparked your interest in the history of ISU’s WGSS Program, check out the program’s timeline for more information. If you are a student interested in pursuing the Queer Studies certificate, email WGSAdvisor@IllinoisState.edu to arrange a meeting with the WGSS academic advisor.
