One of the unique aspects of Class, Race, and Gender – both on this blog and in the classroom – has been the fact that our discussions have been as much about how we talk about the most controversial bits of our society as they have been about the history of these meaty topics in […]

Read more "The Play’s the Thing"

Ventura County, California. When I describe my hometown, breezily summarizing it as a southern California suburb, I have a pretty good idea of what people imagine. Traffic, beaches, large single-family homes, year-around sun. The assumptions are accurate, at least to a point. While I, a middle-class white kid who got good grades, took ballet lessons, […]

Read more "The Faces of Homelessness"

“Nobody knows what causes it. And nobody knows how to cure it. The best theory is that we blame a retrovirus, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Its presence is made known to us by the useless antibodies which appear in reaction to its entrance to the bloodstream, through a cut or an orifice. The antibodies are […]

Read more "There are No Angels in America: AIDS and Queer Identity"

Mischievous. Powerful. Confident. In control. These are just some of the words in phrases we used today in class to describe this dynamic 1936 photograph of Bessie Smith. About a week ago, a friend of mine sent me this fascinating article about female “trickster” archetypes in literature and pop culture that immediately came to mind […]

Read more "Blues Women and Female Myth"

In 1993, two distinctly different museums dedicated to the history of the Holocaust opened in the United States. One was the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, located just off the National Mall in Washington, DC. With its stark architecture, exhaustively detailed and documented exhibits, and atmosphere of solemnity, it has come to represent the quintessential […]

Read more "“Beyond Auschwitz”: Teaching Tolerance in Los Angeles"

There is a scene from the 1972 film Cabaret that manages to encapsulate in a few short seconds the very ethos of the movie, it’s dark moral about the dangers of fiddling while Rome burns. The two main characters, Liza Menneli’s anti-heroine Sally Bowles and her love interest Brian (Michael York), are traveling in a […]

Read more "In Here, Life (Isn’t) Beautiful"