Pride Month Q&A: Kandice Chuh

The second in a series of profiles to celebrate Pride month at the Graduate Center.

Professor Kandice Chuh (English) specializes in critical/queer theory and critical race studies, Asian American and comparative ethnic literary studies, and minority discourse. She recently spoke about the importance of Pride month, the Graduate Center's role in establishing LGBTQ studies, and the need to expand this role in the future.

* * *

GC: Could you discuss the importance of Pride month for the GC?

Chuh: Pride month gives the GC the opportunity to focus on the ways in which LGBTQ studies should be a vibrant center of intellectual activity for us, as well as how it is the rubric under which some of the most innovative and important theorizing and analysis of history, politics, culture, and social life has been mounted.

How has the GC been a leader in LGBTQ studies?

CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the GC, and individual faculty members 'Distinguished Professor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, of course' have been vitally important to the establishment of the field.

Do you feel that the intersection of LGBTQ issues and issues related to race and ethnicity receives enough attention during Pride month?

I take my lead from the intellectual and political traditions of queer of color critique and women of color feminism and so understand LGBTQ and race and ethnicity as compresent and entangled rather than separable. So, in my head, the question becomes, do we give enough attention to these genealogies of thought and activism? And in that sense, I don't think it's possible to give enough!