Although my social media post was on the same topic, I feel it is useful to mention, again, the journal entries from UR graduate student Jay T. Stratton. He provides insight into the coming out experience as a student at our own university. In his journals he mentions how attending a meeting at the Gay Liberation Front was one of the pivotal moments for him to feel accepted in a community with little representation elsewhere. With this, he specifically described an encounter where he was answering phones at the GLF office. In this memory, he recalls how nervous he was that someone, not unlike himself, would call asking for help that he felt unsuited to provide. His premonition was correct, as another student did call, and as his story unfolds, Stratton reveals to us that he and this other student helped each other more in there few-minute conversation than any other experience he had had leading up to this point. As a reader of this experience, a student in this class, a member of the Rochester community, I could only hope that our cultivated exhibition could do the same for someone else.
Entirely unrelated to the class visit to Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, I have thought frequently about the inherent exclusivity of my major, English Literature. The canonical works read in classes like British and American literature are almost entirely works written by cis white men. This, however, is neither a reflection on the professors teaching the courses nor is it a reflection on those who study these texts, but it is a reflection on the accessibility to education and publication in the 17th through 19th centuries (and also to periods before and after those just mentioned). While there are plenty of examples of iconic works written by women and people of color, there is a much greater focus on cis white men, especially in the way literature survey courses are structured. Frequently, and unfortunately, in order to study outside the white male writers, it is necessary to take a course explicitly designed to focus on people who are not cis, straight, white men.
-MF