Teaching and Researching the History of Sexual Politics at San Francisco State, 1969–1970

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 2-29
Author(s):  
Marc Stein
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Third World ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
History Teachers ◽  
Lgbt History ◽  
The Third ◽  
Collaborative Authorship ◽  
Lgbt Activism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third World

This essay summarizes the methods and results of a collaborative student-faculty research project on the history of sexual politics at San Francisco State University. The collaborators collected and analyzed 160 mainstream, alternative, student, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans) media stories. After describing the project parameters and process, the essay discusses six themes: (1) LGBT history; (2) the Third World Liberation Front strike; (3) feminist sexual politics; (4) the history of heterosexuality; (5) sex businesses, commerce, and entrepreneurship; and (6) sexual arts and culture. The conclusion discusses project ethics and collaborative authorship. The essay’s most significant contributions are pedagogical, providing a model for history teachers interested in working with their students on research skills, digital methodologies, and collaborative projects. The essay also makes original contributions to historical scholarship, most notably in relation to the Third World Liberation Front strike. More generally, the essay provides examples of the growing visibility of LGBT activism, the intersectional character of race, gender, and sexual politics, the complicated nature of gender and sexual politics in the “movement of movements,” the commercialization of sex, and the construction of normative and transgressive heterosexualities in this period.

“This Quiet Revolution”

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330
Author(s):  
Eli Meyerhoff
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Third World ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Student Union ◽  
The Third ◽  
State College ◽  
Experimental College ◽  
History Of ◽  
Revolutionary Movements ◽  
The Third World

One of the most revolutionary movements in the history of US universities—the Third World students’ strike that shut down San Francisco (SF) State College for five months in 1968–69—had a key precursor in the Experimental College (EC), which supported student-organized courses, including the first Black studies courses, at SF State. The EC offers inspiration for creating infrastructures of radical imagination and study. The EC appropriated resources—including spaces, money, teachers, credits, and technologies—for studying within, against, and beyond the normal university. The EC facilitated courses with revolutionary content, and they fostered modes of study in these courses that were radically alternative to the education-based mode of study. Contributing my concept of “modes of study,” I offer guidance for revolutionary movements on the terrain of universities today. Through analysis of archival materials and interviews with organizers of the EC and Black Student Union, I found that the EC organizers’ potentials for supporting revolutionary study were limited by their romanticizing of education, which was coconstituted with subscriptions to modernist imaginaries. Rejecting the education-based mode of study as bound up with liberal-capitalist modernity/coloniality, organizers today can appropriate their universities’ resources for alternative modes of study and world-making.

“Solidarity is Something you can Hold in your Hand”

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Torkil Lauesen
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Global Context ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Support Work

Abstract This article tells the story of an organization based in Copenhagen, Denmark, which supported the Liberation struggle in the Third World from 1969 until April 1989. It focus on the support to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (pflp). The story is told in a historical and global context. The text explains the strategy and tactic behind the support-work. It explains how the different forms of solidarity work developed over two decades (for a more detailed account of the history of the group, see Kuhn, 2014). Finally, the article offers an evaluation of the past and a perspective on the future struggle for a socialist Palestine.

Wanted: A Comparative History of the Modern Mediterranean

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
Edmund Burke
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Third World ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Third World

There is something seriously flawed about models of social change that posit the dominant role of in-built civilizational motors. While “the rise of the West” makes great ideology, it is poor history. Like Jared Diamond, I believe that we need to situate the fate of nations in a long-term ecohistorical context. Unlike Diamond, I believe that the ways (and the sequences) in which things happened mattered deeply to what came next. The Mediterranean is a particularly useful case in this light. No longer a center of progress after the sixteenth century, the decline of the Mediterranean is usually ascribed to its inherent cultural deficiencies. While the specific cultural infirmity varies with the historian (amoral familism, patron/clientalism, and religion are some of the favorites) its civilizationalist presuppositions are clear. In this respect the search for “what went wrong” typifies national histories across the region and prefigures the fate of the Third World.

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