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Todd's Hammer (10 unread)

No Redemption in “Angels in America” (Guest Post)

Posted: August 30th, 2010, 2:38pm EDT by Todd

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In a conversation with some friends last week about the brilliance and shortcomings of Kushner’s play cycle Angels in America, a friend of mine, Caroline Udall, wrote this piercing critique of Kushner’s choice to redeem every character except the gay Mormon. Her comment is in medias rex, as it were, but I think it stands [...]
On the Uses of History

Posted: June 14th, 2010, 1:40am EDT by Todd

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While I was thinking out loud about history, lately, and its role in creating meaning (not in a cheesy self-help way, but in the social-psychological or symbolic interactionist sense of Meaning (i.e., G.H. Mead or John Dewey)), a friend suggested to me that feeling connected to the past can be mere nostalgia or sentimentalism. I’m [...]
Out of Step with Queer

Posted: May 14th, 2010, 9:34am EDT by Todd

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An acquaintance of mine asked me this morning to explain what I meant in my profile by being “out of step with the queer left.” It’s a good question, but a complex one that I still struggle with and am not sure about. I find that I both love queer theory and am frustrated by [...]
Naturalistic Theory of Culture

Posted: February 16th, 2010, 10:55am EST by Todd

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I’m constantly working on explaining the naturalistic theory of culture to my students. I have posted on this several times in the past and am still working it out. I want my students to understand both that culture is plastic and context dependent, and that culture is also always embodied and emergent from interaction. My [...]
“The Homosexuals” (CBS, 1967)

Posted: February 10th, 2010, 8:29am EST by Todd

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In my book The Meaning of Gay, currently in press (sorry for the shameless plug), I briefly treated the gay male response to this documentary in a section on the media and homosexuality. I had tried several ways to find and watch the documentary in its entirety, but had never been able to find it [...]
Gender Differences?

Posted: November 15th, 2009, 5:06pm EST by Todd

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In my ongoing quest to integrate genetic, neurological, biological, physiological, and evolutionary research and knowledge into my cultural sociological work, I am constantly trying to grapple with a way to theorize an integrated “nature/nurture” transaction in human behavioral and cultural characteristics. As I’ve said many times here before, I find it frustrating that English, because [...]
Teaching Religious Studies

Posted: October 14th, 2009, 12:43pm EDT by Todd

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I am teaching a bit out of my expertise this semester a course on the interaction of religion and politics in the United States. I expected conflict with believers in the course, but was unprepared for resistance from non-believers (I don’t really know why; probably because personally I come from a religious upbringing). Several of [...]
Theorizing Sexuality: Vexing and Vexed Categories

Posted: March 25th, 2009, 1:48pm EDT by Todd

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At the base of the problematic of theorizing any social/cultural phenomenon lies the task of defining the phenomenon in the first place. Definitions by nature are a process of creating useful categories of analysis, categories that draw boundaries in the world of phenomena in order to enable the analysis we desire. Here I’m going to [...]
Theorizing Sexuality: Introduction

Posted: February 15th, 2009, 10:10am EST by Todd

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Over the past year or so, I’ve been working to rethink my theories of sexuality and especially what I think of Queer Theory. My dissertation and forthcoming book in many ways self-consciously ignore Queer Theory, a reflection of my effort to read the past (I studied gay men in the 1960s) and draw conclusions from [...]
Obama’s Inaugural Speech

Posted: January 20th, 2009, 3:10pm EST by Todd

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I listened to it live and have re-read it twice. I think it deserves a place among the best presidential speeches in American history. Maybe not Lincoln’s 2nd or FDR’s 1st, but pitch perfect for the time and place. My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the [...]