Kate O’Brien: Let's hop right into it! Just to get started, to begin, kind of have our fun little introductions, can you tell us a little bit sort of about your background and, like, gender and sexuality research, and maybe talk a little about a bit about what queer theory actually is?

Johnson: Sure. So my name is Colin Johnson, I'm an associate professor in the Department of Gender Studies, and American Studies as well. And I mean, as a scholar, my work has really dealt with a number of issues. But one of the things I'm probably best known for is the work that I've done in the history of same sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural America, which when I started doing that work was not something that got a lot of attention. In the field of LGBTQ studies, a lot of work had been done. At that point on, you know, the history of sexuality in urban spaces. And I think there were reasons for that. And that work was really important. But I grew up in a small town in west central Illinois, and so when I was where you all are now, when I was a college student, and I had the good fortune to take courses in gay and lesbian studies, which included, you know, gay and lesbian history, but also queer theory, there was a lot that I learned in those courses. That felt true to me. And that was really important in terms of my own education. But like a lot of people who get- are motivated to sort of do certain kinds of work, I didn't really see a lot of my own experience reflected in those narratives. And so that prompted me then to start doing the research that I did as a graduate student that I can continue to do to this day, although my interests have kind of evolved over time as those things do so. 

And what I discovered when I was doing that work, is that I needed to kind of know the history of things, right, and the kind of disciplinary sense, like- I needed to know what happened, when and where, and how things change over time to tell the story that I really wanted to tell. But I also needed some conceptual tools, to think differently about how to talk about that history, how to talk about the people who were involved in making that history, and really how to talk about the experience of being different, where gender and sexuality were concerned. And those tools I drew primarily from a kind of, from a field that's related to the history of sexuality. But different than that is this kind of literature on queer-queer theory, which was kind of came into existence in the very late 1980s. But really, probably more of the early 1990s, really kind of on the back end of the HIV AIDS pandemic. And that was really, that actually has a lot to do with what queer theory was, and kind of what it is, and what it kind of continues to be in lots of ways. 

So you asked about what queer theory is, and this is- I teach a course on queer theory, I'll be teaching in the fall. So there are lots of ways to define or to think about what queer theory is. And I'll give you the kind of complicated one first, and then I'll give you the one I really like. Sort of related, but not the same thing. And if I had to give you the complicated explanation of what query theory is, I would characterize birth theory as an anti-essentialist, anti-moralizing, anti-minoritized critique of normativity. That’s also because of where it came from, and what it is historically, is very self consciously anti-homophobic. And I think that's a really important part of it, of what queer theory is, and does an increasingly queer theory– I think, also, just because things change over time. And I think queer theory has had a fairly significant effect on the world, it's increasingly anti, while really always was, in some respects, been anti-transphobic. And I think a lot of other anti is as well, including anti-racist, anti-classist, and even with respect to itself. 

So one of the things that happens with fields is that people start talking about something and then they reflect over time on how they may have been kind of drawn into replicating some of the harms, and that they were kind of accusing other groups of people having engaging in, and I think queer theory has gone through its kind of episodes where that's concerned. So there's a lot in that definition. We don’t have time for me to unpack it all. But I guess what I would say is: one way to think about it is if the history of LGBTQ+ history is the story of how we became who we are right over time, like how people come to came to recognize themselves as being part of a community as having more in common with one another, and are having enough in common with one another that that sense of affiliation, and commonality mattered socially, culturally and politically. And I think there's- there's no question that those things happened and the fact that they happen, matters. Queer theory, I think, is kind of working the equation from the other side, which is just– it's an effort to look at what happens when you begin to settle on certain kinds of definitions. What happens when you begin to start to, kind of, narrow the scope of who was included in a minoritized community or group? And what kinds of exclusions and assumptions then get built into that process as well. 

I think that the best definition, though, just to share with you a little nugget of wisdom, that when I remember– when I was in college, and I asked a very similar question of one of my professors, who I respect, and really adore very much– she passed away recently. And I said, “So how would you define queer theory?” and her definition was, “Queer theory is a theory of how we find one another, despite everything, despite all of the kinds of forces and influences that really have an interest in keeping people apart, particularly people whose gender and sexuality don't align with social norms.” Queer theory is the theory of how we find one another. When I teach queer theory, that's often one of the kinds of lessons that I want people to walk away with, is how do you find one another in the world? And how do you know your people when you see them? And what kinds of assumptions are built into that? And what kinds of exclusions might be being built into those– that set of assumptions as well? So that's a very long answer. But it's a complicated subject. 

Amanda Tinkle: Sorry, no, that's a very beautiful way to put queer theory and understanding of that kind of study in that kind of work is finding each other is very, that sounds very, you know, very heart touching to hear it's, I think it's phenomenal that we're actually able to study things like LGBTQ and queer theory in universities now and really expand that and gain that knowledge and education of how to find each other and, and also think about it critically, analytically and historically, and keep growing that knowledge to everybody. And so I think that's a really beautiful definition of campus, you know, and it wasn't always the case. 

Johnson: I mean, I always tell people, I remember the first course I took in LGBTQ history in the early 1990s. When I was in college, it was– it was very early on. And when I registered for that course, the title of the course was The history of American Sexual Subcultures in the which sounds… [laughs] He said it was called that was because the university was concerned that there that students would be concerned that if the words gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender words appeared on people's transcripts, that they would be stigmatized when they went looking for jobs. And so on my transcript, it doesn't say “The History of American Sexual Subcultures,” it says The History of Americans SSU, because that's all that would fit on the line. And that was intentional. Now, you see the word “queer” on people's transcripts, and it's no big deal. And people are, you know, in fact, it's– it's often a matter of pride with people that that's been part of their college education. So, history– history does matter. Change does happen. Sometimes for better sometimes or worse. 

Amanda Tinkle: Even just looking at, like, the acronym LGBTQ, we went LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, LGBTQIA like that has evolved as well with time. So I love that we're able to kind of evolve and change as we learn and grow with each other. I'm really excited to talk about the rural American experience with you because I'm from a rural American town as well. 

Kate O’Brien: I'm from a rural American town as well!

Johnson: We find each other! I learned that theory holds sometimes.

Kate O’Brien: One of the things that you actually talked about earlier and I kind of wanted to point out a little bit in terms of like, informing the people and having– having students understand more things. And this comes from someone who is a student who is very engrossed in media. It's part of my incoming job that's– that's part of my majors. So something I've run into is the discussion. And quite frankly, the debate between gender and sexuality. And one of the things, at least that I have seen in sort of the more modern era is that, oh, but some people seem to not understand sort of what gender and sexuality are, what their fluidity means, how they can change, sort of how they're able to change. And I guess now, obviously, I know that gender and sexuality are not cut terms. We are changing, we are learning, we are adapting new identities, quite frankly. But would you be able to explain to us sort of what gender and sexuality mean, and sort of how, how they kind of function in our society. And if you want to talk a little bit about, like, how that's developed in any way, or evolved in any way or degree, that would also be great, because I know that they are not cut and dry words with definitions.

Johnson: No, they're not, so– so let me back up just a little bit, because I think it's a really, really important question. And it's a kind of symptomatic question too, of where we are. Because it's interesting to me and notable, and I think really important that the two terms that you were kind of putting in connection are trying to connect with one another with gender and sexuality. If we were having this conversation, you know, 18 years ago, when I started working here, the two terms that would have kind of bedeviled people more would have been sex and gender. I think the reason that's important is because it's that distinction, the sex/gender distinction is kind of foundational to understanding how sexuality relates to even gender itself. So– so if I was teaching a class when I, you know, the first semester that I started here in 2005, for me to walk into a classroom, for example, and try to explain to students that there's a difference between sex and gender– I remember very vividly there were some students who were like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And then there were other students who they had to take all semester to think about what that meant. And the kind of traditional way that in a classroom context that I think people use to talk about that was they would say, “Oh, well, sex is kind of the material biological conditions of the body. And gender is what's kind of social, historical, culture. All right, it's about meaning, it's not about kind of matter. And those two things are clearly related in certain ways, but they're not the same.” And it turns out, that's actually itself a really complicated– it's actually not quite right, for various reasons. Because it turns out that even the way we think about the nature of the body, right depends upon us making kind of intellectual, cultural, assumptions and statements, right. So how, for example, you classify certain bodies is fundamentally a kind of an intellectual exercise that requires you to set up criteria by which you kind of make sense of the matter and the material that's in front of you. 

And those criteria, and those kinds of ideas about how you make sense of the body are not outside of culture, they're not outside of the political, they're not outside of any of the things that people can more easily understand as being about ideas and perception and that sort of thing. So– so as we often say, sex itself is kind of gendered you know, because– because you have to have a whole bunch of assumptions about things before you start making sense of something, nothing is kind of self evident in that regard. It also turns out that what we talk about as gender, the kind of cultural, the social, the historical meaning that gets assigned to things, is not arbitrary, right? It's not like the meanings that we assign things are fabricated, or without grounding in the material world, or what's in front of us. So those things are bound in a particular way, by people's– again, perceptions and experiences, and just the limits of the body and you know, and kind of the world that we live in. So they're kind of knit together in a much tighter way than a simple while sex is the biological and gender as a cultural would suggest. So that's the first thing.

When you start adding sexuality into it, it gets even more complicated because it turns out, shocker, right? It turns out that how those things relate to one another, kind of depends on what you mean by sexuality, if you mean by sexuality, what people do, what kind of sex they have, what kind of desires they have, what kind of relations they have to their own bodies and pleasures and kind of capacities and other people's bodies and desires and pleasures and capacities. Well, that's one thing but increasingly, and that– that then becomes a kind of story about– in that universe. The difference between something like just sex and gender and sexuality is, it's a difference between what people believe they are right and a kind of static sense to what they do? So it's a story of, in fancy terms, it's, you know, it's sort of an ontological story on one side, or it's a story about action and behavior. It's the, that's one way to think of it. But increasingly, and I'm sure you all could kind of attest to this. 

There's a sense sexuality itself, is sort of like sex and gender in the sense that it's an it's a dimension, it's an aspect of who we are. Right? Then it says some sort of attribute of the self that one has, but it's– it's a comp– it's a really complicated attribute of the cell. Because if it's what– if it's– if sexuality is kind of like the nature of your desires, and all sorts of other things, and kind of what you do with other people or don't do with other people, then it's a– it's a– it's an attribute of the self that is weirdly dependent on other people, right? In a way that something like sex understood as one's bodily morphology, anatomy, kind of the materiality was when its body is not necessarily, or at least is not imagined to be. It's a really complicated set of things where, where there's constantly this kind of push and pull between what's imagined to be an attribute of the self and what is fundamentally imagined to be a relational quality. Right. And I think that issue, the issue you asked about– about kind of change and fluidity and all that other stuff is, the answer ends up kind of being contextually Yes. As you say, the answer ends up being everything is kind of relational in lots of ways. But the fact that it's relational doesn't necessarily mean that it's inconsequential to one's understanding of one's self, we are kind of social creatures and, and our understanding of ourselves is contingent upon our understanding of– of other people. So as the world around us changes, our understanding of our own capacities in and of ourselves changes with it in relation to it. 

Amanda Tinkle: The next thing I was curious about is… when we think about the changes in the fluid being the ability of change, you have a background in the history of LGBTQ community and that realm. And so I'm interested in knowing a bit more about the actual historical context and environment of the United States, in the realm of LGBTQ, if you could explain a little bit about how things started and how, you know, they've evolved over time a little bit.

 Johnson: If you look at the literature on the sort of– sexuality broadly, but specifically LGBTQ+ history, sort of the earliest work was really– first of all, it wasn't really about LGBTQ+ anything. It was about lesbians and gay men. And what that usually meant was gay men. [laughs] So it was– I– now, the first thing is that all those histories are related in the sense and I think, importantly, related in the sense that there are all histories of forms of social kind of minoritization that have to do with gender and sexuality. They're all histories that exist, and were mapped out at the edges of a world that was imagined for a very long time to be presumptively heterosexual, presumptively cisgender, and in many cases, presumptively, middle class and white, right? And in some cases, presumptively, Metropolitan or suburban, I mean, this was one of the places where my work, like, that's great, but it's, you know, there's all this other space where people are doing things, you know, that's not getting talked about. So all of those histories have something to do with one another. And rightfully so because of the fact that they, they're kind of histories of marginalized experience, right, and the struggle to kind of push back against that structural marginalization, but they are distinct in particular way. And I teach a another course on this, we'll be teaching it but it's called ‘Gay History in Queer Cultures,' it's very much like about all of these questions, right? Where are these histories related to one another? Where do they diverge? So– so that's the first thing I would say is that– that whole formation, there are lots of points of intersection and kind of commonality, there are lots of differences. And both matter if you had to kind of plot the arc of what that history broadly understood, looks like. 

It would really be a story of the major arc of it would be a history of gradual self recognition amongst people, that they belong to a group and I mentioned this a little bit before, but the recognition that they have kind of something significant in common with one another, that matters in terms of a broad range of subjects in terms of the livability of their lives in terms of, you know, the struggle for equity and justice and inclusion, in terms of shared challenges, they kind of experience together and as people begin to recognize themselves as being members of part of a kind of structurally marginalized group, they come to feel that they share kind of an identity with one another, that they are part of an identity group then and that they are part of a community of people that has interests that are either being served or not Observe by dominant culture, the old version of this story is, everybody was isolated alone. And then all of a  sudden, at some point, a whole bunch of people, you know, started moving to American cities rural, for multiple reasons, it's never entirely clear whether they moved to cities because their cities or whether they move to cities, because they were they understood themselves to be different in that they would find other people who were similarly different, you know, more of them in cities, just as you would find more people or whatever. But one way or another, the idea is there's this rural to urban migration, there's a concentration of people in urban areas, who began to recognize themselves as part of a group, they start building institutions and developing kind of social, sexual cultural practices that then define the community that they're part of. And at a certain point, they come to be so pissed off by how badly treated they are, that they fight back.

And then they become kind of politically self conscious and self actualized, right, and start making claims on society. So that's kind of the old version of the story. And that does, there's a lot of truth to that. But you can see even from the way it's mapped out, there are a whole bunch of other people whose experiences kind of don't fit that story. They're the people who stay behind in those small towns and they're the people who are engaging with that community and those institutions in some way, but don't necessarily see themselves as at the political vanguard of it, right? So it gets very complicated in that in that regard, but there are really important differences, big things, for example, that the lesbian/gay community members of the political knew worked a very long time to achieve was to get the medical establishment in the United States, for doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists to abandon the idea, that same sex desire or being gay and lesbian, was it in and of itself indicative of mental illness, right? They worked very hard, they lobbied very hard, for example, to have homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the 19– early 1970s. 

 Because prior to that, if you were, you know, discovered to be gay or lesbian to have same sex desires, that was in and of itself, evidence of kind of mental disorder, weakness, and that made gay men and lesbians susceptible to all sorts of abuses, I mean, sometimes really violent abuses, it basically put them at the kind of mercy of physicians and psychiatrists who could either determined that they were okay or whatever, or have them involuntarily committed, and really, in many ways, kind of violently violate it. And they succeed. In the early 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So that was fine for gay men and lesbians, because what it did, it was actually quite an achievement was it kind of got the medical establishment out of their hair, didn't get the legal establishment out of their hair, people could still be arrested and thrown in jail for doing all sorts of other things, but they couldn't, it was far less common for them to be institutionalized. 

The trans community has a slightly different history. Because if you're trans and if you depend, for example, on access to various forms of medical care, telling the medical establishment to simply go away and leave you alone, we don't need you is not a particularly desirable, like political goal, because you actually need access to an ideally, that kind of humane support of people who are in a position to provide you with the resources that you need in order to transition. So that was a big bone of contention between members of the gay and lesbian community, right? And members of the trans community when you know, gay men and lesbians are like, right, we're in the clear now, where this is concerned, and trans folks were kind of sitting there saying, but you just told these people to buzz off and we still, you know, we still need to work with them. We need to find a different way to talk to people in the medical and psychiatric community, and not just about access to medical services, but to things like insurance coverage, right? I mean, it's usually expensive. So– so understanding those differences is really significant.