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This article reconsiders Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons (2012) as a book that helps to discern a necessary relation between Queer Studies and Working-Class Studies, two fields that do not often share a footprint in the US academy. That relation emerges for the author in the unexpected resonance between Object Lessons and Vivian Gornick’s recently republished The Romance of American Communism (2020), a classic text about the politics of passionate longing for a better world. Likewise, Wiegman understands political desire as the animating force behind the field of Queer Studies and other identity knowledges. Brim argues that, alongside this affective threshold of belonging that constitutes the field of US Queer Studies, there exists a material threshold of belonging that renders politically indispensable academic fields as, nonetheless, sites of class-based exclusion. In the increasingly class-stratified and race-sorted academy, disciplines such as Working-Class Studies that are attentive to the material exclusions of knowledge production can help scholars to proactively set material conditions alongside political desire in a future-oriented, sustainable vision of Queer Studies.

This study asks, What are the material conditions under which queer studies is done in the academy? It finds a longstanding association of queer studies with the well-resourced, selective colleges and flagship campuses that are the drivers of class and race stratification in higher education in the U.S. That is, the field of queer studies, as a recognizable academic formation, has been structured by the material and intellectual resources of precisely those institutions that most steadfastly refuse to adequately serve poor and minority students, including poor and minority queer students. In response, "poor queer studies" calls for a critical reorientation of queer studies toward working-poor schools, students, theories, and pedagogies. Taking the College of Staten Island, CUNY as a case study, it argues for structural crossing over or "queer-class ferrying" between high-status institutions that have so brilliantly dominated queer studies' history and low-status worksites of poor queer studies.

Queer studies is experiencing a methodological renaissance. In both the humanities and the social sciences, scholars have begun to identify research protocols and practices that have been largely overshadowed by dramatic advances in queer theory. The 2010 volume Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, indexed this shift toward methods by reframing the endlessly rehearsed question "what is queer theory?" as the nascent "how is queer theory done?" Three years later, the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a two-day Queer Method conference. Organizers asked "what it means to understand queer work as having a method, or to imagine method itself as queer" (QueerMethod 2016). A 2016 University of Massachusetts Amherst conference similarly refocused queer studies-as well as black and postcolonial studies-through the lens of methods, and next year, the University of California Press will release a new collection on queer methods in sociology. With this special issue, WSQaffirms and enriches these conversations by presenting pioneering feminist work on queer methods in sociology, performance studies, African American studies, lesbian cultural studies, critical psychology, African studies, statistics, transgender and queer studies, media and digital studies, history, and English, as well as poetry and fiction.An Alternate HistoryWhat if a high-profile academic conference in 1990 had ushered in an enterprise called "queer methods" rather than "queer theory"?1 Our ques- tion-speculative and provocative in its rewriting of a watershed moment in queer intellectual history-is also surprisingly plausible. The methods that scholars used to establish gay and lesbian studies in the decades prior to queer theory were often quite queer themselves, particularly when guided by social constructionist approaches to the study of homosexuality. This was certainly true in sociology, as Steven Seidman (1994), Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer (1994), and others have noted.2 Why then has queer theory not staked a more pervasive, methods-oriented claim? Insofar as queer theory has relied on a humanities-centered displacement of the disciplinary innovations that were unfolding in the social sciences as "LGBT/queer studies" (see Lovaas, Elia, and Yep 2006), a focus on methods would not only have exposed that displacement but also forced a confrontation with disciplinarity that might have threatened queer theory's constitutional claims to inter/antidisciplinarity. The current turn "back" to methods may be perceived as an attempt to leverage disciplinarity against those longstanding claims by queer theory. Working explicitly through the question of queer methods, the following contributions thoughtfully negotiate such disciplinary impasses.From another angle, the political context that inspired early queer theory might also have translated into an inaugural focus on queer methods. Like much of gay and lesbian studies scholarship, academic queer theory was largely inspired by activist social movements of the day. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman suggests that ACT UP exemplified the pragmatic ability of queer activists of the 1980s and 1990s to join "deconstructive reading practices and grassroots activism together, laying the groundwork for . . . queer theory" (2010, xv).3 Freeman thus links queer theoretical work in the academy to the questions of how that queer activism so ingeniously answered. To take her example, ACT UP was grounded in goal-oriented tactics and techniques including direct actions (e.g., teach-ins, kiss-ins, and die-ins), building coalitions across race and gender (e.g., affinity groups), highly stylized graphic designs, medical interventions (e.g., needle exchange, inclusive clinical trials, lay expertise4), video/media innovation, acts of disclosing, self-nominating, public shaming, outing, and marching. …

����� ��� We are in a queer pedagogical moment in the academy. The moment is not new, but a number of recent books have dramatized it and made it more urgent. In the past two years, studies by Robyn Wiegman, Roderick Ferguson, Sara Ahmed, Judith Halberstam, and David Halperin have illuminated the political, historical, phenomenological, theoretical, and affective contours of institutionalized queer teaching and scholarship. These books allow me in this essay to reflect in a timely way on a recent queer peda gogical intervention of my own: writing the study guide for Jim Hubbard’s 2012 documentary film, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. 1 My narrative traces the history of the study guide, charting its contexts, goals, and methods, in order ultimately to identify and confront murkier questions about its creation. Having never used or read a study guide, why was I writing this one? 2 Why was I so committed to the project? What simultaneously charged and freighted this rather intense moment of queer pedagogical engagement for me? In Object Lessons Robyn Wiegman considers just such questions in terms of professors’ aspirations to turn political commitment to critical practice. “What is it we expect our relationship to our objects of study to do?” she asks fellow practitioners of identity knowledges (2012, 337). Here, Wiegman considers the “many projects of academic study that were institutionalized in the U.S. university in the twentieth century for the study of identity” (1). Those projects include women’s studies, ethnic studies, American studies, and queer studies. 3 Like academics throughout the university, the inhabitants of identity knowledges want something

In his introduction to the 1991 collection Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, Essex Hemphill recalls his search for writing by and about black gay men as a difficult attempt to find...