Framing race, sexuality: doctoral candidate tackles black queer studies in new Northwestern program

Chicago Reporter, The, Sept-Oct, 2007 by Michelle Sibery

The self-drawn tattoos on Kortney Ryan Ziegler's arms were birthday presents to herself. On her right forearm rests a guardian angel with a star and on the left a Yoruba statue. It's meant to be a satire of the perceptions some people have about what "African" people look like, said the 26-year-old Northwestern University doctoral student.

Pushing the conventional boundaries, Ziegler challenges others to question the traditional notions of blackness and sexuality in her academic work. Even her appearance sets her apart from conventional trends. "I think a lot of people don't take me seriously as a scholar because I don't dress however we're supposed to dress," Ziegler said, donning lip and nose piercings and red- and orange-tipped dreadlocks.

Despite the differences, she found herself fitting in comfortably as one of five students in the inaugural African American studies doctoral program, where students this fall will begin their second year. The new program is just one of seven African American studies doctoral programs in the nation, with the others at prestigious universities including Harvard University, Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley.

The first in her immediate family to attend college, Ziegler was drawn to the progressive way she felt the department approached issues of sexuality and race. Northwestern is not the only school in the country to offer courses in black queer studies but has conducted research in that area. The doctoral program drew Ziegler from her studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she had been studying for a year. Prior to that, Ziegler had earned her masters in ethnic studies from San Francisco State and received a bachelor's from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Northwestern's African American studies doctoral program supports her lifelong passion to make films. "Since I could think, or my first memory, I've always wanted to be a filmmaker," Ziegler said. Over the summer, she began working on her first feature-length documentary, "still black," which conveys the stories of two black transgender individuals. The story highlights the intimate details of their personalities as they find their way through a society dominated with heterosexual beliefs about gender and sexuality, she said.

She will continue to work on her film while pursuing a concentration at Northwestern in black queer solo performance artists. After completing the program, Ziegler plans to teach at a university, maybe in the film department, while pursuing a filmmaking career.

Ziegler sat down with The Chicago Reporter to share her experiences as a black academic, lesbian, blogger, filmmaker and as a member of the first class in Northwestern's African American studies doctoral program.

Have you found any difficulties being black and lesbian in academia?

In [some] departments--I won't say names--the scholarship they teach is very quote-unquote, 'Eurocentric.' And that's problematic. And if you want to speak up, your aggrieved position is of, 'Ok, there's the black person again--always have to talk about the black stuff.' Or even in classes that are predominantly with people of color, it might be predominantly heterosexual. [Then] there's the lesbian that always has to talk about gay stuff or something like that. I'm not saying that happens all the time, but it does indeed happen. So that is definitely a challenge. And that's not unique to Northwestern. It's at any university, USA.

What would you like to see happen in academic programs when it comes to incorporating these two topics, blackness and lesbianism?

More of an understanding because I feel like no matter what department we're in, we're all just trying to figure out human behavior. That's pretty much all we're doing and so, if you really want to find value in our research, it's necessary to incorporate a number of viewpoints because nobody's right; nobody's wrong. We just all have different experiences.

What do you think people are missing when they don't get these multiple viewpoints?

You just have to appreciate that there are different ways of understanding. I think it makes you a better person, to sound very humanistic, but it does make you a better person. It makes you a better citizen. It makes your personal life probably a lot easier because you aren't so afraid of the other, the unknown, what you don't know.

Why do you consider Northwestern's program to be progressive?

Progressive in terms of interrogating what it is to be black. And by that I mean [it offers] different kinds of perceptions of blackness. Sexuality is important, and a lot of scholarship in African American studies doesn't tend to take in the sexuality question or the class question. And this program does that in terms of the professors and their research and also the courses that are offered. There's a course being offered next year called

Black Feminism Meets Black Queer Theory, and that's very fascinating. I've never seen that anywhere else. They're pretty much separate: black feminism and then, black queer studies is new. I think it's very interesting that the professors bring into dialogue different discourses.