Finding Out: An Introduction to LGBT Studies

Deborah T. Meem is professor and head of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her academic specialties are Victorian literature, lesbian studies, and the nineteenth-century woman’s novel. She earned a PhD from Stony Brook University in 1985. Her work has appeared in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Feminist Teacher, Studies in Popular Culture, and elsewhere. She has edited three works by Victorian novelist and journalist Eliza Lynn Linton: The Rebel of the Family (Broadview, 2002), Realities (Valancourt, 2010), and The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland (Victorian Secrets, 2011). With Michelle Gibson, she has coedited Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go (2002) and Lesbian Academic Couples (2005), both published by Haworth Press. With Jonathan Alexander, she wrote “Dorian Gray, Tom Ripley, and the Queer Closet” (CLCWeb 2003).

Michelle Gibson is Professor Emerita of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Her scholarship focuses on sexuality studies and pedagogy. Her most recent writing applies queer and postmodern identity theories to pedagogical practice and popular culture. In retirement, she writes and publishes poetry and maintains a blog called ProfSpazz at profspazz.com. With Jonathan Alexander, she edited QP: Queer Poetry, an online poetry journal, and she and Alexander also edited a strain of JAC (Journal of Advanced Composition) titled “Queer Composition(s).” With Deborah Meem, she coedited Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go (2002) and Lesbian Academic Couples (2005).

Jonathan Alexander is professor of English and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellen Nold Award for Best Articles in the field of computers and composition studies, and in 2011 was awarded the Charles Moran Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Field of Computers and Writing. His books include Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies (2008) and Digital Youth: Emerging Literacies on the World Wide Web (2005); the coedited collections Bisexuality and Queer Theory: Intersections, Connections and Challenges (2011), Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others (2004), and Role Play: Distance Learning and the Teaching of Writing (2006); and the coauthored books Argument Now: A Brief Rhetoric (2005) and Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Composition (2014).