Now Enrolling: a New Course in Honor of Jeffrey Escoffier

To honor the life and achievements of queer socialist scholar and beloved colleague Jeffrey Escoffier, BISR and Jeffrey’s friends, loved ones, and comrades have collaborated to raise money for and design a specially accessible course dedicated to exploring Jeffrey’s remarkable body of work. In Community and Perversity: an Introduction to Jeffrey Escoffier, taught by BISR faculty Paige Sweet and Joseph Earl Thomas, we will read from Jeffrey’s extensive writings, including his landmark collection American Homo: Community and Perversity, to grapple with the central questions animating both Jeffrey’s life work and, res eadem, the queer liberation movements he chronicled and analyzed. How can we understand the emergence of marginalized sexuality identities and their coalescence into politically potent subjectivities? How does “perversity” negotiate the contours of normativity? Can queerness be universal?

Community and Perversity: an Introduction to Jeffrey Escoffier starts Tuesday, September 12th. For more information and to enroll (at the subsidized price that feels right for you), please visit the course page. As we mourn Jeffrey’s death and the shadow it continues to cast, we express our profound gratitude to all of those who have contributed to making the course possible. If you yourself wish to contribute to the course and its future iterations, please visit the donation page.