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Too many lesbian and liberal writers
Sometimes I find course evaluations rather humorous. Of course I love reading comments like "I love Amy Braziller," and I even am humored by comments demanding that there be less lesbian and liberal writers in my American Literature II class. So, inspired by Liz's organizational counting of her books , I looked over my syllabus to determine exactly how many lesbian writers were covered. We covered 34 authors and 6 of them are lesbian identified (or lesbian implied as in the case of Willa Cather). Thus, my math tells me that 18% of authors studied were lesbian. Now, this unidentified student did not seem to be bothered that 15% (5) of the authors were gay male identified. If I tally up the lesbians and gay males (throwing in the one bisexual identified writer), I am at a whopping 35% (12 authors). I realize that I have passed the GLBT margin of 10%, so perhaps there is a bias; however, many key 19th and 20th century American writers are queer identified. Seriously, I don't understand why some students didn't complain about the heterosexist bias of the course, since 65% of the writers covered identify as heterosexual.
As for the liberal bias--guilty I suppose.
