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The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture

Introduction to Grit and Glamour

This Scalar project is based on a course offered in the Spring 2016 semester at Occidental College [Oxy] in the department of Critical Theory and Social Justice [CTSJ] in collaboration with the college's Center for Digital Liberal Arts and Center for Community Based Learning. A Mellon Faculty Fellowship afforded co-instructors H. N. Lukes and David J. Kim the opportunity to develop this digital humanities archiving course from two previous iterations of a seminar on Los Angeles LGBT* cultural history. This current version of The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture, presented in the University of Southern California’s Scalar format as a hybrid digital book/archive/exhibit, is the culmination of student and instructors’ collaborative work conducted before, during, and after this course offering. We hope to build it over the years as an ongoing public digital humanities project through both further courses at Occidental and in collaboration with other campuses.

Professor H. N. Lukes's following essay, "Queer Intentions," documents the methods and progress of this CTSJ course at Oxy in three sections tracing the arc of the semester. As Grit and Glamour develops from a single course project to a multi-campus endeavor, and eventually a digital public history project, we hope that this kind of process-based document will eventually populate an independent pedagogical dossier for others working in course-based digital humanities.

We invite you to read "Queer Intentions: A Course and a Project" or just proceed to our first two complete chapters and our two works-in-progress linked below. Each chapter begins with multi-part essay, followed by the archive for the chapter. All of the following content can be accessed by the main menu in the upper left corner anywhere in the site.