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VOLUME 1 8 I SSUE 2 W ednesday, 9 S eptember 1998
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P u b l i s h e d b y t h e S tu d e n ts * S o c ie ty o f M c G ill U n i v e r s i t y
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Redmen triumphant in season opener By Tariq Jeeroburkhan________ The M cGill Redmen have begun the 1998 football season exactly the way coach Baillie and the rest of the team hoped they would — with a win. By turning opposition miscues and penalties into a 24-17 victory over the Ottawa Gee-Gees in front of 1,500 damp spectators at M olson Stadium W ednesday night, the Redmen got off to the start that they so desperately needed to make this more than just a rebuild ing season. Using a combination of solid defence, timely offence, and some outstanding individual perfor mances, the Redmen parlayed six teen Ottawa penalties into a win, in a game that, on another day, could easily have had a different result. In a game which witnessed the return of Shawn Linden, the emergence of Marc Freer as Dan Pronyk’s successor at fullback, and some two-way playing from J.P. Darche in an offensive set which coach Bailie refers to as “the ele phant form ation,” the Redmen apparently turned the heads of the Laval University and Concordia scouts in attendance. As pleased as he was with the win, coach Baillie described the game as a “confidence builder” and “the start that we needed.” He pointed out that with all the penal ties that the G ee-Gees took, Ottawa “shot themselves in the foot.” Coach Baillie was proud of his team, however, and explained that with 14 players who had never started for McGill before being thrown into action the outcome was as good as the Redmen could have wanted. McGill opened the scoring at 10:52 of the first quarter on Bentley Harris’ 32- yard field goal. For Harris, replacing regular placekicker Gord Hoogenraad who sat out the game with a concussion received upon being bear-hugged by linem an Saad Chahine last Continued on page 26
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Rebecca Catching
Q u e e r S t u d ie s g a in s f o o t h o ld a t M c G ill Introduction of course in queer theory propels calls for an interdisciplinary queer studies program By Kris M ichaud The scene is familiar to most McGill students. In an overcrowd ed classroom in the Arts building, the keeners have already found their seats while hordes of unlucky stragglers vied for valuable floor space. Markedly different from most opening classes, however, was the group feeling present in this new course. The room was positively abuzz. A palpable, contagious enthusiasm brewed in the crowd, even as they trampled each other in search of sitting, kneeling and standing room. Body heat sent the room ’s tem perature rising and beads of sweat began to trickle their way down several scholarly brows. Amid the chaos, Professor Karin Cope, sm iling broadly, addressed her classroom, informal ly but with authority. A hush fell across the room.
“Normally I prefer to keep small classes, but this is a historic moment and I want this class to be as big as possible,” Cope said Wednesday. The stored energy of the room suddenly erupted into spontaneous applause of the sort usually reserved for political ral lies. Historic moments? Students passionate about learning? This, in a class called Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literary Theory? The course calendar entry for English 110-353A provides some insight. Added, as if an after thought, to the course description is the phrase “In 1998-99: Queer Theory.” A subject that would have raised eyebrow s ten or twenty years ago, perhaps, but hardly a stranger to the curriculum of a con temporary North American univer sity. At McGill, however, Cope’s course is the first of its kind . “At a certain point I simply
decided that not only is queer stud ies a legitimate field of study,” Director of English Undergraduate Studies P rofessor Peter Ohlin informed the Tribune, “but that there exists a sufficient interest in the subject here at McGill.” Ohlin’s decision comes more than five years after Professor Cope first arrived at McGill with a portfolio containing extensive work in the fields of gender studies and queer theory. Cope was, to her surprise, assigned instead to the field of postcolonial theory. Cope found McGill’s conservative cli mate especially jarring as she had previously spent time at “a series of campuses [Yale, Johns Hopkins, Brown] where lesbianism was the flavour of the month, where I knew maybe four straight people,” she joked in class last Wednesday. “I had given up,” Cope noted soberly. “I was smuggling queer elements into my classes. Then
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suddenly, lo and behold, I was handed this course.”
A s e c r e t h is t o r y of Q u e e r S t u d ie s at McGill Institutional approval, though sudden and unexpected, did not occur in isolation. Queer content incorporated into Cope’s lectures may, in fact, have helped spark a grass-roots educational movement on the part of McGill’s queer stu dent population. “I knew through the grapevine that Karin was interested in queer theory,” recalled Lisa Nevens, administrator of Queer McGill, the organization formerly known as L esbian, B isexual, Gay and Transgenders of McGill. “I hadsome friends in her Contemporary
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