Love and Sex at Notre Dame, 1972-2022

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Parietals, ResLife, and SYRs. ND’s Vagina Monologues and the “Gay? Fine By Me!” t-shirt campaign. Controversies over risqué dorm revues. 30+ years of queer student groups (forbidden, unofficial, and official) and the question of what is allowable at a Catholic university. ND’s never-quite-adopted “nondiscrimination policy.” These and a host of other customs, traditions, events, and scandals comprise the history of love and sex, sexualities, and genders affecting Notre Dame’s undergraduate students. Today most of this history has been forgotten, misremembered, even mythologized. This seminar will continue the barely begun project of retrieving this history, focused on the fifty years after ND became coeducational in 1972. Each student in this research seminar will work as both historian and informal archivist. Because relatively little has been published on this aspect of ND history, our class’s central texts must be primary sources. We will rely especially on old articles from the Observer, Scholastic, The Dome Yearbook, Irish Rover, and other ND student publications. Each student—acting as historian—will use these and other available sources to research and write one or more short, informative essays that uncover, analyze, and explain an important piece of ND’s past. Each student—acting as archivist—will also help build a “love and sex at ND” archival database for current and future researchers. Finally, each student will learn best practices for gathering and processing oral histories and then, using those practices, interview a current or past member of the Notre Dame community who might have useful memories or perspectives for the student’s research area. Most importantly, this project depends on today’s Notre Dame students applying their own experiences and ideas to their historical research and analysis. This is a student-directed project, written by and for today’s undergraduates with all their varying, generationally specific viewpoints. The larger purpose of this course is to give students the opportunity and tools to ask historical questions and argue about the answers, as all historians do, as they write this history for themselves.