I was born in Snohomish, Washington December 19, 1947 to parents who were in the last throes of a deteriorating and violent marriage. I spent most of my childhood in Omaha, Nebraska on the edge of the city where houses gave way to hay fields and farms. I was fortunate to live there with my Aunt Ann and Uncle Ed who took me and my two sisters and a brother into their house-hold after my father left my mother and brought us to Omaha. My aunt and uncle had one child, Agnes. Omaha was home to my extended family-- grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins on all sides.

    Uncle Ed and Aunt Ann were both pharmacists. My uncle owned and operated a number of neighborhood pharmacies until his health failed. He died shortly thereafter, in 1975. My aunt taught  pharmacy, medical and nursing students at Creighton University until she retired. After that she traveled, re-learned bridge, took college courses for fun, and read. She died in 1995.

    On the Irish side of the family (Aunt Ann's and my father's mother's side), my great grandmother and  grandmother went to college and then taught in public schools.  Meanwhile the men were railroad engineers and conductors for the Union Pacific Railroad and drank too much. Grandma Langley played Chopin, drove a car to work everyday and made a great lemon meringue pie.  My Grandpa Langley oozed Prussian/Germanic qualities. He was obsessed with acquiring wealth, and while he worked for Union Pacific as a conductor his entire life, he died with a lot of money which he gave to Creighton University so he could get his name on a plaque.

    On my Uncle Ed's side, his parents both immigrated from Poland to a small settlement in out state Nebraska.  His mother, Grandma Agnes, loved us and was a great grandma. When I first knew her, she lived with an adult bachelor son and was devoutly Catholic (Mass twice a day). She tended a bountiful backyard orchard and garden. I only heard stories about Uncle Ed's  father, Grandpa Vince, who had died long before I came onto the scene. He bootlegged during the depression and got caught, forcing Grandma Agnes to bring him three meals a day in the local jail. When they moved to Omaha, he ran a bar in South Omaha when the big meat packing houses (Armour, Cudahy, Wilson, etc.,) were in their heyday. According to the family lore, he was also the rough and ready sheriff of the district for a time. Neither Vince nor Agnes had much formal education, but were proud to sent their son, Uncle Ed, off to Creighton University for college in a fine new car and a set of threads.

    My background and interests are in interdisciplinary learning and teaching. As an undergraduate at a liberal arts college, I pursued art, literature, and philosophy. I finished my studies at Hampshire College as one of 17 seniors in 1970, its first year of existence. Hampshire's articulation of the primacy of interdisciplinary learning struck a responsive chord in me, and I have not looked back since. I decided to go to law school, to practice a few years, and then to teach in an interdisciplinary undergraduate program. In law school I contended with the intellectual narrowness and political conservatism of law; in legal practice in Detroit, I saw firsthand the ways law compounded gender, race, and class inequalities.  I helped found the Women's Justice Center, where I served as its first Director, litigating sex and race discrimination class action suits, and lobbying on issues such as battered women and police treatment of victims of rape. Today, the Women's Justice Center is still a vital feminist institution in Detroit.

    I started teaching in 1977 in Sangamon State's interdisciplinary legal studies program. My interests have shifted considerably over the years. In 1983, I became joint appointed in women's studies and in 1991, I moved to a full time appointment. My current intellectual and teaching interests include queer theory and history; sexual orientation, gender expression and public policy; sex/gender and the law; and feminist theories.

    I am an active participant in shaping my workplace. In Detroit, at the Detroit Legal  Services Corporation where I worked doing civil poverty law, my colleagues and I organized a union and won recognition as a union for attorneys after a long and spirited fight in the courts and the National Labor Relations Board. At SSU, I joined the faculty union as soon as I arrived. When Illinois finally allowed public university employees to bargain, I  joined the faculty bargaining team and became the chief negotiator for many years of turbulent contract disputes with an extremely anti-union Board (of Regents) and the president they hired to bust the union. Happily, the president became one of our best recruiter after he took down names of faculty who were silently picketing a public meeting of the Board of Regents.

    Since SSU was merged into the University of Illinois under a hostile take-over in 1995, and the powers that be had the SSU faculty union eliminated by the state legislature, I have switched my energies to the University's system of "shared governance," a euphemism that allows everyone to say that faculty  have more power than they do under collective bargaining. The proverbial emperor's clothes. And even though, or because shared governance is the only game in town, I still want to be a player. I currently serve as the Chair of the UIS campus senate, and as a member of the senate's conference--the coordinating board of the three UI senate's. What it all means is that I am committed to keeping UIS as democratic, flexible and un-corporate as possible--a trend that is turning American public higher education into the McDonald's of intellectual nourishment.

    I continue my work in the community by providing training for feminist organizations around issues such as sexual assault and sexual harassment, and with and for queer groups.
I have been a board member for the local chapter of PFLAG the last few years. 

    Another love in my life is building. I am excellent carpenter, plumber and electrician and love the problem solving challenges of making things and remodeling, especially old houses. I've renovated  three complete kitchens and three bathrooms, and built many a deck. One summer I built floor to ceiling bookcases and window seats for the library of  an old farm house in Virginia, Illinois.

    I have recently moved into a lovely old house on the outskirts of Athens (there is a long "A" in Athens, so no one confuses it with the city in Greece) with my partner.  Built in 1923, it has  mutt-like architectural characteristics--a large part Victorian Shingle style, a bit of colonial, and a hint of arts and crafts here and there.  It's charming, well lit (with 37 windows) and drafty. Situated on three acres with big old walnut and hard maple trees, we are surrounded by the beauty of some of the best hills in central Illinois as well as the prairie. Over my many years here, I have grown to love the prairie where the wind is fierce and the sunsets are magnificent.