Posted on 01/14/2013 12:05:03 PM PST by Academiadotorg
At the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2013 Boston meeting, at least on the program, homosexuality seemed to be the new heterosexuality. This year’s conclave, where just about every English department is represented, at least once, featured panels on:
• Queer Theory without Antinormativity; • Postqueer? Postrace? The Political Stakes of Queer; • Queer Theory in a Post Colonial World; • Queerness as Form; • Transgender France; • Movements, Incantations, and Parables of Queer Performance • LGBTQI Graduate Students and Academia; • Queer Sexualities in African Literatures and Film; • Queer Occupations; • Gay Culture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union; • Racing, Queering and Psychoanalysis; • Queer Times: Affect, Phenomology, Temporality; and • What is Post-AIDS Literature?
Looked at one way, that’s only 13 out of 795 panels at the MLA. By way of comparison, though, there were six panels on Shakespeare. Yet and still, in a conference broken up into 24 segments lasting 75 minutes each, that breaks down to one every other hour.
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
As a graduate degree holder in English, I can confirm that many PhD students and graduate school teachers are OBSESSED with “queer theory.” I was regularly chided for my anti-queer theory posts in my courses, but usually just from the prof and some in-school grad students. Most of the others privately told me that they were glad someone had the guts to speak out.
Academia.org?
Please, please...physics professors are academics. Mathematics professors are academics.
Even some English professors are (close to) academics.
But, of one thing we can be sure:
IF MLA member,
THEN - couldn’t earn a real wage in a profession requiring intellect.
This ia a queer topic for FreeRepublic.
check your local public universities and colleges to see how many Queer or Homo or Gay or Lesbian or Ethnic Studies or Street Law or, worst of all, Community Organizing courses are on offer.
(some even have entire departments awarding “queer degrees”...
all at your expense as the taxpayer paying for all this stuff
then, make sure your legislators know your views!
A friend from high school ended up briefly working for the MLA and was shocked to discover they had a rule about not holding conferences in any state or municipality that had anti-sodomy statutes.
Please educate me - What is “queer theory”.
It’s not “queer” in the homosexual sense but “queer” in the definitive form of the word: different or as they define it “anti-normative.”
It’s theory is that gender is not so much important as is the essential experience of the person outside of stereotypical gender norms. So, for instance, they expand on the feminist challenge that women don’t “belong barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen,” but that they are required to question their stereotypical “gender roles” to find their own lifestyle choices outside of the gender they “inhabit.”
It’s all very circular logic in many ways. Most of my anti-queer discussions circled around the idea that challenging the essence of femininity or masculinity is to question the existence of the driving forces behind those gender roles and literally try to undo them in a way to force a man to be more feminine or a woman to be more masculine. So, for instance, if being a young boy means you want to climb trees and ride bikes, queer theory challenges that norm and asks if that boy would be “better off” in another gender role and if it’s crucial for him to experience the masculine role any more than it’s “abnormal” for him to experience the feminine role.
It’s all very boring and almost begs for an answer to a question that doesn’t really need to be asked. Boys are boys, girls are girls, if boys grow up to become sports stars or executives, it’s because they wanted to, not because they were herded by their gender. Likewise, girls don’t grow up to become housewives or pant-wearing politicians, they choose those roles on their own, even if they are counter to their upbringing.
My main argument was that “experimenting” with child rearing by challenging traditional gender roles is part of what’s screwing up our children. It’s tantamount to child abuse. If you want to question queer theory in a college classroom, fine, we’re all adults, but don’t push that bullshit on our children.
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