Academics Attacked, Hold Conference

(or, "Why I Love the Academy")

On 27 December 2004, a guy by the name of John Strausbaugh wrote an article for the New York Times called "Eggheads' Naughty Word Games" where he took issue with the MLA's annual meeting (that year, held in Philly); calling it a convergence of "[t]ragic hipness, multicultural agendizing and an almost abject embrace of low/popular culture."

I don't know about you, but that sounds like my kind of convention.

He began his rant with the admittance of being one of "those" journalists who routinely scan the annual conference schedule looking for "wackier-sounding papers" so that they can show up, listen, and then write a scandalous, sensational news bit on them - usually with an unrelated stock photo of a scantily-clad celebrity for added glitter. [A related aside: I've been the recipient of that kind of media "attention" a couple of times in the past and so have friends and colleagues; the resulting article(s) usually end up heavy on the juice, with less - or no - pulp].

While the associations' conferences used to be snooze-fests, he wrote, slowly but surely "papers with titles that were rife with bad puns, cute pop-culture references and an adolescent preoccupation with sex" slipped themselves in, interrupting the canon and causing a stir. It was in the 80s, he charges, that things started really getting out of hand - dividing the "traditionalists" (who "insisted on subjecting literature to close textual and historical analysis") and the "newcomers" (who "seemed more intent on retrofitting classic works into currently trendy political theories on race, gender and sexuality").

Race! Gasp! Gender! Shock! Sexuality! Oh the Horror!

It MUST also be said that the latter were defined specifically as "the increasingly powerful new breed of postmodernists, multiculturalists, feminists and queer-theory advocates," while the former was, simply: "old school."

So...Old School Snooze-Fests are the right way to "do" academic research, it seems. Dang young'uns - messin' with somethin' that was perfectly fine as the Old Boys Club it was: devoid of deconstruction, postcolonial discourses, chicks and 'the gays.' Worse still - they're making it seem fun.

And, he continues, "[b]y the 1990's those skirmishes had helped start the so-called culture wars..."

OK, I DO remember (albeit vaguely) the very public stink over some of the work that emerged in the 1990s. When utilizing Madonna as a site was considered to be a sign of the death of The Intellectual and the walls that housed him. It seems, if I recall correctly, like the opposite of what's happening within the debates now: theory and practice shouldn't be coupled; the academy's job was to study and critique things that had no bearing on the everyday; embodiment bad/Cartesian dualism good.

I thought we were over that. Apparently not.

Strausbaugh suggests that the MLA, "basking in this unaccustomed level of public notice" purposely sought out the provocative ''campus radicals" who would present "wild theories" that were "'queering' the 'canon'" and "championing the 'postcolonial.'" No, no mention that perhaps what constituted academia had changed, and that perhaps the "canon" had shifted right alongside...

He goes on to list the 2004 offerings: "queered" is still a "major preoccupation"(!) A whole panel on Mel Gibson's ''Passion of the Christ"(!) Sex! Sex! Sex! (!). In the end, he states that this is just more evidence of the perpetual self-conscious nerdiness of the academy and takes one last good jab:

The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop.

Disclaimer to all this: I'm not an English major and have no real stake in what's happening within the hallowed walls of that particular discipline. I'm just an interdisciplinarian who adores cultural studies and who has an investment in a few things that happen to fall under the rubric of "race, gender, and sexuality" that dude just went haywire on. And I get pissed when mainstream media pundits spout off on "salacious" titles like "(Post) Feminist (Porno) Graphics, à la Française" when they haven't got the slightest idea how layered the discourse over that "post" actually have been and continue to be (and how unsexy those heated debates actually are) or, more to the point, haven't got the slightest clue about feminism. ESPECIALLY when they're knocking this supposedly flippant 'young' generation of academics, spurting homophobia, dismissing feminist theory and pooh-poohing critical race theory in the process. They LOVE polemics. Me? Not so much.

Whew. OK, on to the punchline. The English Graduate Organization at the University of Florida, Gainesville did something similar to what a group of us did a while back: they're holding a conference this upcoming October called "Theory*Activism*Creativity: Navigating Textual Politics" (Ours was called "R/Évolution: Genders, Sexualities, Ideologies") - addressing the disruption of the Old Guard and of "traditional" modes of research (and calling those constructions into question in the process). They welcome what Strausbaugh would consider 'flaky' and will undoubtedly draw a wide range of deeply invested, highly critical, mega-theoretical, inter- and multi-discipinary scholars presenting a wide array of interesting, thought-provoking, timely, socially aware - not to mention academically sound - papers. In fact, they even cite him in their CFP.

And I'd bet my bottom dollar that John won't be scrambling to attend.