The hour badly spent

ivory tower, femiladyism, saucy aussie, trying to amuse erica hateley with clever tags, blogsome nymphet, shut up college, fixating on sex, too postcolonialey, scopophilic patriarchyOctober 16, 2008 1:07 pm

Avoiding the expected witticism about ‘coming from down under’

Wednesday afternoon Erica Hateley presented the colloquium "’It’s Not Just Cricket’: Sexual Colonization in Woody Allen’s Match Point and Someone Else’s Wimbledon." I decided to check it out because the flyer had the word "sexual" near Erica Hateley’s name.

Although she assured us this would be a "post-feminist rant," I wondered whether this would be delivered in saucy layman’s terms, or if instead we would be playing the poststructuralist drinking game. So I sat around for a few minutes and tried to get into the groove of whatever dialect she’s going with this afternoon.

4:06 PM "ideology founded on patriarchy."

4:08 PM "patriarchal heterosexuality." Okay, it’s gonna be one of those.

4:08 PM "psychology of patriarchal capitalist culture"

4:14 PM If Karin Friggin Westman wasn’t sitting right behind me I could just IM this right to all the English majors I know and THEY could play the drinking game along with me. What’s up with that? And why is Michael Donnelly over here too? The back row is for slackers and badasses.

4:15 PM ….

4:15 PM Oh.

4:16 PM "I’m looking at her skirt, not her arse." Tee hee!

4:16 PM "heteronormative patriarchy.”

4:17 PM "It takes a lot longer to find a picture of Anna Kournikova playing tennis than it does to find her…resting."

4:19 PM "destabilize the binary gendered logic of patriarchy"

4:19 PM "scopophilic patriarchy." Okay I FORFEIT the poststructuralist drinking game. Erica wins, because the patriarchy is oppressing us faster than I can type. At this point I decided to just listen, and only use my computer to google the big words.

4:20 PM Oh dear, look at the time! Erica never notices things like that.

4:21 PM There is a "been there done that" popular discourse of feminism internalized by female tennis players. Did I type that accurately?

4:23 PM "the sexualization of tennis-playing woman"

4:24 PM "containing women w/in acceptable patriarchal limits"

4:30 PM "body spectacle:" "pornography’s portrayal of orgasm." There’s something to google.

After she had thoroughly established that tennis is a tool of colonial and sexual repression, we started watching movies.

4:40 PM Heh, Erica said "Scarlett Yohansson."

I wasn’t sure how much I liked Match Point when I actually saw it, but Erica’s analysis pointed out that the film is aware of the colonial representations embedded in its characters, and partly because of that, the mood of the film prevents us from fully sympathizing with Chris Wilton. Uhh, I think that’s what she said. There were more big words too.

4:49 PM In Wimbledon: Why did we fast fwd through the part where Kirsten Dunst is nude? Wouldn’t it be possible to undermine my own internalized scopophilic patriarchal tendencies and make Kirsten Dunst’s ass a site of agency by normalizing her apodysophilia, or would this just reinforce them? Later on, after bumming one of Erica’s Marlboro’s, I felt a little guilty about joining the "I’ll eat out Luce Irigaray" Facebook group. Then I ate out Luce Irigaray.

4:54 PM "retroactive destabilization" what?

5:03 PM Time for questions. Why are these feminized, fetishized representations of America both blonde?

 Erica's Word Cloud

[Erica’s colloquium @Wordle.net]

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playing the race card, wingnutz, pretentious literary douchebag, what's the what, absurd liberal myth, going native, shut up kansas, new york salute, multiculturalism, fuck white supremacy, too postcolonialeyOctober 14, 2008 9:40 pm

White supremacist grad student has big words, not afraid to use them

The K-State campus now boasts a much larger and more diverse student body than ever before, writes Tim Schrag in today’s Collegian.

“All of us at K-State are thrilled that we have a record enrollment of 23,520 students,” President Jon Wefald said, “and we are also delighted that K-State has a record number of students of color and international students as well.”

The total for minority students includes record highs for black and Hispanic students, and international student enrollment has increased, including 431 students from China.

And according to Duane Nellis, provost and senior vice president:

“There is tremendous value in getting to know students from different cultures,” Nellis said. “These friendships not only enhance an individual’s personal experiences, but also help students understand other cultures. This is vital in an increasingly global society.”

Oh boy! They are just going to LRRVE it here! Grant Jones, PhD history student, gives them a neighborly welcome in a letter to the editor.

One encounters the buzzword “diversity” at K-State ad nauseum. The source of the incessant demands for “diversity” is the doctrine of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism is the product of moral agnosticism, cultural relativism and ethnic determinism.

This doctrine holds that one should never judge Western/American culture superior to any other. Its purpose is to obliterate distinctions between values and non-values.

For example, the value of individualism is considered equal to the non-value of tribalism. The multicultural doctrine makes no distinction between chosen values such as reason, individualism, personal liberty and non-chosen physical attributes, including race.

I wasn’t sure WTF he meant by tribalism so I looked it up: cultural and ethnic identity. Why is that a "non-value?" Does it really extinguish the value of the rugged individual, or does it respect her and value her role in society? And why not use the phrase "spirit of community?" Could it be that Grant Jones wants to link multiculturalism to the image of bands of nomadic African hunters? How close do you think he actually came to typing the word "niggers" when he wrote his letter?

The epithet “Eurocentric” conflates race and culture.

I was under the impression that, historically speaking, the two were somewhat linked. Being a PhD student of history, Grant Jones would know for sure, and apparently he’s found that there isn’t, probably by not studying very much history at all.

“Diversity” elevates unchosen attributes to greater importance than values based on merit, personal achievement and moral character. “Diversity” also requires individuals to primarily define themselves based on these unchosen criteria.

"Diversity" also "requires" that you take your head out of your ass and recognize that values based on merit, personal achievement and moral charactor are not exclusive to Western Civilization. Taking your head out of your ass is difficult for people with rectum-sized comfort zones; you’ll find a lot of that in Kansas!

The agenda is to Balkanize [ed. note: good grief!] the United States.

Twenty years ago Jesse Jackson led Stanford students in an anti-intellectual chant: “Hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” Jackson’s nihilistic premise is the basis for both “diversity” and “multiculturalism.”

A history student might want to frame Jackson’s awesome comment in historical context; since Grant Jones hasn’t learned how to do that after 6 years of secondary education, I’ll give it a go:

Jackson grew up attending segregated grade schools in the South, witnessed the assassination of civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, and has travelled all over the world as a spokesman for civil rights issues. Western Civ is bound with a history of unjust oppression of women and brown people, and his "anti-intellectual chant" was speaking to that part of Western Civilization.

Either Grant Jones willfully ignored this crucial aspect of the history of Western Civ just to make a specious point, or the topic just never came up in his K-State history classes. Neither would surprise me.

Anyway, my fellow brown folks: people like Grant Jones — couching their small minds behind big words — are the Whites your parents always warned you about. As long as you avoid the blowhards “studying” history and political "science," and instead just focus on the beauty of the landscapes and the fun weather and dating cute white chicks, you might end up liking it here. And if you enjoy Jamaican food, the Little Grill is somewhere around here. Check it out!

[Source: K-State Collegian, Letter to the Editor]

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