Imagine: you’re paying $30,000 a year to send your kid to college and she calls to tell you her class schedule. “Monday and Wednesday mornings I’m taking ‘The Phallus’ and Tuesday and Thursday I have ‘Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music.’”
“You’re taking the what?”
These course titles aren’t a joke.
Women’s studies has long been a field in which scholarship takes a backseat to leftist activism and radical feminist politics. Although the discipline has “evolved” to encompass gender and sexuality studies, campus programs remain ideologically sterile laboratories designed to indoctrinate students into the ins and outs of the live-action role playing game they call feminism.
Typically gender studies departments are nothing more than vocational training programs for progressive activists. The political litmus tests and radical feminist indoctrination administered by these programs are well documented in One-Party Classroom by David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin. When students sign up for classes like “Introduction to Women’s Studies” at Penn State, they may not realize they’re getting a “course in (rather than about) the ideology of radical feminism.”
But not all gender studies classes have such innocuous titles. Here are 10 hit-you-over-the-head ridiculous gender and women’s studies courses offered by American colleges and universities, starting with The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie.
10. Occidental College – The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States
Readin’, writin’, and RACIST!!! A smattering of white guilt, a dash of anti-capitalism, and fresh from the oven at President Obama’s alma mater comes this Marxist inquiry into Barbie’s unbearable whiteness. From the Spring 2010 catalog:
Have you ever said or thought “I don’t look like a Barbie!”? Join the crowd. However, the problem that Barbie presents is infinitely more complex than her supposed life-sized measurements. As the embodiment of complex discourses on race, sex and gender Barbie provides a central figure for this course in exploring broader themes, particularly those of race and social justice. Thus, we will cover a wide territory that ranges from an exploration of the ways in which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism. You’ll never play with your toys the same way again.
Oxy doesn’t have a separate gender studies major, so this one falls under the Critical Theory and Social Justice Department.
9. Berkeley – Pornographies On/Scene
Linda Williams, author of Porn Studies, offers this course through the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. She cautions prospective students, “Please realize that curiosity about this course does not mean that you are actually prepared to look closely at a wide variety of explicit sexual representations for an entire semester.” Watching porn with your teacher? Ick. (Or bow chicka wow wow, if you prefer.)
This seminar will bring together debates about the nature of pornography with debates about the nature of the visual. Both will be considered in relation to the (mostly unwritten) history of American visual pornographies and with an eye towards imagining, and even contributing to this history. What, for example, is the canon of hard core pornography? We will concentrate on two moments in the history of moving image pornography: an earlier era of “obscenity,” in which explicit sexual images were kept off-scene for the consumption of private elites in the era of the stag film, and a more contemporary, and increasingly electronic era of “on/scenity” in which pornographies of all sorts become available to wide varieties of consumers, including those to whom it was once forbidden. Although moving-image pornographies will be our primary objects of study, this seminar will also consider the different rhetorics of still and image moving images which aim to arouse, techniques of arousal, and related popular images which also aim to “move” the bodies of spectator/users. Approximately one third of the class will be devoted to general readings in the growing “field” of pornography studies, another third to the question of what constitutes the canon of the stag era (here I will invite those interested to imagine a two disk DVD with notes arguing for what constitutes this canon) and another third to the burning question of electronic, interactive pornographies on small screens.
8. Brown University – Che Guevara, the Man and the Myths
What gender studies curriculum would be complete without a course on murderous Communist thug Che Guevara? This class is cross-listed in the Gender and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Literature sections of the Brown University catalog.
Reads Guevara’s political and philosophical writings alongside the literary, visual and filmic representations that have made him one of the twentieth century’s most iconic figures and a symbol for vastly diverging interests. From a cultural studies perspective, compares the development of Guevara’s theories to posthumous uses of his work and image, particularly in and in relation to present-day Cuba.
I wonder if they condemn Che’s persecution of gays. Or maybe they spend some time discussing how he tear-gassed the grieving widows of the prisoners he slaughtered when they came to claim the bodies. Nah. That might intrude on their Motorcycle Diaries viewings and daily group chants of Viva Che!
7. University of Washington – Feminist Understanding of Victims
Surprisingly, this course lasts just one semester. I’m betting it’s a shallow survey, because it would take at least a year to really make a dent in the canon of feminist victimhood literature. Even if full embrace of one’s status as a victim is a prerequisite, that doesn’t leave much time for instructing students on the art of wallowing in victimhood, the science of reveling in victimhood, and of course, the socio-economic impact of rejecting victimhood. From the University of Washington Women’s Studies catalog:
Explores the meanings of the term “victim” within popular, religious, psycho-social, and feminist discourses and the implications these have for victims, people and institutions that serve victims, and scholars who are concerned with these questions. Examines the tensions between activist and academic understandings of the impact of “backlash”.
Is this a scholarly look at victimhood or yet another seminar designed to remind women of their perpetual status as victims of patriarchal oppression? After looking at a syllabus from an earlier version of the course, my money’s on the latter.
(snip)
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I'm a Brown student who took that Che class (which, incidentally, is not actually being offered this fall.) In fact, much of the class focused on dissecting why white limousine liberals in the US lionize Che when many of them are relatively unaware of his writings. In fact, several of the students in the class had relatives who fled Cuba after the revolution--needless to say, they were not huge fans of Che. And yes, we did go over the persecution of gays and dissenters in post-revolutionary Cuba. Overall, it was a very evenhanded treatment of a man who, for better or worse, has become a cultural icon.
I know the blogosphere has different rules than the real world, but please, do your research before you make such silly (dare I say "utterly ridiculous"?) claims. This would never fly at Brown.
Post a Comment