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[robinturner]

After trawling scholar.google.com for articles on female action heroes (see earlier post) I have come to the conclusion that anyone who puts parentheses or slashes in the middle of words in titles of academic papers should be, in good old-fashioned Maoist style, "sent to the countryside for re-education". Titles like "Brain Sex, Cyberpunk Cinema, Feminism, and the Dis/Location of Heterosexuality" or "Anxiety and the S(ub)lime Body of God" are not clever, just silly. Neither does putting "shit" in the same sentence as "trope" make you academically daring; it just says "I'm a naive postgrad who's just read Deleuze."

And by the way, "queer" is an adjective, not a verb.

I am so glad I spent my twenties bumming around playing music and working as an artist's model rather than going on and doing a PhD in English Literature.

Comments

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm a silly pomo bubblehead, but I love "queer" as a verb.

[asteriskhere.livejournal.com]

Could you give me an example of how it's used?

[vret.livejournal.com]

Well, there's the possibility that one might queer one's pitch.

I don't know where that originally comes from. It could just as easily be from cricket groundsmanship as ship caulking.

[alsoname.livejournal.com]

I hear it used in "queer theory." Actually, I read it used in queer theory.

Here's a made-up example that Robin will hate: "Queering Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Power Dynamics in the Buffy/Spike Relationship." So basically, analyzing something for its "queer" elements.

That was probably a terrible explanation.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I saw several titles like that. I even saw "Queerying". Yech.

[vret.livejournal.com]

Anyone who uses trope in a sentence at all must be a bloody student bag o' shite.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Bloody ponces.

[ironed_orchid]

this would be why I transferred to philosophy

[solri.livejournal.com]

And presumably why you chose to specialise in someone like Kant, rather than, say, Derrida or Deleuze ;-)

[ironed_orchid]

Pretty much. I do find that on the whole philosophers tend to write less silly things about Deleuze and Derrida, with less convoluted titles. I'm pretty sure that all the really annoying things I've read that were on or inspired by Derrida were in lit or cultural studies journals.