Academic Absurdity of the Week: Advanced Gibberish

Okay, so you expect articles from the journal Feminist Theory to be turgid and unreadable, but this article abstract reaches new heights of incomprehensibility:

The unruly queer figure’s phallic seductions and the re/production of sexual (in)difference

Corie Hammers, Macalester College

Abstract

This article interrogates a psychoanalytically inflected strain of anti-social queer theory that in privileging refusal and negation, views as paradigmatic of ‘queerness’ the destructive, annihilative aspects in (queer) sex. In this view, sexuality is a product of the unconscious, thus irreducible to gender, such that gender is irrelevant to (and indeed hinders) understandings of desire. Informed by feminism, which views gender as crucial to any theory on sexuality, I expose that which ‘sexual negation’ masks through this very disavowal – that of gender and the body itself. I argue that subtending the figural representation of queer/ness is a deep-seated, albeit disguised, masculinism that, through negation, works to re-centre and re-virilise (gay) men’s sexual economies. I take up Butler’s lesbian phallus to de-idealise and thus challenge this privileging of the penis operating within this strain of queer – as only phallic sexual economies can, it seems, deliver the very annihilation we (all) seek.

Is she saying that gay men who like to be buff are some kind of problem? It’s hard to tell. Pass the popcorn anyway.

Again, this article can be yours for only $36.

JOHN adds: Stop, you’re killing me! This was hilarious, but please, please tell me it’s a parody. I would hate to think that a single one of Earth’s 7 billion people would be dumb enough to write that illiterate nonsense.

Another, more chilling thought: I doubt that anyone will spend his own $36 to buy that paper, but nevertheless, some copies will be sold…all paid for by taxpayers, I fear.

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