This from Kenyon College that can cost up to $80,000/year. The PJ Media author, George Harbison, is beside himself putting up the description from his alma mater. Good thing that my SAT score made me immune to having to take a college English class but I certainly can’t make much heads or tails of this:
Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5
How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.
My first take is that the person who wrote this is really full of his own ego thinking that he’s impressing others with his expertise in wordsmithing. I guess he never learned that less is more and even less generally is more understandable.
Really, “how do you read gender? How do you read sexuality?”??? Sorry, you are BORN with a gender and your sexuality is an ACTION and an EXPERIENCE. It’s clear to me that he starts badly – and it all goes down hill from there. It’s almost like a smarter Kamala for “word salading” in using bigger words but no better in comprehension.
I’m not even go and attempt more of an analysis – it’s just not worth my time and effort. However, Harbison did use one line as an example:
Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus.
Note that this is a statement of fact, rather than a reference to a topic that is to be discussed in class. In fact, it is the basis of the class, and it reveals its true agenda: indoctrinating students in cultural Marxism.
Cultural Marxism. Of course it is – unintelligible, unworkable, unable to make it real, and always ends up in failure.
However, if any of you want to take a crack at what this absurdity is supposed to mean, have at it because I have no idea. This is only for a close community sheltered in what passes for the vaunted Ivory Tower denizens who don’t speak to God but certainly do believe they are smarter than He is.
(H/T: PJMedia)
