The following specimen of decadent uselessness was produced by Laura Alexander, “a PhD candidate in English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her scholarly interests include Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature, feminist theory, and women’s writing, and her research typically leads her to take interdisciplinary approaches to literature in her writing”:
In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous proposes l’ecriture feminine as a model that allows feminine desire, the language of the body, to reconstitute expression as a revolutionary movement against the masculine rhetorical structure that has defined language over time. . . .
Because feminine writing represents expression not only as writing but also as lived experience through the recreation of and through the body, I am focusing on Cixous’s model of a multidimensional being free from the constraints imposed on her through time. By employing female sexuality as a new feminine rhetoric, Cixous seeks to project expression through the image of the medusa, which symbolizes both feminine writing and feminism as a cultural, political, and linguistic movement. Just as the serpents on the medusa’s head reject the Freudian location of heterosexual feminine desires as active to passive sexual desire, so too must the many female selves (the metaphorical serpents unleashed) spread in diverse directions for fluid, feminine expression. . . .
Rather than phallocentric language that proposes lack as a perpetual human state, feminine writing offers woman a means to articulate the inner, silent she. As Cixous exhorts women to write the body, she argues that woman’s writing will redraw the politics of pleasure, allowing woman to release her many selves. These multiple selves correspond to the metaphoric snakes on the medusa’s head, also erogenous zones of the body, which cannot be liberated in a phallocentric system because they engender fear in “the abyss” that the “two horrifying myths” of castration and loss imply. . . .
Whereas “masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis,” female sexuality roves in “immense astral space not organized around any one sun” . . . Just so with feminine writing, which laughs through the medusa head and its discursive parts at language that imposes form on the formless. Unorganized through male dominated forms, the woman as medusa is woman as giver, no longer a commodity in a masculine economy but creative of “life, thought, [and] transformation” . . . The reconstitution of feminine writing and the female relationship with the male displaces Lacan’s Symbolic formulation of the dominating phallus because it possesses no order, no fixed binary. . . .
The whole thing is over 4,000 words, if you care to escape “the masculine rhetorical structure that has defined language over time” and enter the vortex of madness that is postmodern feminism.
I just don’t understand the obsession with sex and related organs.
Must be why I’m a repressed prude.
So is she saying women have multiple personality disorder?
Feminists are cranial eunuchs.
Here is the big question: Stacy: How have you not be driven to madness or drink from reading all this dreg?
It is more a self revealing writing…
That is because you haven’t walked on the wild side…
http://batshitcrazynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Choudary-3.png
I have no desire to meet Lola.
And that they should embrace, indeed revel in it.
The most appalling aspect of this is that at some point she’ll write a massive tome of similar drivel and be granted a Ph.D. based on it. She’ll then be granted the title ”Doctor” of nonsense and probably be able to earn living based on it.
Speaking as one who, in his former days, was a literature major and graduate student, this drivel is Exhibit “A,” in the case for me leaving that profession. The Liberal Arts have been lost. There is no rigor anymore. There is no substance. There is only “feelings” and deconstruction and nebulous grievances wrapped up in a slickly salient language created a facade of deep thought. None of these modern “scholars” have any foundation in the core philosophical or literary works which define the human condition. We merely have people flailing around trying to pick the correct lotto numbers to parlay their ignorance into tenure among those who are similarly dim-witted.
“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that’s turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind!”
I’m holding on by my fingernails.
She’ll demand equal pay. Which is zeroty-zero dollars and zero cents — ’cause there’s no corresponding PhD in male gender studies. Unless you count engineering or something.
She could get a job as a COBOL programmer. Maybe in the payroll department at UNC. That would be good.
And to sum up that entire stroke inducing tome: “Men bad, women good!”
I just saved everyone 4000 words.
The world needs Witch Doctors…apparently.
I’ll save every one the time reading this article:
“Blah blah blah, I’m a woman, men are evil, I’m a victim, blah blah blah.”
I put that wall of gibberish into Google Translate, but it didn’t know what to do with it either – it was still gibberish on the output.
Perhaps I lack the subtlety necessary to appreciate Miss Alexanders writing style, but shouldn’t English majors have some appreciation of the function of the paragraph?
And then there’s her employment of gibberish as a replacement for argument.
Here you go:
“Because I have a vagina instead of a penis I’m going to pretend I actually have several penises coming out of my head, so sucks to you!”
[snort!]
Who was it who coined the word “psychobabble?”
What makes you think that he has?
How can you be sure? If you went crazy, how could you tell?
As nearly as I can determine, the sole career field open to people with degrees in women’s studies is professor of women’s studies. So, if there are twenty women’s studies majors at a given university, and the average women’s studies professor lasts for five years before she’s committed to the psychiatric hospital, that would mean only one out of a hundred women’s studies majors have any shot at actually using their degrees. If this young lady does receive her doctorate and wins the professorship, she will have proven herself to be the craziest out of a hundred crazies.
Oh, but wait, she’s an English major. Thing is, they don’t (normally) haul English professors off to the loony bin, and, tenured professorships being what they are, the professors don’t turn over every five, or fifteen, or twenty-five years.
One hopes that she will be able to master that very difficult English question, “Would you like fries with that?”
Since a doctoral dissertation is supposed to be original research in an untouched field, and the number of fields inadequately explored continues to drop, eventually you reach the point where only silliness is left to research.
4,000 – 19 = 3,981. You saved us only 3,981 words!
If women have multiple personality disorder, and sex is a mental construct rather than a physical assignment, wouldn’t that mean that every personality she has has a 50% chance of being male?
More like the dustbins of your mind…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eHE3BOtGIG4
For me, the point of writing is to provoke a reaction of some kind in the reader. Instead, her medusean head-dicks appear to be having a circle jerk.
“where does it feel good, baby?”
“just lick the immense astral space not organized around any one sun!”
– as heard never by any male (or female).
AMEN! I quit an MA in History (which I love) because it was less about history and more about the role of this and that minority in history… even if they had to be shoehorned in. Further, we were encouraged to write in the style of the author above: turgid and so filled with jargon as to be almost incomprehensible.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was “The Heart and Stomach of a King”, which professed to explore the alleged confusion amongst Englishmen over the gender of Elizabeth I. I couldn’t take it any more.
I think we could tell. But there are frankly some warning signs already.
Moral preening with $10 words.
That’s exactly how I used to write answers to essay questions when I had no clue what the subject matter was because I didn’t read it.
I even got called out on it once by a teacher who said, “I thought your essay was good, but I got the feeling you hadn’t read the material.” He was spot on. He gave me a ‘C’ anyway because I wrote a good essay.
It was totally made up BS that read like this stuff Stacy shows us here. Only it sounded more like something from the more “masculine” sorts of blather you’d have read in say, a New York Times article on some Supreme Court case back in the 1960’s.
You can grift your way through college making A’s and B’s without reading a damn thing the teachers want you to read. Trust me on this. The good news is, I picked the classes I wanted to read in, and read deep. So I gave a pass on English Lit, and sailed through Comp Sci and math, and my philosophy core, because I read the assignments, and many other books on the subject that weren’t assigned.
But choosing a bullshit degree is going to require manufacturing bullshit by the dumptruck load. And this lady was cranking it out by the yard. The idea is to simply overwhelm the committee with your erudition and prose. Since they all did the same thing to get where they are, you’re good to go.
The cat was a genius.
Riiiiight…
My experience was similar, except substitute an obscure 17th Century German poet. Doctoral programs had no interest in me, simply because my area of expertise was Humanism and Reformation in German literature. No recognizable victims to make for a compelling dissertation.
Math is hard.
For us literature types, that is.
: )
Hey–you know what those snakes on Medusa’s head look a lot like? Yep. PENISES.
Feminism is nothing more than marxism for the sexes.
It’s a marxist ideology, through and through. Marxism, adapted for the sexes, one might say.
What’s really interesting is the pervasive nature of marxism. From whom does this pervasive ideology arise?
That is the real question.
So if I’m reading this correctly, the person who wrote the piece she’s discussing took something that 15-year-old boys would say — “Huh huh, Medusa’s snakes look like dicks, huh huh” — and turned it into a long, boring, incomprehensible “academic” paper. I think the dumb teenager version is both briefer and more insightful.
She seems to have an issue with penises.
The Feminist writing above made my head spin in language and lack of logic.
Retardation.
It’s the Judith Butler school of retarded gibberish so favored by sociopathic feminists. They make H.P. Lovecraft look like baby-talk. Scarier too. And did I say retarded?
See, here’s where you’re wrong, patriarch. There are tons of career paths for women’s studies majors.
There’s professor of women’s studies, associate professor of women’s studies, adjunct professor of women’s studies, women’s and gender studies center director, director of the gender and sexual oppression center at U of Whatever, tolerance and diversity consultant, diversity and tolerance consultant, tolerant diversification consultant, FEMA tolerance reeducation director, paid blogger and troll, and many, many more. Practitioners likely make more than I, a lowly STEM field major, with useless degrees.
You don’t suppose she woke up with a bunch of Mardi Gras beads around her neck, after having downed the better part of a bottle of Patron the previous evening, holding her pounding head and muttering, “I wrote what last night?”
Dude, if I had a dollar for every time a professor peered at me suspiciously over the top of his reading glasses while reading my papers, I’d have…well…ten dollars, but that’s not the point. The point is, you have described my college experience in its entirety! Here’s to semi-well-educated slackers and grifters! [Shoots ten dollar double shot of Glenmorangie paid for with suspicious professor money, then chokes on it.]