fearless risk-taker got the fear
Music: Meat Beat Manifesto: Original Fire
Last December I agreed to write a brief opinion essay for Inside Higher Ed, an online outfit that publishes some pretty edgy (if not at times needlessly anti-pomo) stuff. I don't read it often, but a number of my colleagues do and routinely post links to stories about this or that academic gambit or scandal. I agreed to write something after one of the editors "stumbled" across my blog about teaching queer theory.
Well, I finished a draft of the essay today. There is a reason I dragged my heels on this, and it has something to do with Meat Beat Manifesto's song, "I Got the Fear." See, getting the fear or "got the fear" is a reference to the brand of paranoia one gets when doing psychoactive drugs: are my parents gonna catch me? Does the police know I'm tripping my balls off? Did I just crap my pants? No, I didn't crap my pants. Maybe I did and I'm just trying to rationalize that I didn't crap my pants so that I don't stick my hand down there to find out? Oh, that's stupid, if I crapped my pants I'd smell it right now . . . " [ecetera and so on].
Well, I sort of got the fear about this article--have had it for months. When I normally publish something it's for an academic audience and, maybe if I'm lucky, twenty sets of ears or eyeballs. Period. Inside Higher Ed is widely read, maybe even 50 sets of eyeballs! So I'm a little nervous about having an audience for once in my life. It's kinda of scary.
Anyhoo, here's a teaser. I can't post the whole thing cause, you know, then there would be no put in sending it to the online joint:
On (Tolerating) Queer Theory, or, Why I'm Not Radical Enough
As a teacher of rhetorical studies, I've been trained to think about the differences between audiences and how to adapt one's messages to address those differences. Of course, having earned one's credentials in "the art of persuasion" and (presumably) possessing the intellectual tools of audience adaptation doesn't necessarily mean one can do it well, and last fall I really stepped in it. I've just completed my first year at my second tenure-track job, and as anyone who has moved from one institution to another can testify, student bodies in different places are not the same. In this brief essay, I share my experiences trying to teach queer theory in a class titled "Rhetoric and Popular Music," and in particular, I detail one attempt to adapt the course material and my teaching style to a handful of hostile students (and one "concerned parent"), navigating the problems of teaching "posthumanist" theoretical approaches along the way. If you'd rather skip all the drama, I'll be arguing this: sometimes it is permissible to retreat to a classic, liberal politics of toleration or humanism when teaching undergraduates because we no longer live in an environment that protects academic freedom. Although Kurt Cobain did once sing, "what else should I say/everyone is gay," sometimes students are not ready to interrogate what that means, and they'll make their parents call deans and chairs attempting to get you fired if you try to teach them.