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Friday, April 01, 2005
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CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN DRAMA Zach at the blog Veiled Conceit looks for Women’s Studies and finds Queer: I was checking out the Women's Studies program at Smith for an easy joke, but instead found the "Queer Studies" program. I suppose it'll help us all out to analyze "antinormative sexual identities, performances, discourses and representations in order ultimately to destabilize the notion of normative sexuality and gender," but one thing about the program made me laugh. Buried within courses titled "Queer Resistances," "Queer Globalizations," and "Lesbian Identity and Experience" was the curious "Contemporary Canadian Drama". Is there something about contemporary Canadian drama that I don't know? What are those Canucks up to up there, ya know? I'm serious. UD took a gander. But only a brief gander. As you know if you read UD with any frequency, UD’s long addiction to Tabasco sauce has left her too acidic to read Queer or Women’s Studies course descriptions without getting into peristaltic trouble. So she’s grateful to Melana Zyla Vickers, who has just completed an extensive study of Women’s Studies departments, programs, courses, enrollment, texts, etc., at five public universities in North Carolina. Here’s the Vickers report. Few students take WS courses, and very few major or minor in it. The programs are ideologically rather than intellectually driven. Many of the course readings (if the course involves reading, rather than viewing) are by semi-literates. You could say that the market is taking care of the Women’s Studies problem, but the programs Vickers looks at are propped up by state funds, and, after all, they are only part of the panoply of “Studies” programs in colleges and universities today, most of them equipped with extensive self-justification and corrupted by self-applause. |