I’ve misplaced my ontologies
Paul Varnell doesn’t break new ground in his characteristically sensible IGF article on queer theory, but he does iterate a point that needs to be made over and over: “None of this seems very coherent. To the extent it is coherent it seems simply wrong.” On the one hand, even taking the energy to point out how contentless and irrelevant these people are as scholars is a waste. On the other hand, they do have plenty of influence in the campus gay culture that’s the backdrop for a lot of people’s coming out. I daresay that most gay students, even when their entire sense of themselves and the world is being broken down and remade, are together enough not to buy full-on into the laundry list of pomo beliefs. But those who do are those who most desperately need what a humanities education traditionally provided: lots and lots of information that took you outside yourself.