HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Babylon Bee Publishes a Hysterical Spoof of a College English Course Description. Oh, Wait!
If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like 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.
Sadly, this nonsensical, unintelligible gibberish was copied, word-for-word, from an actual English course description currently appearing on the website of Kenyon College, one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges. That Kenyon approved a course description (and course) so replete with esoteric academic jargon and hackneyed, woke buzzwords reveals the intellectual vacuousness that currently permeates the college.
Could actually be worse, though: Duke University To Publish A ‘F*ggotology’ With Intro That References Anal Sex.
