what? What? WHAT? and the Best CFP Puns of the Week

Sitting in an office this afternoon working over final grades with the course director and someone who enjoys watching my wince whinge and wallow informs me that next quarter--the one that happens after the quarter whose final grades I'm currently computing with the course director--that "next quarter" begins "next Monday" a.k.a. the day that's five days away and not as I'd spent the last week supposing the Monday that's at least twelve but in all probability nineteen days away.  The pain strips commas from my clutches because who has time for commas when Spring is nigh and inspires unparalled alliterative fits.

In news whose normally noxious effects on my sanity may have been mitigated by the surprising arrival of the Spring Quarter I present the lowlights of this week's Academic Calls For Papers (CFP) Puns Division:

• Ill-uminating Gender: Gender and Disease
• Corpo/realities
• roots/routes

General stupidities include:

• "Integration and Fragmentation affect every aspect of contemporary life and academic activity...What kind of activities are integrating, which are fragmenting; and what manner of strategies might bring these issues together."
• "While much critical attention has been given to the disiplinary moves which have created the student body in education, the significance of teachers' bodies remains central to the production of knowledge...For this special edition we seek articles that examine this problematic through the signification of the teacher's body and the spaces in which teachers perform their identities.  Teaching as performance implies an audience...We are looking for smart, lively essays that examine the construction of the teacher's body inside and outside the spaces of schooling...as well as the performances that are required of teachers to maintain their status as (in)visible containers of knowledge."

That second one slaughters.  All this time I thought the goal of teaching was to perform the act of teaching THAT IS the mass migration of ideas from my head into my students' BUT it turns out that what I should've been doing all along is performing my identity for the students so that they might learn who I am and what's so FUCKING SPECIAL about me that they're spending upwards of $10,000 per annum to watch me perform my identity.  (Commas are out 'cause I have no time for pausing but SHIFT IS IN because SHIFTING never slowed NO ONE down.)

But this CFP's kicker is that despite its authors' investment in investigating say how teachers' bodies are marked through racial and racist knowledge even as these bodies are made and remade in and through interaction and performances in the classroom (and no there were no commas in the original) so that despite this investment these teachers presumably of English know it no better than our current Commander in Chief.  They ask:

What are the pedagogical functions of a teacher's body that is marked by difference?

You have me there I admit that sentence isn't ungrammatical so much as tortured by its commitment to ugly awkward and ungainly phrasing.  I could maybe bring this up with them via a smart lively essay that opens up a "dialogue through the teacher's body" i.e. theirs i.e. with sharp chthonic implements and an intention to torture as they torture syntax and no doubt the undergraduates who feign interest in the daily performances of identity for money better spent on prime Florida real estate...

Comments

[David]

See, now /this/ is the kind of blog entry you should write more often. Spittle-flecked, bug-eyed with rage, this close to shooting a man (and by a man, I mean a coworker) just to see him die.

Incidentally, the more familiar I become with the jargon of the race-gender-class crowd, the more I think it's not only similar to, but serves the same /function/ as, Sovietese-- that distinctive, malformed, and deadly dull language you'll find in anything produced by the Communist bloc. And I'm almost /certain/ that was a run-on sentence. Anyway, if you're not familiar with Sovietese, you have only to read even a tiny bit of Soviet history and I'm sure you'll spot the parallel on your very first encounter with it.

It f'ing /killed/ the Russian language, too-- particularly Russian literature. I'm just sayin'.*

* Actually, in fairness-- hah, fairness-- the "socalist realism" school of art and literature, memorably summed up as "boy meets tractor," is what killed Russian literature. But since the Party decided that socialist realism was the only acceptable form of art, because it was supposed to help advance the cause of the proletariat, whereas art for art's sake was simply a decadent bourgoise conceit (yes, they really thought like that); and since the end result, once the state's organs of censorship were in place (Organs of Censorship would be an /excellent/ name for a rock band), was a distinctive brand of Soviet "literature" just as cloying, dull, and heavy-handed as anything you'd read in Pravda, what I said was true in spirit. Also, I suspect this footnote will be longer than the rest of the post combined. Good times.

[David]

Wait, crap. That post is horribly unclear, I fearinate. ("Fearinate?" "Fearinate. I also fearify." "You frighten me.") So let me clarify.

When I referred to race-gender-class jargon serving the same function as Sovietese, I didn't mean that it was supposed to "advance the cause of the proletariat" (although I'm sure its authors think they're helping oppressed masses); rather, what I meat was that it's designed to comfort and reassure the faithful while at the same time /not provoking any thought/ about the faith itself.

Of course, there are some differences between the two. The Soviet system had the advantage of education on its side-- that is to say, small children were taught in school that the class struggle is an international struggle, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, solidarity with the proletariat, ultimate triumph of the workingman over the exploitative capitalists, from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs. It would be extremely difficult to grow up in the Soviet Union and /not/ believe in the fundamental underpinnings of the Sovietese, no matter how deadly-dull and thick-tongued the phrasing was. Whereas a Soviet child was taught from a very early age that Marxism-Leninism was incontrovertible scientific fact, most Americans pass through a happy childhood without hearing anybody say "genderracial."

On the other hand, this particular jargon has advantages that Sovietese didn't. For instance, if all you freaking read in the paper every goddamn day is "the Soviet economy is constantly overfulfilling the quotas set forth in the Five-Year Plan," and yet there are shortages of /everything/, you'll develop a healthy skepticism towards the claim that the Five-Year Plan is in fact being overfulfilled; indeed, you'll rather doubt it's being fulfilled at all. On the other hand, for the good folks who come up with terms like "genderracial," there /are/ no barren store shelves to confront them with their emptiness; they can therefore trundle contentedly along, secure, despite all common sense and evidence, in the unshakeable conviction that someone, somewhere, believes that they aren't full of it.

Ah, vitriol. I do enjoy it so: yet it appears I have said everything I wanted to. The hour is advanced, near 3 AM: and so to bed.