Michael Capel

SAN FRANCISCO—Lesbian detective fiction of the 1920s, California’s Proposition 209, ebonics, Victorian-era fashion, and wax figures were among the topics discussed as 11,000 academics descended upon San Francisco for the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention from December 27-30. The MLA, the largest scholarly organization in America, includes professors and graduate students in English language and literature, foreign languages and literatures, and linguistics.

The purpose of the convention is threefold: for professors and graduate students to present their current research projects (which in many cases become the themes for college courses), for graduate students to try to obtain employment (many job interviews occur on-site), and for scholars to socialize, "network," and, as the San Francisco Chronicle, which adoringly covered the conference, puts it, "talk shop."

The conference was impressive for its scale—thousands of papers were presented at the convention’s over 800 panel discussions—but not for its range of views. To be sure, attendees were presented with a mind-boggling scope of subjects. In fact, many of the lectures were about subjects so esoteric or highly specialized that one cannot help but question their academic validity.

Rather, the convention was notable for its ideological conformity, specifically to the far left. It constituted the utmost definition of "preaching to the choir": virtually no panelists or observers ever challenged other speaker’s positions, whether academic or political. Audience members could be seen nodding their heads in passive agreement with almost everything that every speaker said, no matter how outrageous.

Many panels were convened for the purpose of outright political proselytizing. One such example was "Kalifornia über Alles"—in which the papers read were titled "‘There Are Millions More like Me’: Proposition 187 and the Reconfiguration of ‘Race,’ Nation, and Culture"; "‘Angry White Men’ and ‘Whiny White Guys’: What’s Going on with White Men and Affirmative Action?"; and "Racists and Nativists Take the Initiative; or, Three Strikes against California." Others included were "Representing the Left," "Complementary Theorizing: ‘Black’ and ‘White’ Women Imagining Feminist Coalitions," and "Psychoanalysis and Queer Theory: Strategies for Social Change."

Most of those panels that actually dealt with academic subjects did so by revisiting the subjects with new radical themes. For example, conference attendees were treated to "The Politics of Gender in Irish Writing," "Queering Dickinson," "Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Postwar German Literature," and "Queer Crossroads: Intersections of Queer Studies and Religious Approaches to Literature."

There was an omnipresent delusion of oppression at the conference, as evidenced by the panel "Coping with Fear of Feminism: A Roundtable Discussion." This was comprised of six professors telling self-congratulatory tales of how they have supposedly faced resistance as "feminists." The overriding message of the panel was that it is becoming harder, not easier, to be a feminist in academia.

The first speaker, University of Cincinnati professor Lisa Marie Hogeland, claimed that middle-class, educated, white women are complacent, and that they must "wake up" to their truly oppressed status. This is essentially an utterance of Karl Marx’s theory of "false consciousness"—that the workers in capitalism may think that they are free and prosperous, but are really subjugated to the bourgeoisie. Herbert Marcuse—who had many fans (and a disciple, Richard Delgado, who talked about "Law’s Role in the Construction of Whiteness and Race") among MLA presenters—adopted this concept to free speech, saying that people in America may think that they have freedom of conscience, but in reality the First Amendment only perpetuates and, as it were, masks the class structure.

Similarly, Hogeland argued that white women who have putatively achieved success—a Ph.D. and a prestigious, well-paying job for life—are really living a lie. To celebrate their success is "a seduction to act in bad faith."

The solution, echoed by the second speaker in "But Nothing, I Am a Feminist: An Argument for Separatist Pedagogy," is for the feminist professor to aggressively politicize her classroom. "Fear of feminism, in the end, is political," Hogeland said, "and must be battled politically." Thus, each time she steps in the classroom, she "fights" to advance her cause.

The next speaker, a black woman, added that she echoed the comments of the two previous speakers, but that as a minority woman, things have been even harder for her. She advanced the notion of "Africana womanism," not just a black version of feminism, but rather a whole separate identity struggle that counts as its adversaries typical "white feminist" notions.

Another paper was presented by two professors at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who wanted to be co-chairmen of the English department. They explained the resistance that they encountered from the faculty and the administration. The detraction seemed to be on the grounds that a co-chairmanship would make administration difficult, but the speakers attributed opposition to what they decried as the conservative, "individualistic," patriarchal, hierarchical structure that is the norm.

During the question and answer session, one speaker remarked that perhaps a "fear of feminism" by mainstream undergraduates was caused by a perception that the term "feminist" connotes a man-hating, anti-marriage, anti-family, lesbian identity, and that self-identified feminists should counter that perception. Predictably, as if on cue, a member of the audience stood up and said, "But some of us are lesbians!" The audience and several panelists then applauded raucously.

‘Can We Talk?’; or ‘Can We Listen?’

The "culture war" was the subject of a panel at the conference’s final session. "Can We Talk? Is Dialogue Possible between the Cultural Left and Right?" featured conservatives Sanford Pinsker, a professor at Franklin and Marshall College and editor of the National Association of Scholars’s journal,and Robert Alter, a professor at UC- Berkeley and founder of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics; and liberals Sandra Gilbert, a professor at UC-Davis and former MLA president, and Don Lazere, a professor at California Polytechnic State University and organizer of the panel.

This panel was among the more spirited of the convention, largely because it was the only one about political issues in which opposing viewpoints were actually invited. The four speakers were relatively well-balanced. With the occasional exception of Gilbert, the panelists offered sensible and civil dialogue.

Lazere identified "preaching to the choir," distorting others’ ideas in the course of attacking them, attacking "straw-man" opponents, and shouting others down as the main impediments to civil dialogue practiced in various combinations by both sides. Gilbert, on the other hand, was less balanced in her attacks, employing such labels of the cultural right as, among others, "right-wing" and "fundamentalist."

Pinsker, meanwhile, told the audience that he had stopped attending MLA conventions because "the trendy and the trivial have so elbowed out traditional scholarship" and most participants’ topics of study have become bizarre and "self-indulgent." He poignantly asked, "can anybody in this room suggest a topic so outlandish, so loopy, that the powers that be would turn it down" as the subject of a panel? He complained that any effort to discuss "standards" or "excellence" is hardly welcome in the discipline.

He also raised what he saw as a major problem that has resulted: students with politically incorrect views are intimidated or even reprised into silence in the classroom. Consequently, a chilling effect results and the politicization of academics continues.

During the question-and-answer session, an audience member challenged Pinsker’s claim. Gilbert then commented that she had never seen an incident of intimidation of students. In one of the most important moments of the panel, though, Lazere responded that the behavior cited by Pinsker happens all of the time. The audience became silent on the issue thereafter.

Indeed, the audience did not share the panelists’ good spirit. Virtually all audience responses came in the form of diatribes against Alter and Pinsker. One self-identified "feminist" rose to complain that in the course of listing four or five of his favorite authors, Alter listed only white males. As several audience members rose in a chorus to demand why Alter hadn’t included, say, Virginia Woolf or George Eliot, Alter replied that this type of question/comment was precisely the manifestation of incivility that he was talking about—he called the responses "knee-jerk feminism," because, he said, none of them bothered to look at his career, and if they had, they would know that he frequently assigns, teaches, and writes about female authors.

Pinsker said of the theme of the panel, "‘Can we talk?’ Of course. We do it all the time. ‘Can we listen?,’ however is another, much more complicated story."

Ebonics, KFC, and Child Beating

The convention was honored with the presence of James Kincaid, the University of Southern California professor who is one of the leading advocates of sexual relations between adults and children. In his paper, "Victorian Constructions of the Beatable Child," he argued that child-beating is the fulfillment of adults’ erotic orientations toward children. "Drooling erotic satisfaction could be disguised as duty" for the spanker, he argued. "The connection between sexual delight and child-beating has never been hidden." No one in the session took issue with his bizarre assertions.

Meanwhile, Purnima Bose and Laura Elizabeth Lyons, graduate students at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, decried the "multiple levels of trauma"—on poultry workers, fast-food restaurant employees, residents affected by supposedly poor environmental practices, and chickens on farms—caused by Kentucky Fried Chicken in "Reading Transnationalism: Commodities, Corporate Genealogies, and KFC."

The company was renamed KFC in recent years to de-emphasize the "fried" element of the product. The talk provided a convenient means for the authors to attack and ridicule, among other things, corporate America; the company’s culture (they called the original Colonel Sanders character "racist"), marketing (which "manipulates [and] exploits national identity") and entrepreneurial aggressiveness and success; and its founder’s charitable work. It discussed the company’s "commodity chain"—which became a Marxist conception of the company’s production processes—and its effects on the participants therein.

Not surprisingly, in addition, several speakers defended the notion of ebonics (black English), which has come under fire as being absurd and demeaning to blacks. Speaking at the panel "Ebonics, Bidialectalism, and Bilingualism," Dennis Baron, a professor at the University of Illinois, reminded the audience that the American Linguistic Society (ALS) endorsed ebonics not even as a legitimate dialect of English, but as a legitimate language in and of itself. He then complained that no one in the mainstream media or society paid attention to the declaration, and lamented that no one takes the ALS seriously, even though it is composed of college professors.