Mark Young

CHICAGO-The Modern Language Association (MLA) gathered in Chicago from December 27-30, and lived up to its reputation as a politicized organization obsessed with race, sex, class, and sexual orientation. The group offered such presentations as “The Anal Eye of Ecstasy” and “‘Ahem, We Are Not Horny Thai Girls’: Resisting the Thai Girl Image on the Internet.”
    Ostensibly a “gathering of teachers and scholars in the field of language and literature study,” the massive MLA conference rarely focused on topics relating to literature or language. Discussions of works by Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer often gave way to Marx, “queer theory,” feminism, and other topics that would seem to have little to do with the group’s stated purpose. 

Marx a Literary Figure?
    In “Hybridizing Marxism,” panelists often spoke not as if they were students of Marx, but as his followers. “I’m here to make the case for Marxist-feminism,” Rosemary Hennesey from SUNY-Albany confessed, adding that she is “committed to social transformation.” Hennessey complained that the title of the panel didn’t fully represent her goals. “The word ‘hybrid’ carries luggage that weighs us down in our efforts to provoke social movement towards the end that Marxism endorses.”
    Kathryne Lindberg of Wayne State University discussed her and other academics’ “felt need to move somehow from theory to practice, from the academy to activism.”
    Kevin Robert Floyd of Kent State University used his paper to apply Marx to the gay rights movement, explaining that “The gay liberation movement was motivated in large part by a rejection of precisely this [an embrace of heterosexual institutions] type of tolerance, characterized by a conviction that homosexuality could in no way be integrated into the existing order of things. As one of its chants put it, ‘2, 4, 6, 8, smash the family, smash the state!’”
    Prior to making their presentations, panelists had reasserted their commitment to Marxism in a statement that was read at the conference. The statement said in part: “The framework for analyzing the history and determinacy of capital provided in the Marxist tradition is essentially correct and explains current political and economically global mass underemployment, economic crisis, and the continuing gross disparity of wealth nationally and internationally.”

Reading ‘Gay’ into Literature 
    Like Marx, homosexuality was a frequent source of inspiration for presentations, including, “The Emerging Queer Voice: The Video Underground of the 1980s and 1990s,” and “From the State to the Street: Transdisciplinary and Transgender Politics.” 
    Failure to accept homosexuality as a normal lifestyle is the result of homophobic right-wing conservatives, B.J. Wray, University of Calgary, charged in her presentation,  “Lesbianism Is To Nationalism As Canada Is To America,” rather than a majority public disdain of the lifestyle.
Wray displayed a video depicting two lesbian Canadian Park Rangers to drive home her point. The unintended underlying message of the video, though, was that homosexuaals must resort to impersonating authority figures in order to coax adults and children into approaching them.
“You could see the kids flocking to their booth. They have the lemonade. They have the enticements,” exclaimed Wray.
    During another session, “TV 2000 II: Sex and Sexuality,” Katie King from the University of Maryland, College Park, in her paper “Television’s Global Gay Formations: European and United States Strategies of Representations,” discussed homosexuality and multiculturalism in the new global marketplace. In particular, she highlighted the television shows Xena and Highlander.
    “Nineteen ninety-two …marked the 500th anniversary of the so-called discovery of the New World, the invasion of the Americas by European conquerors,” as well as the debut of the show, Highlander, she said. King stated that she immediately recognized the “queer” characteristic of the main character and since she herself is a lesbian, this heightened her pleasure in watching the show.
    The use of television characters to further the gay agenda was highlighted by King, who also says that she comes “from a tradition of Marxist historicising, whose purpose of history is to subvert such official readings,” and that “any new political movement among the lesbian and gay human rights activism must be very sophisticated.”

Menchu’s Fairy Tale of ‘Surpassing Importance’?
    Speaker Daniel L. Zins of the Atlanta College of Art’s Liberal Arts Department, explained in his paper  why the truthfulness of I, Rigoberta Menchu is irrelevant. The book stands not as an account of an innocent victim of war but rather, as Zins puts it, “to incite hatred not so much of European and Western societies per se, as with some of their profoundly serious shortcomings” that place “corporate interest far ahead of the most elemental human rights considerations.”
    An unidentified audience member felt that though flawed, “the thing about Menchu is it’s not so much literature, but it occupies  space between literature and history. I think that is the classic strategy of resistance narrative.”
Academics revere Rigoberta Menchu’s fabricated  “autobiography” as “canonized text.” The factual substance of a work is a mere technicality, these academics make clear, as long as the end results and intentions of the work perpetuate the cause. In the case of I, Rigoberta Menchu, the intention is nothing more than propaganda for Marxism. 
    I, Rigoberta Menchu is a false account of her life in Guatemala pieced together by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, a dedicated Marxist. The book is embraced by liberals, feminists, and socialists to such an extent that the book has become required reading on many college campuses. Menchu was awarded the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. 
    Zins further states that “one of the things that I try to do in my teaching is help my students develop a certain amount of empathy” for Rigoberta Menchu,  who in Zins’ own words uses “lies, or fictions, or embellishments, of whatever variety.” Though Zins eventually concludes these lies are “indefensible,” he argues nevertheless that I, Rigoberta Menchu “provides educators with a ‘teach the conflicts’ topic of surpassing importance.” 

More Politics From a ‘Literary’ Conference
    “The powerful rhetoric of the civil rights movement, rhetoric of equality, civil rights, and an end of discrimination,” asserted Kelly Oliver, a professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook in  “Blindspots in Colorblind Society”, “have been reappropiated by conservative forces to overturn affirmative action policies and legislation.”
She continued, “this afternoon I’ll use psychoanalytical theory to diagnose this reappropiation of civil rights rhetoric.”
    Oliver explained that she was teaching at the University of Texas when Hopwood v. Texas, a suit that did away with race as a factor in admissions into state schools in Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, was being reviewed. Following the Hopwood decision, the category of race had to be eliminated from admission forms, she noted, and was done so with “white-out.” 
    Oliver further explained how “the use of ‘white-out’ to cover any mention of race can be seen as a metaphor for the ‘white-out’ underlying the conservative reappropiation of civil rights rhetoric of a color blind society and equal treatment regardless of race.” 
    “Hopwood projects victimization onto whites, denies present effect of past discrimination, levels all forms of discrimination without distinguishing benign, necessary or racist forms,” she claimed,  “and refuses to see worlds of difference between racism against people of color and so-called reverse discrimination toward whites.” 
    During a session titled “Current Issues in Professional Communications,” audience members were greeted with  Amy L. Koerber’s paper, “Radicalizing Feminist Perspectives: The Relevance of Feminist Critique of Science and Technology to Professional Communication Research.”
Koerber used her paper as a soap box, urging  “scholars to take a more radical feminist approach than has been typical of feminist approaches to this field in the past.”
Koerber went on to say that in “fields that have historically been—and to some extent still are—male dominated, current rhetoric of technology research risks perpetuating a traditional [i.e. patriarchal] definition of technology.”

MLA Impact on Education
    As America’s largest scholarly organization, the MLA includes in its ranks professors and graduate students in English language and literature, foreign language and literature, and linguistics. The MLA is also closely allied with such organizations as The Marxist Literacy Group, Gay and Lesbian Caucus for the Modern Languages, and Feminista Unidas (Feminist United). Founded in 1883, the MLA hosts more than 700 panels, attended by more than 10,000 people, over four days at the end of every year.
    On Thursday, December 30 the MLA convention ended just before noon with a mad scramble to vacate both the hotel and the city as quickly as possible, made all the more urgent with New Year’s Eve just a day away. Whatever had been accomplished over the last four days would be up to the academics to decide after they returned to their lecture halls. Judging from literature courses offered at leading colleges and universities, e.g., Amherst College’s “Black Gay Fiction,” Swarthmore’s “Lesbian Novels Since World War II,” and  Harvard’s  “A Thousand Feminisms,” the MLA is having a profound impact on higher education.