I remember visiting Flinders University, which is south of Adelaide, once by bus, many long years ago. The bus number was 21 D. It took one hour to arrive, as two buses simply did not turn up. I was busting to go to the toilet when I eventually got to Flinders, to agitate in a public lecture. What a place! Isolated, and in the summer, very hot and windy, sitting on a hill. It is a symbol of the modern university, and was once only in one spot, but now seems to be spreading over the city.
Now we have the latest piece of pc nonsense, that has got international attention:
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/02/22/australian-professor-writes-about-the-horrors-of-heterosexuality/
“A professor at Flinders University in Australia recently published an academic journal article that highlights the “horrors” of heterosexuality.
Heather Brook of Flinders University in Australia published a paper this week for the academic journal Feminist Theory in which she wrote about the “horrors” of heterosexuality.
“The larger aim of this endeavour is to theorise heterosexuality in more accurate ways, and to seek out understandings of heterosexuality (including its historical relationship with heteronormative marriage) which acknowledge its horrors without foreclosing hope for its future,” the paper’s summary reads.
Brook describes “heterosexuality” as an issue that needs to be fixed. “So far I have suggested that in feminist, gender and sexuality studies, heterosexuality is a problem, and a problem resistant to any easy solution,” she wrote.
This, of course, got me interested enough to read the original paper, at:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1464700118754675
which has the following abstract:
“Hetero’ (from the Greek, ‘different’) is most familiar to us in its attachment as a prefix to ‘sexuality’. In gender studies, sexuality studies and feminist scholarship, heterosexuality is routinely contrasted with homosexuality, and this contrast is often mapped over the opposition of heteronormative versus queer (ideas, practices, effects). These word-pairs (heterosexual and homosexual; heteronormative and queer) tend to operate dichotomously – that is, in exclusive, exhaustive and hierarchically ordered ways.
Taking up Sara Ahmed’s work on orientation, this article experiments with an alternative pairing, exploring the potential for admixture or subversion in those dichotomies. ‘Heterodoxy’ is introduced as a concept that might be usefully contrasted with ‘orthodoxy’ in sexuality/gender studies – particularly in relation to current debates on marriage. The larger aim of this endeavour is to theorise heterosexuality in more accurate ways, and to seek out understandings of heterosexuality (including its historical relationship with heteronormative marriage) which acknowledge its horrors without foreclosing hope for its future.”
In all fairness, this sounds like standard sociology, which means that it is meaningless. She does say that heterosexuality is theoretically troublesome, but in the wild world of sociology, what isn’t? In any case, whatever the objections made to heterosexuality, it can be reworked against any of the hero sexualities of the chattering class, as I have explained in other articles. Transgender changes, for example, seem to require surgery and the administration of artificial hormones. So, isn’t that a socio-scientific construction?