[csaa-forum] bolt, sticks and stones

[Elspeth Probyn]

well it's nice to know that bolt doesn't hate us all!

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 A mouthful of tripe
 By ANDREW BOLT
 12dec04

 PROFESSOR Elspeth Probyn shouldn't be so modest. In Wednesday's The Australian
she denounced "Andrew
 Bolt's annual column in the Herald Sun on how useless academics are."

 Actually, professor, I have never claimed all academics are useless.

 In that column last month, I discussed only a few stand-outs -- ones who'd had
work of dubious benefit financed by
 a $500 million-a-year system of Australian Research Council grants that seems
unfocussed, wasteful and far too
 clubby.

 I wondered, for instance, how members of ARC committees could hand each other
big grants, including one of
 $880,000 to study the "the classed, racialised and ethnicised dimensions of the
bodily experience" in Japan.

 Did such grant-making help explain why the humanities in particular have become
so insular and self-indulgent?

 Probyn, professor of gender studies at Sydney University and author of Sexy
Body, tackled none of my arguments
 in her piece, simply wailing: "Would (Bolt) care that it hurts to be told that
your 50-or 60-hour work week is
 pointless?"

 Pointless? Now that I've checked Probyn's own faddish work -- and who has paid
her to do it -- I can understand
 why she seemed to take my criticisms personally. Or why she sure should.

 In 2000, she received an $11,000 grant from the ARC to study The Making of Mod
Oz: the roles of the food media
 in the construction of contemporary identity.

 In 2001, she won another $137,500 to ruminate over Practices and performances
of alimentary identities: a
 comparative analysis of the food media and their audiences. And that same year
she shared a $118,000 ARC
 grant to study Girl Cultures: the effect of media on young women's
self-representations.

 That last study involved such things as quizzing girls on "their reaction to
Sara-Maria Fedele (de facto star of the
 first Big Brother series) as a focal point for analysing both young women's
interest in the Big Brother format and,
 more broadly, their responses to popular discourses of protection which
circulate around their media consumption".

 I suspect, from their bloated titles, you'd understand her other studies even
less, so I'll let Probyn describe what
 she's up to in one article, using her best English: "I argue that queer theory
needs to extend its theoretical reach
 beyond an increasingly over-privileged and narrow use of sexuality."

 Which has her doodling: "The mouth machine registers experiences and then
articulates them -- utters them. In
 eating we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations,
just as we may disrupt them.

 "For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage
zapping from one part of the world to
 another, and then to me.

 'UNSOLICITED, it sets out a statement from a Dr Johannes Van Vugt, in San
Francisco, who on October 11, 1999,
 National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights for
persons who are gay, lesbian and
 other sexual orientation minorities'."

 And, no, it doesn't get any more readable -- or meaningful.

 Several questions zap into my thinking machine as I eat my dinner of
connotations, leaving traces of their
 rhizomatic passage on my shirt.

 What exactly are Probyn's students learning that is of use to them? Or us?

 Why are we paying for her to write such dismal stuff, and so turgidly?

 And what does it say about the ARC that Probyn is just one of many academics
who have received grants of
 $100,000 or much more to subject us to even more such arid theorising?

 But let me be as clear as I can so even Probyn understands: I am not
criticising all academics in asking these
 questions. This time I've named only her.

--
Elspeth Probyn
Professor & Chair
Dept of Gender Studies
The University of Sydney  NSW  2006
Tel - 9351 7389; Fax - 9351 5336
Mobile - 0412 548 762

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/Arts/departs/gender
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gender/GirlCultures/index.html