By Sarah Amsler, Lecturer in Sociology at Aston University (Birmingham, UK), Posted: December 10, 2010 10:55 AM
Under what might now need to be termed comparatively normal circumstances, I have often agonised over helping my students understand the practical significance of critical theory. They ask, but what can one actually do with Herbert Marcuse today? In a scheduled class, it all feels so remote.
Now I can say, look: his work is a defense against injustice. Or in the more eloquent words of the London Book Bloc, inspired by its Italian counterpart, “books are our tools — we teach with them, we learn with them, we play with them, we create with them, we make love with them and, sometimes, we must fight with them.” In today’s fourth, most passionate and most ungoverned national demonstration against the British government’s wholesale privatization of higher education, books-as-shields replaced pens-as-swords.…
At bullybloggers, the blogging site that Lisa Duggan, Jose Munoz and Tavia Nyong’o and I sometimes call our internet home, we believe in bullies. No, not those kinds of bullies, not Tennessee Williams’ no-necked monsters, the brutish boys who make it their business to keep everyone else in line. We believe in a queer breed of bullies, bullies who bash back. In actual fact, lots of queer girls (and I speak from experience) do begin their lives as bullying types as they fight their way out of the restrictions of femininity. Some find queerness to be a refuge from the ravages of teenage heterosexuality.…