What Fresh Hell Is This? A Guy Marooned in Women's Studies - Critical Essay

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2001 by Eric Adler

With all that accursed "critical engagement" happily discarded, what did the class offer its students? Perhaps a woman's response to an article about young feminist devotees of punk rock music offers the best insight. Asked by the professor about the piece, this young woman relayed a tentative--yet, to her, utterly damning--criticism: "I thought I would be in this article," she mused, "but I definitely wasn't." The article was a failure precisely because it did not provide this student with sufficient opportunities for empathy. But this criticism seemed to be acceptable, evoking a warm response from our instructor, and a rush of deep "women s studies nods" from members of the class. From then on, the class engaged solely in solipsistic exercises of empathy for feminist theorists. We were not to bother with the academic rigor or the intellectual uncertainties a traditional liberal arts education presents.

We were there merely to nod.

Eric Adler is a Ph.D. candidate in classical studies at Duke University.