The University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Australia’s most elite training centre for the woke, has outdone itself with the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies (HISS), which was launched earlier this year.
In case you missed it, the launch was kicked off with a number of events, including CLOAK, ‘a cross-disciplinary project aimed at reinventing the lab coat as a symbol of queer pride’ and an evening at the Australian museum to celebrate ‘queer heroes of STEM with a night of comedy, community and science.’
HISS purports that it will connect the finest minds working in the fields of Queer theory, LGBTQIA+ studies and other fields. The institute’s focus, however, seems very much to be on the ‘Q’ in Queer theory, while the rest of the letters in the alphabet don’t get much of a look in at all. Narrowing it down even further, the institute is concerned with Queer Youth because apparently ‘much of the cultural anxiety around queerness centers on youth.’
Naturally then, many of the HISS’ activities revolve around something called the ‘queer led classroom’ which ‘builds on the observation that all of us, young or old, established or emerging, have been school students at some time and might usefully revisit that experience in a queer-led context.’
And how does the team at HISS propose help us revisit that experience in a queer led context? It will furnish us with a number of extra-curricular activities such as ‘fieldtrips, school photographs and a formal – all teenage rites of passage that may strike fear in the hearts of queer kids’.
I have many questions about this. Does this mean that even if you were not ‘queer’ as a child, the folk at the institute will help you re-create your school days as if you were queer? Or does it mean that you might have been queer at school and that you’d like to relive it all as an adult? Are they trying to recreate an alternate reality, and replace one ‘lived experience’ with another ‘lived experience?’ Anything and everything is possible in the mad, subjectivist, socially constructed world of post-modernism.
But it’s almost impossible to say, because the nature of queer Theory itself is to confuse and to discombobulate. The most coherent thing about this post-modernist theory is its sheer incoherence. As Pluckrose and Lindsay explain in Critical Theories, ‘its goal of subverting or rejecting anything considered normal and innate in favour of the “queer” can make queer Theory frustratingly difficulty to understand, since it values incoherence, illogic and intelligibility.’
This my friends, is what is our hard-earned dollars are paying for; incoherence, illogical and intelligibility. Our universities are well and truly lost.
