(from Forbes):
By Thomas K. Lindsay
As an academic who spent over three decades working in and with colleges and universities, I thought I had seen it all—the good, the bad and the downright silly.
I was wrong.
Yesterday, I came across a list of “the craziest academic works, straight from the minds of the Ph.D. candidates and faculty members.” It must be read to be believed. Propriety prevents my listing all the unsavory subjects deemed scholarship-worthy by today’s intellectuals, but what appears below will give you a taste, if not dyspepsia.
The first “academic” work adds insult to the injuries received by the valiant soldiers whose sacrifice our nation honored this past Memorial Day weekend. In a recent doctoral dissertation “Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state,” we are informed that the author “want[s] to trouble the soldier as an object of desire, not merely as a subject imposing violence.”
It gets worse. The paper analyzes “the fetishism of militarization to argue that the relationship between soldiers’ bodies and the state might be usefully understood using theoretical categories derived from kink communities.”
Why, we might ask, does this subject merit academic inquiry? Because, says the author, “like it or not, war is sexy in contemporary U.S. culture.” CONTINUE READING HERE