Hysterical Spoof of a College English Course Description? Oh, Wait! By George Harbison
The Babylon Bee is far and away the leading source of conservative satirical content on the internet. Its writers brilliantly skewer the entire spectrum of woke and PC nonsense on a daily basis. Its pieces are shared widely in social media by clear thinkers seeking comedic relief in the face of the avalanche of increasingly crazy and dangerous ideas, positions, and rhetoric emanating by the American left.
If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:
Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5
How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.
Sadly, this nonsensical, unintelligible gibberish was copied, word-for-word, from an actual English course description currently appearing on the website of Kenyon College, one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges. That Kenyon approved a course description (and course) so replete with esoteric academic jargon and hackneyed, woke buzzwords reveals the intellectual vacuousness that currently permeates the college.
Related: TikTok Throws Satire Site Babylon Bee Down the Memory Hole
Plucked from the course description is this sentence:
Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus.
Note that this is a statement of fact, rather than a reference to a topic that is to be discussed in class. In fact, it is the basis of the class, and it reveals its true agenda: indoctrinating students in cultural Marxism. Kenyon parents shell out upwards of $80 thousand per year to have their children exposed to this dangerous pedagogy and agenda. Are they aware of what those dollars are going for? And why in the world is this garbage part of an undergraduate English curriculum?
As a Kenyon alumnus, I am saddened by the steep degradation in academic rigor at Kenyon revealed by this situation. Unfortunately, Kenyon is not alone in propagating such mindless, worthless dreck. Most of America’s colleges and universities are woke cesspools, spitting out ill-informed and arrogant social justice warriors steeped in bitterness, victimhood, resentment, entitlement, and guilt. These graduates, hamstrung by a lack of real-world skills, tend to gravitate back into academia (where they can use their woke learnings to indoctrinate future cohorts of students) and to the non-profit world (because their woke professors have told them that profit-making enterprises are exploitive).
Those SJWs who have entered the private sector over the past decade or so have now progressed in their careers and attained positions where they have been able to implement their woke agenda, which has metastasized and been codified into the noxious concepts of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance). The PC orthodoxy that has prevailed on America’s colleges and universities for decades is the true origin of the current woke infestation of American businesses, military branches, and governments.
Since the Babylon Bee missed out on this satirical opportunity, perhaps its fertile minds could instead write about an absurd, farcical proposition whereby the federal government taxes plumbers, construction workers, and truck drivers in order to forgive the student debt racked up by SJWs while taking worthless courses like Kenyon’s Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality.
Nah. Not even the brilliant writers at the Babylon Bee could conjure up and satirize effectively about such a far-fetched and harebrained scheme.
Oh, wait!
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