The Birthplace of Woke: Identity Studies in Academia – The American Spectator

In 1983, having spent four years earning a PhD in English, I instantly turned down the reasonably secure entry-level faculty position my alma mater offered me and chose instead to sign up for that most financially insecure of all professions: freelance literary journalist. Why? Partly because it had taken me that long to face the fact that I just wasn’t the academic type. And partly because I saw that the kind of jargon-heavy approaches that were taking over America’s English departments — from politics-driven “feminist criticism” to pretentious postmodern “deconstruction,” straight out of France by way of Yale University — had nothing whatsoever to do with my own reasons for wanting to spend my life reading and writing about books.

In the years that followed, I often found myself sighing with relief at my narrow escape from the ivory tower. For, as time went by, the humanities fell increasingly under the thumb of leftist radicals who were preoccupied with the phenomenon of social and cultural power, who inflexibly depicted Westerners (Americans especially) as imperialist oppressors and non-Westerners as victims, who replaced real liberal education (that is, the development of critical thinking) with outright Marxist indoctrination, and who even played the tiresome game of questioning reality itself. In the new humanities disciplines, the focus was more and more on identity groups — notably women, blacks, Latinos, and “queers” — who, cast in the role of perennial underdogs, became the subjects of grievance studies whose practitioners didn’t perform potentially useful scholarly research into those groups’ histories and cultures but instead endlessly pondered, professed, and protested their purported oppression. 

In my 2012 book The Victims’ Revolution (TVR) — in preparation for which I interviewed some of the leading figures of this movement, sat in on college classes, read shelves full of turgid tomes, and attended academic conferences in cities ranging from Berlin to Baton Rouge to Berkeley — I provided an overview of several of these “identity studies.” I told the story of women’s studies, one of whose founding figures, the Marxist writer Betty Friedan, depicted the 1950s suburban American kitchen (which at that time was nothing less than a dreamscape for most women around the world) as a gulag; black studies, which was founded by race hustlers, many of them semiliterate thugs, after university administrators surrendered to violent rioters (including Black Panthers); and queer studies, which has nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality but is, rather, in the words of queer academic David M. Halperin, a celebration of “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” — or, more correctly, a self-celebration by privileged professors who, while being viewed as ornaments of the educational establishment, pretend to be at odds with the established order. (As if to prove this fact, the founding mother of queer studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, was a monogamous, heterosexual Jewish housewife who spent her career holding elite faculty positions at, in turn, the University of California, Berkeley; Dartmouth College; Duke University; and the City University of New York.)

TVR has just been issued in paperback with a new foreword by the UK Spectator’s Douglas Murray and a new introduction in which I discuss some of the ways in which these identity studies’ guiding dogmas have, since the book’s original publication, spread out into society at large. For example, the abominations known as critical race theory and “anti-racism,” which in recent years have infected primary school classrooms and corporate boardrooms alike, had their genesis in black studies; the widespread demonization of men — including the stereotype of all men as rapists, which dominated the #MeToo movement at its most extreme — is rooted in women’s studies; and the sheer fantasies that make up transgender ideology — and that have also become an orthodoxy in any number of established institutions — can be traced directly to the reality-defying notions of gender identity that are preached in the classrooms of queer studies.

Unfortunately, when writing this new introduction, I wasn’t able to retrace my steps and see how the landscape has changed; that would’ve been a prohibitively expensive proposition, and even in the waning days of the pandemic, it would’ve been exceedingly tricky in terms of travel. But thanks in large part to that same pandemic, the last few years have resulted in a small archive of online lectures, discussions, and conference sessions that provide a pretty clear picture of what’s happened to identity studies since I was researching TVR all those years ago. Herewith, a brief report.

In TVR, I observed that women’s studies, the largest of all the identity studies (which often goes by women’s and gender studies), had over the years become increasingly preoccupied with other identity categories, race above all. That this remains the case was made instantly clear by the poster for last November’s annual conference of the National Women’s Studies Association, which took as its theme “Killing Rage: Resistance on the Other Side of Freedom”; drawn in a kind of pseudo-primitive African style, the poster depicted two black women in African-looking garb. The theme of the forthcoming October 2023 conference is “A Luta Continua/The Struggle Continues: Resistance, Resilience, Resurgence.” A luta continua, as it happens, was the founding motto of Mozambique’s Frelimo party, whose war for independence from Portugal (1964–75) enjoyed the support of both China and the Soviet Union. (One wonders how many of the white feminists who founded women’s studies ever imagined that their discipline, which at its birth was preoccupied with liberating middle-class housewives from their dreaded kitchens, would end up in the hands of tenured women who, living in leafy American college towns, get a kick out of the illusion that their jargon-drenched scribblings have some connection to mid-twentieth-century communist revolutions in Africa.)

As for queer studies — whose first practitioners legitimized their Marxist enterprise by pretending that the discipline was centered on the study of homosexual life and culture — it has less to do with gay men and lesbians than ever before: to peruse the titles of the papers delivered at last year’s Queer History Conference at San Francisco State University is to encounter one opus after another on transgenderism, “female sexuality,” “queers of color,” or — especially — “queer” life south of the border. Moreover, given that in the last few years many primary school teachers have been introducing their pupils to gender fluidity and storytellers in full drag regalia, it’s not surprising that one of the conference sessions was entirely devoid to the apparently noble effort “to make queer histories more visible” in “K–12” spaces. Also — and I may be wrong here — the description of another session, “Regulating Sex Between Men and Boys in the Anglophone World, 1840s-1910s,” certainly makes it sound as if the participants were engaged in a defense of pedophilia.

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As part of my research for TVR, I attended a 2011 presentation at a queer studies conference in Berlin by Susan Stryker, a star transgender professor then teaching at Indiana University who told us that one welcome, if imperfect, solution to the problem of US “neoliberalism” would be a pragmatic alliance between the intellectual Left and the “fascist” Tea Party movement. As I stated in TVR, Stryker plainly didn’t grasp what it meant to stand in a lecture hall on the Unter den Linden, a short distance from the Brandenburg Gate, and speak blithely about allying with fascists. Appearing a few months ago at a “queer history” conference in Bergen, Norway, Stryker, now “Professor Emerita” at the University of Arizona, was still at war with “neofascists” — who, in the 1970s, we were told, sparked local resistance by turning slum housing and community facilities in the “old trans sex work ghetto” in San Francisco’s Tenderloin into upmarket apartments.

Stryker described the Tenderloin of that era as a “carceral” environment — a “place of confinement for criminalized populations.” In Bergen, just as in Berlin, Stryker — who proceeded to rail against police and prisons generally — seemed deaf to context: whereas many of the misfits who found a home in the Tenderloin half a century ago doubtless saw it not as a penitentiary but as a place of freedom, Stryker was speaking a short distance from the Skrekkens…