Let me do a bit of "both sides-ing"

First, a spectacularly embarrassing look for the top Fox News/MAGA crowd:

And now for the other side of the culture wars.  I have mentioned Prof Sandy O'Sullivan before, who I don't follow on Twitter, but someone else I follow does, hence I keep seeing their tweets.  And Twitter keeps suggesting I should follow "them".

"Them" because this is the byline:

Challenging gender binaries is anti-colonial work. Aboriginal trans/non-binary/queer/kin & Professor of Indigenous Studies @Macquarie_U   ARC Future Fellow  

Now, I like to think I'm pretty tolerant of universities having humanities schools which can have characters stuck in esoteric areas of research that interest few.   I mean, I'm pretty interested in philosophy as a field, and a lot of that has been spinning its wheels and going nowhere for some time. 

But boy (or "non binary"), I'm pretty sure that if ever you want feelings of "what an extraordinary sheltered workshop and mutual admiration society of academia these people have built for themselves" to feel fully justified, I strongly recommend reading their twitter feed.   

This week, for example, Sandy keep posting tweets about the "Digital Intimacies" conference being held at Macquarie.  I can give you a taste:

 

You get the idea?   Sorry, I found it hard to stop, because nearly every tweet seemed to be asking for ridicule for being such obvious examples of the type of academic endeavour that seems so - what's the word? - introverted? and self serving, mainly in the interests of just providing jobs for the boys (and girls and non binaries.)  

And, I should add, it's not that there aren't areas of interest to them that are worth studying, if you want to see some practical changes, like the safety of indigenous sex workers, or something.  But it's the invention of the terminology which really grates, and gives the strong suspicion that mostly, it's just about writing papers for each other to swoon over.  (Or in some cases, bitch about for not including the "non binary" adequately.)   A bit like blockchain advocates at RMIT!

Update:  another subject covered at the mini conference -