Looking for more interesting college course selections? How about ENGL 4038: Queer Modernism, ETHN 3010: Queer Ethnic Studies, ENGL 3856: Queer Film or ENGL 4287 (1): Twentieth-century Anglo-American Lesbian Literature and Theory?

Queer Orthodoxy at the University of Colorado

Academic Marxism shows up clothed in the attire of many scholarly courses of study. In its most recent incarnation, academic Marxism makes an entrance as the sexy bedfellow of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

There, in diligent pursuit of scholarly material, co-director of LGBT studies and English professor Mark Winokur explored the Internet. But such a research tool as the computer is not without its ethical problems for Professor Winokur. With the peculiarly tortured conscience of a Marxist, Winokur worries about the political acts involved in using a computer to surf the ‘Net–of using such a tool for the ends of the revolution. In other words, does the revolutionary end justify the phallic means? Winokur wonders: “Can the Internet be presumed to be phallic in this fashion: simultaneously powerful and nonexistent? … I think that the answer depends on how one views the apparatus that connects one to the Internet: the monitor.” The monitor, according to Winokur, has “coercive qualities” and “is that part of the larger Internet apparatus that most immediately reminds one of now more traditional visual entertainment/information media. Governmental and corporate surveillance aside, I wonder whether, like other media, the monitor through which we view the world is always monitoring us.”

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