Heteronormativity Is Hot Right Now

As the fall semester gets under way, we must acclimate ourselves to the most important ritual of graduate-student life: the proclamation of our "interests." For those of you not in graduate school, this event occurs at the beginning of every seminar: We all introduce ourselves and make some statement about what we are grooming ourselves to study, or our "interests."

I use quotation marks because these interests are not really interests-at least not in the way that one is interested in music, basketball, or girls. Rather, these are academic formulations of the most careful and artificial sort. One can declare an interest in the rhetoric of suburban bike trails and their relation to the death of the novel, and nobody would flinch or giggle. On the contrary, most of us would nod as if we all knew about scholars doing bike-trail studies.

I know those outside academe think this stuff is pretentious, but I find the practice charming, even though I perhaps use that adjective with a sneer. I can't help sensing that professors get sadistic pleasure out of watching students grasp for interests in an attempt to impress. After all, the students are all too aware of their inexperience, and will do their best to play down their anxiety.

For those of you who are just entering graduate school, or who are in need of a new graduate-school beginning, I have some advice. I don't want you to make the same mistakes I did during my first "interests" session, when I explained that I was interested in the literature of the "margins." The professor gave me a horrified look and suggested that I actually meant American ethnic literature or something like that-it was a euphemism of my euphemism. I also made a joke that piggybacked on three previous students' jokes. I didn't know that four variations of the same joke marked the official point of diminishing returns. (If I remember right, the joke stemmed from someone's interest in institutional monogamy and its polygamous subconscious; three of us followed up with jokes about being in a monogamous relationship.)

So for those of you who are not quite sure what you are interested in, here are some guidelines. (If you are not in a humanities or liberal-arts graduate program, feel free to use this as a template. You can substitute words or phrases like "economic game theory" and "macrogenetics" for any of mine.)

1. Never deviate from introducing your interests with the phrase "I am interested in . ," because this is what you are interested in. Really. You are interested in these things because they are interesting. Especially interesting is whatever your last long paper was about.
   
2. Know your theoretical buzzwords, because you will have to use at least two of them. Here is a crib sheet of recent theoretical terms: liminal, heteronormativity, empire, postempire, trauma, narratography, post-new formalism, posthuman, specism, fecism, culturality, hybridity, hybridism, Lacanimal, bestiality, bestialism, bestialology, postbestiality, and so on. You get the point, but you will notice from those terms that the new hot thing is anything about animals and humans. Our field is evolving with such grace.
   
3. Most of the terms, especially if they end in "ism," "ity," or "ology," can be plural, and you might score extra points with that innovation. This is especially true of "sexualities." Never, ever use "sexuality," because you will be guilty of not acknowledging just how plural the concept is. Do you know how many heteronormativities there are? Probably like seven, maybe eight if you add the liminal space between heteronormativities and homonormativities.
   
4. Take a group of common things or states, like dandelions, dead eyes, hugs, or hubcaps, and add "the rhetoric of" before it. If you prefer the singular, add "studies" after it. (Examples: "the rhetoric of thunderstorms" or "boredom studies.")
   
5. Take two totally unrelated concepts, like bookbinding and waterboarding, and add "the intersections of" before them. This works really well for sexualities: "the intersections between monuments and masculinity" or "the intersections between transgender and Trans Ams." If you can relate two unrelated concepts, you'll get a lot of thoughtful nods, which is your goal.
   
6. You can never go wrong with "shame." Think about it: "I am interested in shame." "Shame studies," "medieval religious shame," "postwar shame." Trust me, shame always works. It sounds just right if you say it aloud. It works well with sexualities. It describes every age other than our own, and it describes every belief system other than our own, and it allows us to look down upon everyone being shamed and theorize over their shame. It's Foucaultian, it's Freudian, it's Zizekian, it's even Agambenian. It's shame.
   
7. Try to sit at one end of the room, so you can go either last or first. Go first and you can set the standard for all other interests. Last, and you can refer back to all other proclaimed interests and combine them with the strategy of No. 5. That, or you can borrow a good interest from someone else and just add "sexualities."
   
8. Never sacrifice originality and erudition for clarity.
   
9. Find out what was popular in the field 10 or 15 years ago, so that you can avoid making the mistake of saying you are interested in it. As a bonus, if someone says something like "antitheatricality" or "metanarrative," you can whisper to your neighbor that nobody is doing that anymore. However, do not whisper that to your neighbor if the topic is race, class, or gender.
   
10. Talk longer than you should. Don't be satisfied with just one "intersections of." Use two. Then explain them and how they pertain to the birth of the prose poem. You should always mention a previous professor you worked with from your undergraduate college while you are talking, unless you went to Brigham Young University, as I did. Never mention Brigham Young or any other religious institution you may have happily attended. You might as well say, "I am naïve, conformist, unthinking, racist, sexist, truthist, Godist, and simple-minded," because that will be the class's, and sometimes the professor's, eager assumption.

Following those 10 rules will dispel all anxiety. Let me end by demonstrating a proper interest statement, one that you can readily use if needed:

I'm James, I'm a second-year in the Ph.D. program, and I am interested in the intersections between vertebrate masculinity and the rhetoric of American monuments, particularly as it relates to T'tanka, the buffalo, and the postbestial tendencies of American empire. Before I came here, I was working on a project at the University of Kansas with George Crabtree in which we located all the moments in captivity narratives when buffaloes came in contact with makeshift American monuments, and I hope to continue studying those hybridities, or contact zones, within the fiction(s) of the 19th centur(ies). I also study shame.

- James S. Lambert is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Iowa
q.nathan sanders
associate professor and graduate program director
department of ecology & evolutionary biology
university of tennessee
knoxville, tn 37996
q.my niece

[The pup thinks a person who has no shame cannot possibly study shame.]