Real Time Fetus

So it's time for another true story from the Manion Files. This one comes from when I was in grad school. I was in a technical writing masters program at Northeastern University. I wasn't there so much out of a love of academia, but more because to get a job in tech I needed to get some credibility. The masters seemed like the shortest path.

Anyway, there was a lot of friction between the tech writing masters students and the traditional English major students. They viewed us as mercenary hacks (pretty perceptive of them, really), selling out the beauty of language for a few dollars. We viewed them as pretentious snobs out of their minds with jealousy over the fact that we had actual job offers that didn't involve the phrase "Let me tell you about our specials today."

Because the tech writing masters was still nominally an English degree, we had to take a lot of critical theory courses. I hate critical theory. I hate critical theory like I hate spiders. "But Lance, what is critical theory?" you ask. It's the idea that books aren't really about what they say they're about.

I hate critical theory like I hate spiders.

For example, Feminist Critical Theory would tell you that "Pride and Prejudice" is not about a woman who meets a snobby guy, but eventually they fall in love. FCT would tell you that it's really about a woman trapped in a patriarchal hegemony, who attempts to subvert the existing paradigm, but is eventually subsumed by the dominant power structure. Or something. From there it gets kind of complicated. A lot of it is really just intellectual whacking off. But a lot of academics love it.

Whenever I suggested that maybe Jane Austen wrote "Pride and Prejudice" because she thought it was a good story, and might make her a couple of bucks, I was told that I "...just didn't get it."

Generally, the salient points of any critical theory book can be boiled down to a few pages. And yet they take up hundreds of pages, and are written in light bendingly dense prose. The whole thing strikes me as incredibly self serving. To give you an idea, our main text was "Modest-
Witness@Second-Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" by Donna Harraway.

That's the real title. I didn't change a thing. Now I was an English major in college. I LOVE to read. And this book made me want to put my own eyes out.

So I did what I could to have fun with it. Eventually we were told we'd have to do presentations on selected essays. I chose "Real Time Fetus" by Raina Rapp. The professor went through the class and asked each of us why we chose the essay that we did. I responded that I chose the paper because "Real Time Fetus" because it sounded like an awesome name for a punk band.

Strangely, I was the only one who found this endlessly hilarious.

For those of you who care, the thesis of the essay was that sonogram imaging technology reduces women to a vessel that carries the fetus around so we can look at it. The sonogram makes the woman "transparent" and marginalizes her role in the pregnancy. See? Two sentences. Of course, it took the original author 40 pages to get there. That's why I'm a tech
writer, and she's not.

It really got ugly when I Photoshopped little fetal mohawks onto my visual aids. I think the professor passed me just so she'd never have to see me again.

LM