Why professors of cultural studies are as useless as tits on a bull. Gillard racist for kissing a white baby! #ausvotes

What do you say? Every time I hear somebody from the universities go on about how they are under funded boo hoo hoo, I think about this kind of asinine drivel and conclude that they are in fact over funded if they have money to waste on this kind of pseudo-academic rubbish. From Andrew Bolt:   Suvendrini Perera, associate professor of cultural studies at Curtin University, is alarmed that Julia Gillard kissed a white baby: The day after the election announcement, several newspapers featured front-page photos of the Prime Minister, garbed all in white, and her (male) deputy - each bearing an exceptionally robust looking, if slightly bemused, white infant in their arms. If the central issue of the election is population, these images of the - reconstructed and thoroughly contemporary - white heterosexual family underscore that the lowering of the birth rate is off the agenda… The ideal of the remade white heterosexual Australian family represented by Gillard and Wayne Swan at a baby welcome ceremony reaffirms the way in which the reproduction of the population is inextricably bound up with the reproduction of an established political and social order. The image stages an unspoken but unmistakeable return to the defining characteristic of Australia as a nation-state built on whiteness, and dedicated to the reproduction of the racial order established at Federation. Within this order, non-white bodies may be present, and even attain positions of relative power and prominence; however, their presence is one that must remain subject to continuing containment, subordination or assimilation… Make no mistake: there is a deep internal consistency to the population ‘’debate’’. Beneath the facade of a thoroughly modern, optimistic and relentlessly ‘’forward-moving’’ Prime Minister is a campaign that returns us to the ‘’race election’’ threatened by John Howard in the 1990s. Can Australia move forward from the exclusionary politics of race? Certainly not with a Prime Minister whose ‘’right kind of migrant’’ is a reproduction of her own image. Some people should really get over themselves. [And get out more?] Has she considered that Gillard simply kissed whatever baby was pushed at her, and to refuse a kiss to a white one - as Perera seems to demand - might have seemed not just racist, but a sign of madness? Oh, and it hardly needs saying, but this article appeared in The Age. Foucault is quoted, which is always a giveaway.

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