Queer Matters: A Response to Robert Fulford

What are we to make of robert fulford’s attack on Jes Battis? It would, of course, be easy to point out the simple mean-mindedness of an attack on a junior scholar who has no access to the sorts of forum that are Fulford’s bread and butter. It would be easy to point to Fulford’s manipulation of basic facts, such as making it seem that Battis is living the high life on government largesse when, in fact, the scholarship money available to phd students barely covers basic living expenses. It would be equally easy to point to the rhetorical trickery by which Fulford makes Battis’s use of his salary as a postdoctoral fellow into a near accusation of malfeasance with government money.

These are all feasible strategies for a possible response to Fulford on the rhetorical level. The problem is that, while perhaps emotionally satisfying as a form of riposte, they do little to get at the basic problem behind this kind of journalism. Why are people so happy to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to criticism of the arts and humanities, of cultural studies, and of queer studies of any ilk? Why are they so reluctant, at the same time, to attack the sciences? I suppose the latter is primarily a perception of benefit, a lingering discourse that suggests that the “ordinary person” may somehow receive some sort of direct or indirect profit from scientific research. This suggests something of a lack of familiarity with the kinds of projects funded by nserc, perhaps because the language of the sciences is frequently so obtuse to non-scientists that many people haven’t the foggiest idea what is being funded. Although, having gone to nserc’s website, I must say I found it disturbing how little basic science is being funded and how much funding is dedicated to projects that, not to put too fine a point on it, are primarily about improving corporate profits.

So perhaps one of the reasons that sshrc and humanities topics are so vulnerable to these sorts of attacks is that they are readily accessible, rather than the opposite. After all, even the most obscure title in the humanities can hardly live up to anything involving “estra-1,2,3,5(10)-triene-3,16α,17β-triol.” Then again, I suppose most people don’t spend a lot of time trolling nserc’s website or surely we would have heard Fulford or a counterpart objecting to spending public money on something like “Use of deheated yellow mustard to control E.coli 0157:H7 in uncooked fermented sausages and dry cured ham” (which, by the by, received $187,300 over three years).¹ It certainly seems that we live in an era where public discourse, at least in the kinds of newspapers for which Fulford writes, expects the humanities to be accessible to laypeople in a way in which science, medicine, engineering, and even business are not. Specialized vocabulary is permissible in those areas but is apparently loathsome when researchers are looking at culture.

My visit to the nserc website also reminded me strongly of the university in Australia where I did my phd, which each year held a half-day research showcase in which four carefully chosen doctoral candidates were allowed fifteen minutes apiece to present their research to the town’s celebrities. However, the only students allowed to apply for this event were those in science, health studies, computer science, and food science; the preferred topics were thus things like the mechanics of the strapless bra and ways of improving the tomato sauce on mass-produced meat pies (this was Australia, after all). By comparison, my research, which looked at the conditions which make it possible for lesbian and gay people in Canada to feel that they belong to the nation, was deemed unimportant. So was all research from either the Faculty of Arts or the Faculty of Creative Arts. So was research in the social sciences, including work by a colleague of mine who was looking at depression and suicide amongst Australia’s Vietnam...