Today

Something really annoying just happened.

Picture the scene: I am settling into a seat in Conference Auditorium 2 for a lecture on eighteenth-century literature. I am alone; there is nobody around me to whom I can quietly rant/at least gesticulate. Behind me are two students, a man and a woman, bitching about all the reading they have to do. Then THIS happens:

She: God, and we have to read Mansfield Park this week.
He: Ugh, that's just a load of feminist crap.
She: Mansfield Park is not feminist!
He: It's written by a woman, and it's shit. [she giggles] That's feminist.
[LIZ DIES]

Obviously I was in no position to question this self-assured DICK CHEESE because the lecture started (it turned out to be on landscape and nature again - why is it that whenever I actually turn up it's to the boring ones?). Anyway, I was totally disinterested, and there was no way for me to conveniently leave since I was in the middle of the row, so I started Mansfield Park. Which so far has yet to be feminist or "feminist."

The hour before this lecture was my eighteenth-century lit seminar, in which I had to give a presentation on James Thomson, Anne Finch and Mary Leapor's nature poetry. I spent most of it talking about the gender personifications in Thomson's 'Spring' - how the masculinised aspects of nature are imperial, powerful and, at one point, literally penetrative, and how the feminised aspects of nature are smiling and willing, how gales only 'sigh', and how feminised Nature's assets are separated into desirable and not desirable (there's a line referring to the 'moist Meadow' and the 'wither'd Hill'). After I'd spoken my tutor said something along the lines of 'that's a really interesting point; I've read this poem hundreds of times and I'd never realised that. I'll never be able to read that moist line again!' I mean, I recognise that of course not everyone has the same research interests as me in this field, but I'd always assumed gender was pretty rudimentary; my tutors in the past have never flinched to bring it up, and I've certainly never been in a situation before where my observations about what a text says about gender (or that a text says something about gender) have been met with such surprise.  Then I was thinking about my previous tutors and I realised that the majority of them have been feminists, so maybe I've just been super-privileged until this point. But still. Weird. She's working in an institution whose English exam papers and essay questions always, always include a gender question.

Finally, and less angrily (although I will likely get angry about this when the time comes) I discovered this morning that Germaine Greer is giving a public lecture in a fortnight at Leeds Met. I'm pretty excited; I hate her so much. I mean, I've not studied her works or the period so I have only a dim idea of what she did for second wave in the seventies; all I know about her really is what she's said when wheeled out onto Newsnight Review and what other feminists have said about her attitudes towards more contemporary feminist concerns. From this I have deduced that she is a belligerent, sanctimonious, self-serving twit of a transphobe. Corin feels very similarly, although I haven't asked her what she knows of Greer so please don't anyone assume she's as ignorant as me. We're both really looking forward to it. It'll be good to actually experience some of her ideas first-hand - either I'll end up with fewer things to be angry about or my anger with her will gain something resembling authenticity. Woo!