>To be fair, though, JB does just use a kind of reckless "they" in making these
>charges, as Hitch does. It's all the more contradictory for a student of
>Derrida, who is supposed to be about rigor and attention to detail. And it was
>most appalling to me b/c she would put everyone from Greider and you to Nancy
>Fraser into bed with Alan Sokal, which seems to me a bit much. The nuts at
>Syracuse and SUNY okay, but you? . . .
That was reckless of her, since it weakened her case. And even in my more orthodox days, I always took feminism and the queer movement very seriously. But I remember listening to her deliver that talk at the RM conference (on my birthday, December 7, 1996) and being very annoyed, asking myself, who the hell is she talking about? And then, in subsequent months, I had many conversations about the Sokal affair, narrowly, and the "merely cultural," more broadly, and discovered she had a serious point. Her critics made her argument for her.
Doug