Burchill goes ballistic ...

[Grant Lee]

As a naive and impressionable kiddie in my early 20s, I was a big fan of
Julie Burchill. That is before, 1989 or thereabouts, when she renounced her
own peculiar brand of Marxism-Leninism. That said, I was always uneasy about
the strong undercurrents of racism, especially against Arabs (which flowed
naturally from her fetishisation of Jews), her (now ironic) homophobia, her
obsessive anti-Americanism, to name but a few of her pathologies.

In retrospect, it seems to me that her _whole_ career has really been about
identity politics (including the "marxism" apparently inherited from her
parents and later discarded). And as she undergone one crisis after another
in her own identity, she has steadily painted herself into a corner. Now I
would simply ask: in _her_ own terms, who does Burchill represent? "English
working class conservative bisexual women" perhaps? In _her_ own terms,
therefore, Burchill is part of a tiny minority who should simply be
disregarded.