Drunk Theory
a rogue panel
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On Friday, February 7th, 2014 the MATCH Working Group held a special rogue panel on the night of the George Washington University English Graduate Student (GWU EGSA) "Post-ing: a Symposium on What Comes After," featuring the special guest speaker Roderick Ferguson.
Following a January discussion on Mixology and the role of alcohol in academic communities, MATCH sponsored a special Happy Hour at the Bayou bar and grill. Members prepared thoughts for a round of extemporaneous talks (or, rants) on topics including Manhattans, Vodka, Whisky, Wine, Beer, and Tonic.
Drinks in hand, the Reading Group discussed the pressures and reactions specific to race, gender, and sexuality. One speaker admitted that "Pink Drinks," such as Manhattans, open up men and butch women to comments by friends and co-workers. The pressure to perform specific roles at the bar and drink the right drinks can demand special behavior from academics that are looking to keep the conversation on their ideas and not on perceived incongruities in their gender or sexual identity.
Whereas sugary cocktails undermine the reception of men, women & trans academics, drinking Whisky or dark liquor (especially for women) is perceived as serious business.
For women that enjoy shots or Jack-n-Cokes, the consumption of whisky-based drinks can be seen as an attempt to imitate their male colleagues and appear tough. Even among intellectuals who would disclaim sexist division of liquors, comments such as "woah, is that scotch?" are far too common and can undermine the naturalization of women at bars and happy hours among their male and older colleagues.
The demands on what drinks are appropriate for serious academics all work on the prior expectation that graduate students and junior faculty will need to be drinking and attending happy-hours, receptions, or after-hour events at bars if they are going to accomplish the necessary networking to be successful.
For many businesses, including the University, drinking can serve as an attractive Tonic that relaxes tensions and helps build community. This causes difficulty for people who cannot drink alcohol, including those who abstain because of health or religious reasons.
Many serious discussions, plans and connections are made not on the conference or board-room floor but at the pub after the official event has concluded. Those who want to be included in these events are tacitly demanded to find ways to cope at bars or to insist on alternative meeting places, accommodations that often are met with personal or group resistance.
Without even setting foot into a bar or putting a drink to our lips, alcohol still can direct how we act and how we are perceived. Alcohol ad campaigns such as the sexy cyborg that long promoted Svedka Vodka, continue to associate drinking with chauvinistic relations to women.
The effect of this is to maintain environments of association in bars and conference wine-hours that place women in the position of sexual objects. After hour drinks at a conference can build up tensions that serve to objectify women that have worked all day to substantiate themselves as critical thinkers and formidable colleagues.
Granted that eroticism need not deflate a woman's power of being, but images like those from Svedka's cyborg ad campaigns set impossible standards of embodiment and performance. The curvy cyborg's stalk of a waist, broad hips and bare breasts train the eye of consumers to look for these features in the presence of vodka. This builds up desire for the drink by working on the promise of sex, but has the instrumental effect on the objectified women it uses to sell its product.
The association between intellectual congress, sex & alcohol is hardly a recent development, whatever the futuristic cyborgs suggest. Wine in particular has fueled both the 4th century BC Symposium of Plato and its later Commentary by Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century.
Even without contemporary ad campaigns, treatises on eroticism and drunken stories about the lascivious Pan has perpetuated alcohol's association with sex for millennia. Often following in Dionysus's train, Pan leads his followers to other plains of thought and into the bedroom through the gifts of the vine.
The work of Pan's grape magic has helped form the school system that we have inherited, with its long tradition of sensual exchanges (of the mind and body). From the apprentices of Socrates to boys at boarding school, education's peculiar power games owe a lot to a system deeply invested in love and drink.
MATCH's critical engagement with Drunk Theory hardly diminishes our enjoyment of drink, although it does include a taste of its many bitter notes. Perhaps it is best to say that a glass of Beer has a great deal of power in the academy; and with that power flows many dangers as well as strengths.
Our work and our community would not be what it is without the tightening of bonds and relaxing of tongues that come at the pub house. As the jury glasses around the table testified, a theory working group convenes as the meeting of many full minds and full bodied drinks. However we may judge or liberate the spirits of the academy, we are all implicated in process and outcomes of Drunk Theory.
On Friday, February 7th, 2014 the MATCH Working Group held a special rogue panel on the night of the George Washington University English Graduate Student (GWU EGSA) "Post-ing: a Symposium on What Comes After," featuring the special guest speaker Roderick Ferguson.
Following a January discussion on Mixology and the role of alcohol in academic communities, MATCH sponsored a special Happy Hour at the Bayou bar and grill. Members prepared thoughts for a round of extemporaneous talks (or, rants) on topics including Manhattans, Vodka, Whisky, Wine, Beer, and Tonic.
Drinks in hand, the Reading Group discussed the pressures and reactions specific to race, gender, and sexuality. One speaker admitted that "Pink Drinks," such as Manhattans, open up men and butch women to comments by friends and co-workers. The pressure to perform specific roles at the bar and drink the right drinks can demand special behavior from academics that are looking to keep the conversation on their ideas and not on perceived incongruities in their gender or sexual identity.
==================<( )>===================
==================<( )>===================
Whereas sugary cocktails undermine the reception of men, women & trans academics, drinking Whisky or dark liquor (especially for women) is perceived as serious business.
For women that enjoy shots or Jack-n-Cokes, the consumption of whisky-based drinks can be seen as an attempt to imitate their male colleagues and appear tough. Even among intellectuals who would disclaim sexist division of liquors, comments such as "woah, is that scotch?" are far too common and can undermine the naturalization of women at bars and happy hours among their male and older colleagues.
==================<( )>===================
==================<( )>===================
The demands on what drinks are appropriate for serious academics all work on the prior expectation that graduate students and junior faculty will need to be drinking and attending happy-hours, receptions, or after-hour events at bars if they are going to accomplish the necessary networking to be successful.
For many businesses, including the University, drinking can serve as an attractive Tonic that relaxes tensions and helps build community. This causes difficulty for people who cannot drink alcohol, including those who abstain because of health or religious reasons.
Many serious discussions, plans and connections are made not on the conference or board-room floor but at the pub after the official event has concluded. Those who want to be included in these events are tacitly demanded to find ways to cope at bars or to insist on alternative meeting places, accommodations that often are met with personal or group resistance.
==================<( )>===================
==================<( )>===================
Without even setting foot into a bar or putting a drink to our lips, alcohol still can direct how we act and how we are perceived. Alcohol ad campaigns such as the sexy cyborg that long promoted Svedka Vodka, continue to associate drinking with chauvinistic relations to women.
The effect of this is to maintain environments of association in bars and conference wine-hours that place women in the position of sexual objects. After hour drinks at a conference can build up tensions that serve to objectify women that have worked all day to substantiate themselves as critical thinkers and formidable colleagues.
Granted that eroticism need not deflate a woman's power of being, but images like those from Svedka's cyborg ad campaigns set impossible standards of embodiment and performance. The curvy cyborg's stalk of a waist, broad hips and bare breasts train the eye of consumers to look for these features in the presence of vodka. This builds up desire for the drink by working on the promise of sex, but has the instrumental effect on the objectified women it uses to sell its product.
==================<( )>===================
==================<( )>===================
The association between intellectual congress, sex & alcohol is hardly a recent development, whatever the futuristic cyborgs suggest. Wine in particular has fueled both the 4th century BC Symposium of Plato and its later Commentary by Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century.
Even without contemporary ad campaigns, treatises on eroticism and drunken stories about the lascivious Pan has perpetuated alcohol's association with sex for millennia. Often following in Dionysus's train, Pan leads his followers to other plains of thought and into the bedroom through the gifts of the vine.
The work of Pan's grape magic has helped form the school system that we have inherited, with its long tradition of sensual exchanges (of the mind and body). From the apprentices of Socrates to boys at boarding school, education's peculiar power games owe a lot to a system deeply invested in love and drink.
==================<( )>===================
==================<( )>===================
MATCH's critical engagement with Drunk Theory hardly diminishes our enjoyment of drink, although it does include a taste of its many bitter notes. Perhaps it is best to say that a glass of Beer has a great deal of power in the academy; and with that power flows many dangers as well as strengths.
Our work and our community would not be what it is without the tightening of bonds and relaxing of tongues that come at the pub house. As the jury glasses around the table testified, a theory working group convenes as the meeting of many full minds and full bodied drinks. However we may judge or liberate the spirits of the academy, we are all implicated in process and outcomes of Drunk Theory.
