Greed creeps in from everywhere, and academic institutions are becoming more and more business-like. A match made in hell, since knowledge should not have a price-tag and should rather be an open door through which anyone - regardless of economic status - can attain a higher quality of life.

$30 is expensive for someone from North America, but most students outside the 'rich countries' would never have the money to pay that kind of money for an article. What does that imply for the 'free' flow of information and knowledge around the globe?

Eben

I agree that universities are becoming more corporation-like, and have been doing so since the '90s at least, under the political pressures of neoliberalism (a.k.a. free-market fundamentalism). However, let's be sure to distinguish between universities, whose teachers and researchers write and submit articles and books as part of their job description (i.e. for no additional pay beyond salary), and academic publishers, which produce and publish the journals and books. As demonstrated by the blog post above - and by the academic boycott of the publisher Elsevier - academic institutions have found themselves increasingly in tension and conflict with academic publishers. Many academics have joined that boycott, or otherwise embraced Open Access publishing, in opposition to the demonstrated greed of certain large and established academic publishers, whose policies and fees are increasingly seen by many academics to be obstructing rather than enabling the distribution and sharing of knowledge. The publishers, not the universities, are setting those exorbitant per-article costs.

(Not that universities aren't guilty of raising fees and tuition all the time, when free-tuition models of university education have historically provided education of just as good if not better quality ... but that's another story.)

I tried to find a description, in "your" language (so in a researched, reviewed article), of the fluidity of gender performances recognized by some queer communities: people who are butch in private, but look femme in public (the best description I can muster for the complicated, culturally-enforced drag act I perform that makes my faggy version of masculinity 'acceptable' in public), or who are privately femme, but butch for work (the queer straight man who proofreads essays for me, for instance). No dice, so I've given the anecdotal examples instead. 

But more interestingly, while I was searching, I did find a number of studies that recognized this fluidity, pinned it entirely on young people, and made it an issue of subversion, transgression, and deception (not that it ever isn't, but it just doesn't sit right to think it only is). The young people studied were largely "closeted"* gay, lesbian and trans kids, whose identities were seen as 'naturally' whatever kind of queer they were, and when their gender performances varied from that, then they were 'hiding' their queer identities. Seems strange to me because that variance is claimed by many as a genderqueer identity, and I wonder how much of what varies between public and private, or online and offline, among young people gets labelled as static moments in a dichotomy between right and wrong, real or fake, voice by adult researchers simply because we can get away with doing it. Which brings me back to what bugged me the first time I read van Veen's post.

*I hate that word.

I agree that van Veen's representation of youth is problematic, sometimes more caricature than characterization -- but I agree for different reasons, so thanks for highlighting the assumptions about gender and sexuality as fixed, in essential terms, to assumptions about youth and transgression. (Assumptions that Rob Latham's work is so reliably good for challenging.)

I found van Veen's representation of youth problematic in its caricature of contemporary music:

A pastiche of postmodern style has stagnated into over a decade of hipsterism that drags on & on without reinvention nor cultural innovation. Music regurgitates itself without push nor force. Meanwhile, this cultural merry-go-round—a kind of cyclism of rehashed styles—rotates around an absent pillar: that of youth displeasure and rebellion against the controlling interests of the nation-state.

To be blunt (and slightly unkind), this sounds to me like someone's just getting older: identical criticisms were earlier lodged against house, before that, against disco, and even (minus the po-mo lingo) against Roaring 'Twenties jazz (courtesy of Theodor Adorno). I'll admit I don't get the hipster thing, but (to paraphrase Noel Coward) today's cheap pop music is no less potent than it ever was. So what if the kids don't know how to dance to rock and roll? That's what Lady Gaga's for.

I can't say I get the hipster thing either; it just looks like a neutralizing appropriation of queer culture to me (and a complicated one at that: it's become increasingly difficcult to tell the difference between butch dykes in their 20s and teenage boys). But I guess that appropriation goes in cycles, too (e.g. your earrings are super gay). 

I do worry, when old people start taking themselves seriously, about the specific kinds of youth culture that get trivialized. Like the backlashes against Lady Gaga and disco (also: Twilight, which is awful in its own right, but gets attacked for the wrong reasons), it seems to have a lot to do with trivializing young people's femininity, expressing homophobia, and ultimately ignoring their political voices (however fluid and inconsistent -- as you've shown, a characteristic we all work to some extent) in a way that justifies the continued denial of political power (youth 18-25 may not be voting, but maybe they've just gotten used to 18 years of not being allowed to vote).

On a side note, I did otherwise really enjoy that post, particularly for the distinction between (if not a language for) citizenship on paper and citizenship in practice.