Thanks sweetie, but considering most of the responses I've got I think I'll go and discuss this somewhere where people behave like adults. I can't see why I should have to spend all my time explaining things to bigots instead of discussing perfectly valid issues, and quite frankly I've been putting up with enough homophobia recently not to feel the need to bother. The academic communities I've been in aren't perfect, they have their fair share of prejudice, but nothing compared to this. If my university were like this, I wouldn't have been allowed to submit several of my essays (for example on lesbian encoding in Stein and Woolf), and I would certainly be stumped when it comes to the topics I am considering for research after this degree. Thankfully they live in this century and treat queer theory as seriously as it deserves, so that instead of having to spend half my essays explaining that yes, these writers really were queer, and no, that doesn't invalidate their work, and no, my sexual orientation is none of your business, I can actually discuss the serious issues in the texts.
Tolkien fans are obviously a pretty conservative bunch, or at least the ones here.
And yes, there's nothing like an endless discussion of balrog wings to bore me off the board! Why on earth are people so obsessed with them? Did come up with a theory or two, but still, I've never seen anything so boringly pernickety in my life. I reckon that if I actually did start a thread on concepts of femininity and fertility in LotR, I'd have almost the same trouble getting a real reply. Anyway, it's a pretty obvious subject, someone will have written on it somewhere; I'll just check the uni library when I get back home.
(Save yourself the snarky replies, dear bigots, I'm not coming back to read them.)
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