Those wacky visual gender theorists!

An abundance of death-fetishry hangs ready in the mother’s wardrobe: plastic dry cleaning sheaths, fur trims on coats, shoes and heels, belts, buckles, and bindings, leather, polyester, silk and lace. Each implement embodies a distinct quality of the corpse—each is a synecdoche, which through play, serves to strengthen the attraction to the absent parent’s death. By surrounding the child with dead skins, he is able to return to the inorganic Other while remaining alive himself. The instinctual craving for transmortality—that ability by the living to touch and return from death—pulls the child toward the death-fetish.

--John Corso

This is the kind of writing which gives the Modern Language Association a bad name, and which makes the jobs of the writers of the Wall Street Journal so easy every December. Just take one sentence: "By surrounding the child with dead skins, he is able to return to the inorganic Other while remaining alive himself." Who is doing the surrounding here? The child himself? As for content, this is little more than nodding syncretism: "synechdoche," "play," "death-fetish," etc. Neither tropological nor Derridean nor Freudian approaches make sense or are compatible here, yet they are all invoked practically in the same sentence.

I thank the LORD that I never wrote this kind of thing during graduate school, and that I have since learned other ways to write.