Queer Specters of Intellectual Labor: Knowledge, Ethics, and Desire in the Poetics of Study

Abstract

In contemporary public and institutional discourse, the humanities are persistently compelled to justify their existence through appeals to utility, productivity, and ethical self-making. Yet the ideological and affective conditions that structure this relentless demand for justification remain critically underexamined. Approaching the “crisis” of the humanities from the vantage point of minoritized interdisciplines, such as gender, queer, and ethnic studies, this dissertation examines how the liberal university evaluates and disciplines intellectual labor by casting certain forms of knowledge as illegitimate, excessive, or driven by pathological desire. By defining the prevailing academic common sense as a "liberal metaintellectual consciousness," this project investigates the structural disavowals required to maintain the university's fantasy of objective, instrumental reason.Adopting an interdisciplinary framework that synthesizes continental philosophy, queer theory, black studies, and critical university studies, the project traces the ideological formations of academic value across public controversies and cultural texts. Chapter One examines the 2018 “Grievance Studies” affair as a paradigmatic scene through which minoritarian fields are cast as excessive, illegitimate, and contaminating forms of knowledge, situating the hoax within a longer culture-war genealogy that includes the 1996 Sokal Affair. Chapter Two turns from scandal to defense, arguing that contemporary justifications of the humanities often reproduce a liberal metaintellectual consciousness organized by utility, legitimacy, and moral repair, a structure this project names the “respectability politics of thought.” Chapter Three shifts from discourse to cultural form through a close reading of Candyman (1992), theorizing academic horror as a mode that exposes the racialized desire and epistemic violence embedded in the liberal will-to-know. Chapter Four develops the dissertation’s central alternative, a queer poetics of study, through Rose Red (2002), The Ring (2002), and Sinners (2025), reading horror’s figures of desire, opacity, and shared temporality as speculative resources for imagining intellectual life beyond mastery, productivity, and institutional justification. The dissertation concludes with a coda, “The Right to Study,” which reframes study as a collective claim to time, space, and resources for non-instrumental intellectual engagement. Grounded in a critique of Enlightenment liberalism and informed by theories of differential consciousness, this project argues that the value of the humanities should not solely be anchored in instrumental utility, performative efficacy or liberal narratives of moral redemption. Instead, it proposes a "queer poetics of study," an orientation that affirms the immanently meaningful, non-instrumental dimensions of intellectual life, including desire, curiosity, opacity, and shared temporality. Reframing intellectual labor through this speculative and affective lens, this study illuminates how reclaiming the unrespectable pleasures of study can challenge the neoliberal university's extractive demands, shifting the discourse away from institutional defense and toward the cultivation of a collective "right to study."