Imperial Reproductive Futures (Academic Gobbledygook?)

One of my longstanding blog readers recently sent me something that I felt worth sharing with my readership of six and three quarter souls. What you'll see below is the text from a poster that appeared on a university bulletin board. I assume that it, like most things that appear on bulletin boards, was intended to inform the public about an upcoming event. Rarely have I ever read something so incomprehensible, and this includes posters written in foreign languages!

Enough talk! Why don't you take a look and form your own opinion....

The Department of English and Cultural Studies and the Graduate Program in Gender Studies and Feminist Research are pleased to present:

Cecily Devereux, Professor
Department of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta

"Reproduction Fetishism:  Salome, The Maternal Body and Early Twentieth-Century Erotic Dance"

Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 2:30 PM
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Cecily Devereux’s work engages broadly with questions of gender, race, and mobility in the late years of the long nineteenth century of British imperial expansion, focusing primarily on popular cultural texts that circulate across the Canadian context, and on the ways in which those texts index particular histories of the performance of femininity and the place of the female body in social space.

This paper focuses on a pivotal moment in the history of the erotic dance business—Canadian-born dancer Maud Allan’s sensational performance of “The Vision of Salome” in the first decade of the twentieth century—tracing the ways in which this dance, in particular, stages the white maternal body as it is valued in the context of empire’s commerce in imperial reproductive futures.


Me again...this presentation might be the most interesting talk ever given in the history of imperial reproductive futures, but sadly no one knows what imperial reproductive futures are. My best guess is that it involves the likelihood of getting pregnant if you're a dancer who eats margarine. The dear reader who sent me this information summed things up more succinctly: 

I think "Pole Dancing in Victorian England" may have got more to the point.

That headline might have put my bum in a lecture hall seat. As it stands, I won't be sitting because I have no idea, as in zero clue, what this presentation is about thanks to a few paragraphs of textbook-worthy academic gobbledygook. When academics talk only to other academics, the world of 'street people' like me is neither propelled nor nudged forward. The future is not enhanced (imperial reproductives not withstanding).