Against The Obscuring Orthodoxies

“Recently, I attended a panel at a dance studies conference. The buzzwords were so thick, and the presenter breezily buzzed through them at such a rapid pace, that I could not follow her argument. A second panelist presented her ethnographic study of a conservative popular-culture venue with such humor at her subjects’ expense—and commanded such regular laughter from the audience—that it was clear she counted on the near-complete homogeneity of the crowd. Had the sponsor