Two dissertation topics for the aspiring cultural critic:

Butt Cleavage: It's in, it's transgressive, and it's a cheeky postcapitalist allegory of women's divided self. On the one hand (or should I say cheek?), butt cleavage signifies the soft, vulnerable underside of women's entry into the pub(l)ic sphere. On the other, nothing says "kiss my ass" like butt cleavage. The fashion for showing the top inch or so of the crack is thus a classic postmodern statement about the modern woman's fissured identity, one that is all the more savvy for the fact that it is written on the body. A kick ass diss topic if I ever saw one. Get cracking, body critics!

Topless yoga: This is a topic with bottomless possibilities. Topless yoga may be said to exemplify the liberatory power of the female bricoleur, who owns her body within the objectifying male gaze by occupying the eternal subversive otherness of the eastern pose. It may also be said to represent an orientalist appropriation of the female body, a pornographic mystification of the pornographic gaze itself. Topless yoga also invites extended analysis of iconographic tradition. The depiction of topless yoga in British tabloids reflects, resists, and reinscribes the painterly tradition of the odalisque; there are, in addition, very clear allusions here to Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, which also features an incongruously topless subject looking daringly out of the frame, into the eyes of her beholder. You'd have to be a real boob not to see the intellectual potential here.

Diss on either of these ripe, hitherto untouched subjects, and in a few years you'll be able to watch the radical (i.e., bored, prurient, standards-free) hiring committees flock to you, begging to be entertained, diverted, distracted from the tedium of their comparatively tepid intellectual lives. This will be especially true if you refract your subject matter through the lens of identity politics. If hiring committees think that you are theorizing topless yoga because you are a topless yogi, or if they think your interest in butt cleavage stems from your own butt's historical victimization, their combined desires to promote diversity and to see you naked will pay off big time. You'll be up to your butt crack--or maybe even your breasts--in job offers.