Would that I could write up all the dissertations I have been thinking up lately (see blogs for June 7 and June 18). If I could I'd have so many degrees I might even have professional mobility. But I am but mortal, and so I pass on to motivated others the epiphanic results of my intellectual cogitation. Here's another hot topic for the dissertationally challenged. Write it up in good faith, and may the job market be with you.

I like to call this one "Who Stole Recess? The Politics and Poetics of the Playground." But it's your dissertation, and you can of course call it whatever you want. Do think twice, though, before giving up the allusiveness of this title. It's not every diss that can invoke Christina Hoff Sommers and the legendary Stallybrass and White in one fell theoretical swoop.

"Who Stole Recess"? grows out of recent events at a Santa Monica, California grade school. At Franklin Elementary, the school principal, concerned for the well-being of her young and impressionable students, banned the game of tag, decreeing it to be too emotionally dangerous for that rocky moral trial we like to call recess. She explained her rationale thus in a column in the school newsletter entitled "Safety on the Playground": "The running part of this activity is healthy and encouraged; however, in this game, there is a 'victim' or 'It,' which creates a self-esteem issue. The oldest or biggest child usually dominates."

The liberatory genius of this administrator ought to be readily apparent to any rightminded multiculturalist. She is freeing school children from the ideological constraints of games based on violence, objectification, and othering. They will not grow up to think like victims, or victimizers, because they have not been taught to do so by tag. And yet, Franklin's principal has been shockingly misunderstood, castigated, even mocked, by the crude and unfeeling racist rednecks who comprise the American people. "This is the kind of foolishness that makes wonderful grist for the talk-show circuit," wrote one parent. A radio personality has proclaimed the anti-tag decree to be "laugh-out-loud funny .... They're practically criminalizing an innocent child's game by applying terms like 'victim.'"

Thus does the role of the socially conscious dissertator reveal itself. There is cultural work to be done here, work of an enormously complex, extraordinarily important nature. Only a theorist properly schooled in the work of Lacan, Althusser, Gramsci, and Spivak can do justice to the manner in which the ideological state apparatus of the playground saturates children in hegemonic structures of power, teaching the slow and the uncoordinated to live as silenced, defeated subalterns to the oppressively athletic victors, and causing all children to become, by dint of tag's continuous shuffling of "it" and "not-it," eccentric to themselves, the breathless and bruised victims of tag's brutally dehumanizing fort-da of the soul.

That's chapter one. Other chapters might include:

Swings and Swingers, an analysis of how swings, by putting in motion the essentially oscillatory rhythms of alternative, nonhierarchical sexualities, are inherently homopositive and GLBT-friendly.

Behind the Monkey Bars, a reading of the racist assumption built into this ideological playground apparatus that "monkeys" (clearly a slur for black kids) need to get used to being around--or behind--iron bars.

On the Down Slide, an analysis of how the slide stages downward mobility as a fun and desirable thing, thus contributing to the devastating cycle of urban poverty.

Counterhegemonic Kickball, a celebratory expose of the feminist tour de force that is the kickass game of kickball, centering on the spectacular display of resistance to male dominance that is encoded in the act--enjoyed thoughtlessly by so many boys, and not enjoyed nearly enough by girls--of kicking hard where it counts: in the ball.

"Who Stole Recess?" will steal your advisor's heart, if your advisor has a heart. So get to it, young dissertators! As Marx might have said, you have nothing to lose but your minds.
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Meanwhile, my review of Sam Williams' Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software is up now at Knowledge@Wharton.