Query Letter for 2nd book (That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class)

[ahunter3]

Is there any legitimate role for a male activist to play within feminism and women's studies?

Derek is an angry genderqueer activist who wants to go to college and major in women's studies so badly that he hitches to NY and even withstands a year of homelessness to get into the school of his choice.

He sails through his undergrad career cheered on by his teachers who wave him on to graduate school, encouraging him to believe he can pursue his genderqueer politics there. But then things deteriorate. He faces off with the only Sociology professor doing feminist theory: another male. The professor expects to take students under his wing and mentor them, while Derek is used to doing theory as an active (and political) verb and doesn't respond well to being spoken to as if he wasn't already a theorist.

The Sociology professor tells him that he should be embracing socialist feminism instead of radical feminism, and when Derek disagrees, what begins as an intellectual correspondence degrades into a pissing contest, eventually to their mutual embarrassment.

Derek's interactions with the school's interdisciplinary women's studies program start off on a better foot but eventually lead to another disagreement, this time between poststructuralist feminist theory and radical feminist theory. This puts him for the first time in the indefensible position of being a male telling women professors they're doing feminism wrong.

THAT GUY IN OUR WOMEN'S STUDIES CLASS is a 93,000-word memoir, providing an entertaining story in the "fish out of water" genre, with interpersonal conflict and conflict between personal aspirations and institutions. It also explores serious political issues of interest to feminist theorists: the implications and limits of male participation in feminism, of course, but also the tension between egalitarian elements in feminist theory and the hierarchical relationship between students and teachers as well as between faculty and institution, and the role of theory itself (subject matter to be studied? personal understanding of the world in which we live?) in a college student's life.

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Comments

[anais-pf.livejournal.com]

I am very much amused to read the phrase "pissing contest" in this context, since no female has the equipment to engage in one. :)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

I can't tell whether this is legit or a joke. If the former, I don't think it works for you at all.

Reason? It reads like an Onion satire.

[ahunter3.livejournal.com]

Not sure if you're saying it's a badly written query for a book that deserves a better one, that it's a bad idea for a book because no one would want to read such a thing it's so silly, or that the query is so badly written you have no idea what the book is likely to be about.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

No comment at all on the book, which I haven't read.

The query sounds like a parody -- to me; maybe not to others -- because it's using somewhat hyperbolic dustcover-ish language to describe a more serious personal quest. At least, I assume it's a more serious quest. Or have you written it as a comedy? Because the query does make it sound to me like it's an academic satire in the spirit of Kingsley Amis.