A Heterodox Education

Editor’s Note: On 26 July 2025, Claire Lehmann delivered the Holden Memorial Address for Distinguished Journalism at the Annual Conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research at Northwestern University in Chicago. What follows is an edited version of her speech.

I. The Promise and a False Start

I grew up in Rosewater, Adelaide, a working-class suburb near the industrial hub of Port Adelaide. I rode my bike to school past abandoned wool sheds and social housing. For most of my classmates, university was not on the horizon. So, when I got to the University of Adelaide, and I walked down the elegant boulevard of North Terrace every day—past the state library and the art gallery before arriving at Bonython Hall with its stately gothic towers—I felt I’d arrived. 

I went to university to study English. I was inspired to become a Shakespearean scholar by a brilliant year 12 English teacher who introduced me to Hamlet. And to my seventeen-year-old self, being an English professor at a sandstone university was the most glamorous job in the world. 

The first year of my English studies lived up to my expectations. We studied a bit of Chaucer and the 19th-century novel, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But in second and third year, the coursework changed. Instead of studying the great works, we were assigned “texts,” which could be art installations, films, or TV shows. The assigned readings were all about the ideas of a philosopher named Michel Foucault. It felt like a bait and switch: reel them in with the promise of literature, then bury them in readings about heteronormativity.

Oh, the heteronormativity. In third year we were assigned a 1995 book called The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz. It argued that heterosexuality was “created” in the late 19th century as a byproduct of Krafft-Ebing’s classification of homosexuality. According to Katz, before heteronormative discourse emerged, heterosexual sex occurred only for the purpose of procreation, with rigid gender norms ensuring that “good” men and women were chaste. “Penis and vagina were instruments of reproduction, not of pleasure,” he wrote.

It was a bold argument. Katz opens his book by declaring that in “the early nineteenth-century United States, from about 1820 to 1860, the heterosexual did not exist.” He qualifies this by acknowledging that, of course, heterosexual behaviour existed—but the identity did not. He contends that the very act of categorising the “heterosexual” invented the identity, emphasising that “it is difficult to overstress the importance of that new way of categorising.” Before this category existed, Katz writes, “lust in men was roving,” not limited to the opposite sex—and heterosexual behaviour was typically framed as functional, not erotic. He denounces the recognition of heterosexuality as an “authoritarian” practice of “standardisation,” comparable to the attempt to standardise intelligence, and describes the outcome of this new knowledge system as “an erotic apartheid that forcefully segregated the sex normals from the sex perverts.”

I was sceptical. I was sure that humans had pursued erotic pleasure long before Victorian doctors began classifying sexualities. What about the pictures on the walls of Pompeii or the Khajuraho temples? Or the bawdy humour in The Canterbury Tales? I wasn’t sure exactly when the Kama Sutra was written, but I suspected it predated Victorian England. I was also doubtful that describing something is necessarily an act of invention. When European explorers arrived in Australia, they were surprised to find a beaver-like creature with a duck’s beak. They drew pictures of the platypus and sent them back home. The English thought the creature was a hoax. But the explorers did not “invent” the platypus by describing it.

Despite these logical flaws, among the professors of the English department, Katz’s work was considered so novel and fresh that it was required reading. It was a continuation of the work of Foucault, who had argued that medical categories did not describe pre-existing realities, they merely constructed phenomena under study. In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault argued that diseases were “constructed as objects of knowledge” through particular ways of seeing, classifying, and intervening. In Madness and Civilization, he argued that “madness” as a concept was shaped by social forces rather than nature. While Foucault’s original works did provide some flashes of insight, those who were influenced by him stripped his analytical approach down to a crude and simplistic formula. To Foucault’s acolytes, all empirical inquiry was suspect because investigation and classification served power not truth. As this view came to dominate the humanities, it made the study of human nature almost impossible without the threat of moral opprobrium. 

It dawned on me that what I was being taught was unlikely to be true. But I had also become equipped with the tools to play the game. I knew how to sprinkle my essays with words like “fluidity,” “subjectivity,” and “performativity,” which virtually guaranteed me a good grade. All I had to do was cite Foucault on “power-knowledge,” and name-drop Deleuze and Guattari on the fluidity of desire. Nothing is natural or normal—culture constructs what we mistake for nature. 

II. Finding My Athena

One summer, out of frustration, I went looking for criticisms of Foucault. He was treated like God in my department, quoted the way evangelicals quote the Bible, and I figured that, just like any faith, this doctrine must have its sceptics. A Google search brought me to Camille Paglia. 

“Poststructuralism is a corpse!” Paglia declared. She described Foucault’s scholarship as weak and bloodless, imitative of Nietzsche, and lacking in rigour. But she didn’t just attack Foucault’s work, she assailed the entire academic establishment for elevating him as a guru: 

Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstances. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithering passivity, and inaction.

Paglia’s own background contributed to her irreverence. Having grown up on a working dairy farm, she drew on her rural, working-class, Italian-immigrant background to critique the “bourgeois” academics who surrounded her. She saw through the superficial status games of her colleagues, and identified the shallow careerism in which many of them were engaged at the expense of true scholarship. But what I found most interesting about her work was that, although she was a literature professor, she recognised that there was much more to life than language and words.

Paglia attributed her reverence for art and beauty to growing up in the Catholic Church. In a 2008 interview, she described how she was moved as a child by the sunlight shining through the stained glass windows onto the pews below, and the graceful lines inscribed below an imposing statue of St. Matthew:

I’ve never lost that sense—and I still argue it constantly—that the visual sense and the language of the body are primary ways of communication. And that is why, though I’m a literature professor, I have waged a fierce battle against post-structuralism over the last 20 years, because I feel it’s absolutely absurd to think that the only way we know anything is through words. My earliest thoughts were visual, and my earliest responses were to colour and line and gesture.

Paglia understood that poststructuralism’s error was to reduce every experience to language and discourse. She knew that our instincts—including those related to carnality and desire—exist outside language. We are attracted to bodies and faces we like because of their colour and shape. Sex is more about scent and touch than it is about sentences on a page. We are not brainwashed into being attracted to those who are beautiful because of modern discourse—our desire exists at a pre-civilised, ancient, primal level. For Paglia, this reality was ontological: the body comes first, and the stories we tell about it come later. 

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World

A society that respects neither religion nor art cannot be called a civilization.

Reflecting on her insights and her criticisms of the academic establishment in the humanities, I realised that I would never get the education I wanted in English. So, that summer, I changed degrees and enrolled in psychology.

III. Jensen and Gould in the Underworld

To reach the psychology department, I had to descend four levels underground into what felt like a dungeon—fluorescent-lit corridors leading to small, windowless rooms filled with strange experiments.