I really appreciate this... And really, it has been the way, as I said in another post, that I have accepted recommendations before. It is also the way I generally approach any kind of writing--though in part I realize I want to be fluent in some fields so that eventually I will be able to teach. This however was the first time I spoke to two of them regarding the proposal, and they scoffed and laughed as if I wasn't there at the idea of using Zizek (with trans* studies!--although I have made clear I am not using him, but other Lacanian theorists vaguely influenced by him), and one of them told me specifically "no one agrees with what you are saying" with regard to Todd McGowan and Edelman (and this is part of my dilemma, I do not know if this is actually the case, if they are actually only fad-theorists that are laughable at conferences, but I just don't know).

Of course I do know the climate around Zizek right now, with his provocateur 'woke' articles. But every theorists makes missteps or clumsily stirs the pot. Regardless, I am barely using him, and these committee members know that. What seems more the offense is the audacity of using Lacan or Hegel: in many of my classes here, for instance a professor finds offensive or ridiculous my unironic attempt at advocating for Freud when he is being trounced as the worst face of 19th/20th Century misogyny (and maybe I am slanted from reading mostly feminist scholars of Freud/Lacan). But also the audacity that I should attempt to draw connections between texts despite their historical remoteness from each other (like that an emancipatory kernel may link many of them). It seems these really quickly smothered peeps I've made (often without any clue I would find opposition) have biased the whole faculty against me (none of whom study Lacan or Hegel, except for my supervisor, and she does it deconstructively).

I am rewriting the proposal in a--whatever it means to be--inductive way, basically just talking about the texts I will be analyzing (but am I supposed to drop all the techniques of literary analysis I have learned to accomplish this?)--I must apparently also drop the trans* angle, because it hinders this inductive effort (but there is no way I'm dropping that angle, lol). Honestly, I will just stop talking here because its way too depressing.