Why is it globalization, stupid?

I'm two-thirds done with an arts degree at an unprestigious Australian university. I'm majoring in gender studies and sociology, which I've mixed up with a little politics, media and literature studies. Hello, my name is Linda and I hate globalization.

Why? Because it neauseates me. It's one of these horrible words that means everything or anything or nothing at all, depending on context. It's a word so big and so deep and all-encompassing and so meaningful that it becomes virtually meaningless and just gives me headaches. Yet, it is the answer to EVERY SINGLE question you can ask at my university. World poverty? Globalization. Why Japanese banks primarily use the color blue in their marketing? Globalization. Increased drug use among transgendered immigrant workers in some remote pacific island? Globalization! Why Snoop Dogg wore that hideous blue African jumpsuit at the Roskilde festival 2006? You guessed it, it's GLOBALIZATION!

It's true, I've sat through hundreds of lectures where they ask really complicated academic questions and when you're so confused and over-informed that your pupils are dilated, your hand is cramping and you're thinking "wtf, I'm going to flunk this course," they lay it on you: It's globalization. And you're supposed to go "Ooooh, I get it now, hah, there you go, that's why I'm paying 14 000 aussie dollars a year for this shizz." But you're not actually any smarter for it. By your third year you've memorized definitions of globalization by heart, you've read Scholte and Marx and Castells, and you still have no fucking idea what you're on about.

About me, then, because it's important to know who you're dealing with on the interwebs. I'm a queer able-bodied female 20-something sex-positive middle-class pacifist white poly feminist lefty. I'm a lover not a fighter; I think that the personal is political and vice versa.

Sometimes I go on these really unattractive rants where I blame "oppressive, heteronormative, patriarchal capitalist institutions" for something/everything/anything, and then I throw around some academic jargon and prophesize about the end of the world as we know it, and I don't think people necessarily enjoy hearing these long, impromptu monologues. So now I'm going to write my verbal diarrhea down, because talking to the internet is much less lame than talking to yourself.

So this blog is pretty much just here to entertain me, but who knows, you might read it. Stranger things have happened!