Yesterday we learned Harvard hired a new visiting professor to teach a class on Rupaul.
And thus the world met the man most commonly known by his drag alter ego, LaWhore Vagistan.
It’s a name so vulgar yet uniquely awesome, we’re certain to see it appropriated en masse for fantasy football teams next year.
Vagistan, whose government name is Kareem Khubchandani, comes from nearby Tufts University, where he specializes in performance studies, queer studies and South Asian studies.
His noble aim is to bring “the nightclub to the classroom, and vice versa, teaching critical race, postcolonial, and gender theory through lipsync and lecture.”
Why not?
As the news went viral, LBGTQ site PinkNews announced the hiring, writing that “right-wingers are furious” about it.
On the contrary, most right wingers found it incredibly funny and double checked to ensure they weren’t being duped by the Babylon Bee.
It became even more hilarious to learn that Vagistan would be teaching “Queer Ethnography” and “Rupaulitics: Drag, Race and desire” which seem more like the fall offerings at a Portland LBTQ community center — not the country’s most prestigious university.
Or formerly prestigious university once known for academic rigor and excellence.
But after the anti-Israel tentifadas, students attacking professors over microaggressions and general wokification, nothing coming out of the academic world shocks or outrages me anymore.
At least this isn’t a class for 5-year-olds like all the Drag Queen Story Hour events that led to explosive culture war battles over the last few years.
These are consenting young adults paying nearly $100 grand in tuition for the honor of learning from the author of “Decolonize Drag” and “Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife.”
His next book, “Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties” promises to be the most instructive. In it, Khubchandani digs deep to interview Vagistan. In other words, he speaks to himself.
In a 2015 interview with Johns Hopkins University Press, he explained that he called himself “LaWhore” because his family is originally from Pakistan, where Lahore is a major city. “And, well, I’m a bit of a whore…And Vagistan because I see the subcontinent as one, big, beautiful Vag … istan. Close your eyes and visualize it.”
He pairs his perversion with geography, so that’s something.
(Also in that interview, he discussed, “gender identity in the classroom, race and representation in performance, and sexually active Disney characters.”)
In April of 2024, Vagistan performed “Lessons in Drag” at Williams College, whose newspaper described the show as a “transnational approach to drag that touched on themes of globalization, feminist theory, and Islamophobia.”
How does one cover such a myriad of absurd topics? He lip synched Fergie and Aretha Franklin songs “with recordings of South Asian children competing at spelling bees,” of course.
In that performance, the good professor bemoaned the extra work required of queer South Asian immigrants to fit into the nightlife scene. His examples of tasks were shaving their nose hairs and going to the gym.
So, I guess queer South Asian immigrants are just like the rest of us.
In his work, he seems to find sub-identities underneath the sub-identities to mine a totally singular type of victimhood. It’s actually as impressive as it is nonsensical and privileged, as the kids would say.
Remember, he’ll be teaching at a place where the motto is Veritas. And the truth is, this feels like a clown college. Even if President Trump unfroze $2.4 billion in federal grants to Harvard after they agreed to open trade schools.
The real lesson of Vagistan’s class has nothing to do with drag, nightlife or globalization: It reinforces that it was a grave mistake allowing a generation of race and gender studies graduates to export their campus culture to the corporate world over the last decade.
This isn’t worthy scholarship, it’s indulgence.
The next time there’s a chorus for student loan forgiveness, remember that our top schools are employing people like Vagistan, who teach academic claptrap.
