Good News from the University of Bucharest  Maria Irod  We usually blame Romanian universities (and especially humanist faculties) for being rather opaque towards fashionable critical theories from the Western cultural world. This is partly true: it takes a very long time for a new idea or concept from abroad to be considered by Romanian intellectuals. For instance, structuralism or essentialist feminism is debated in our universities like they were ultimate novelties.  Fortunately, some professors surprise us by their open-minded approach and their sense of “cultural reality”. They are able to speak to their students about new ways of thinking.

However, one special detail of his course surprised me even more. As we all know, in the Romanian academic discourse, homosexuality is hardly mentioned at all – and when it is, people always talk about it as a bizarre, embarrassing thing. Mircea Cartarescu is a pioneer when demolishing this taboo: among other positive things inherited from the hippie and Flower Power movements from the 60s and 70s, he has the honesty to mention “the right to normality for those who practice alternative sex” (gays and lesbians). Moreover, while most Romanians have never heard about gender studies, he seems quite informed in the field and has a lot to say about lesbian feminism and offers his students a solid reference list, featuring names as Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich and so on.

Unfortunately, Cartarescu’s course has to comply with the available time – in fact, the subject of his course is “Popular culture from a cultural studies perspective”. Maybe you will find that such a collateral approach on homosexuality is trivial, but for us it marks a step forward. When will we be able to attend a queer studies course at the University of Bucharest?

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