My colleague Gary Blasi helpfully pointed me to scholar.google.com, which lets you search through “scholarly” sites. Looks potentially useful, though it’s hard to tell how good (i.e., suitably broad yet suitably narrow) the search function is.
Special bonus for the sophomorically inclined (this is my idea, not Gary’s): The search engine lets you engage in the always amusing prospect of searching scholarly databases for vulgar sexual terms and seeing the latest wisdom from the academy on the subject. (Avoid the Latinate terms, since scholarship that uses the Latinate form tends to be less interesting, though more useful.)
Just for a sample gem, one of my queries yielded, as the quote for the #1 result, “One could make an antinomian claim to validity on behalf of, say, a [you guess the sexual act] in a tearoom.” Antinomian claims to validity; wow! I wonder if any acts my friends or I have ever engaged in, in tearooms or outside them, would have antinomian claims to validity. I doubt it — I just don’t think we’re that well-educated. Avoid the obvious query, incidentally, because poor Reinhardt Adolfo F… (apparently a fairly well-cited scholar) makes it less interesting than it otherwise might be.
UPDATE: D’oh! I forgot the best part of the antinomian item — it comes from an article titled Introduction: The Liberation of Intimacy: Consumer-Object Relations and (Hetero) Patriarchy. And, yes, I know that I’m quoting things out of context here.
FURTHER UPDATE: Samuel Chambers writes:
While the article that Google scholar gives you is, indeed, “Introduction: The Liberation of Intimacy: Consumer-Object Relations and (Hetero) Patriarchy” the quote it finds is actually from a different author and text.
The source is Michael Warner’s book, _The Trouble With Normal_ a very significant text in queer theory that happens to be making a very important argument — about the politics of marriage — in the chapter that contains that quote. Warner is one of the first and only queer theorists to challenge the mainstream gay movement’s call for gay marriage. His critique is now widely-cited (hence its appearance on Google scholar, and in that oddly titled article) and important to the field.
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