FGSS Savant Wows Profs

This semester, students may notice a new face on campus. At age 10, Klaus Abu-Lubshod ’14 may be a bit younger than the rest of the student body, but he’s no ordinary little boy.

When Klaus was born, doctors told his parents that he would probably never ever be able to speak, read, or interact with his peers. But despite profound retardation across nearly every area of intellectual, social and hygienic functioning, Klaus has proved to possess a remarkable capacity in one isolated field: gender studies.

“We first noticed Klaus’ special talent when we were reading him Mike Mulligan’s Steam Shovel and he launched into a brilliant critique of the book’s paternalistic representation of male phallocentric technocracy,” says his father, Dietrich Lubshod. “We thought it might have been a fluke, but after seeing The Land Before Time he insightfully identified the dinosaur necks as a prehistoric psychosexual representation of male phallocentric technocracy! That’s when his mother and I realized he was truly remarkable.”

Savant syndrome is a rare condition in which people with developmental disorders excel in one restricted area. Savants have been depicted in popular films such as The Rainman and Angels in the Outfield.

While Klaus cannot tie his shoes or handle solid foods, his post-Lacanian critiques of globalized hegemonic capito-sexual phenomena are regularly published in journals such as Post-Radical Womanism, Biosemiotic Ontological Critique Quarterly, and Sports Illustrated for Women.

“At the age of ten, Klaus is already deconstructing at the level of a post-graduate student,” says Wesleyan FGSS Professor Cherri Gough. “We have a veritable feminist, gender and sexuality studies Mozart on our hands. Gender studies hasn’t seen such a formidable but deeply defective mind since Judith Butler.”

Some, however, are not so impressed by Abu-Lubshod’s talents. “I tried to talk to him about race,” says Professor of African-American Studies Kwame X. Rosenbaum, “but he just drooled on my shoes.”