ABSTRACT
On 18 April 2001, Harvard University students took over a campus building to protest the failure of the world’s richest university to provide its service workers a living wage. 1 What escalated into a widely supported protest occurred barely a month after the appointment of Lawrence Summers as Harvard’s twenty-seventh president. Cartoon drawings sprang up in Harvard Yard that portrayed Summers as Marie-Antoinette, mouthing the infamous and misattributed “Let them eat cake.” As an emblem of conspicuous consumption and crass insouciance, the queen had crossed the gender line. Figured in her lifetime as a usurper of male prerogative, Marie-Antoinette figured here as male prerogative.
