Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

ime academics (esp the tenured) are reeeally reluctant if not resistant to considering their own privilege. buttered bread and all that.

i obv feel that academic language can be used to gatekeep, and that needs to be avoided for obvious reasons, but for example the white feminist rejection of "intersectionality," a word created by WoC, on "educationalist" grounds - that was gross

yeah i agree

i don't know where the dividing line between jargon and useful concept falls - i don't think of "intersectionality" or "privilege" as jargon at all. it's more a way of writing but maybe more importantly a self-awareness about how you come across. when an academic tells a white journalist to go and google something because why should she do your work for you that's all well and good, but when she tells someone with little formal education who's pointing out academic privilege...not such a good look

agree
that's why it's important to know your audience!

*dies* https://twitter.com/hugoschwyzer/status/428580118693289984

lol

The thing about academic writing is that however fresh the idea being scrutinised, the academics themselves often fall on the 'plodder' side of the writing spectrum. Throw a few academic neologisms into the mix, and it can be very heavy going with no leg up for the reader outside academia. I don't really want to spend my time on Twitter suggesting various academic feminists sharpen their rhetoric, but sometimes I have to seriously sit on my hands not to type something to the effect of 'RMDE please find some flow in your prose style before I zzzzzzzzzzzzz.'

BTW saw that exchange between Lex's friend and the prof and was slinging virtual knives at the prof by the end of it.

id like to read a profile of mikki kendall

https://twitter.com/methadonna/status/428644144739672064

academic language is so bad and inaccessible i think at least partially because it evolved in a cliquish pedantic bad-faith toxic environment where everyone is always trying to tear each other down called academia

people with proper educations call it 'academe'

acadamn

http://quinnae.com/2014/01/03/words-words-words-on-toxicity-and-abuse-in-online-activism/

There's an essay that addresses the concerns about "call-out culture" in an intensely thoughtful and humble way without speculating that women are uniquely prone to in-fighting or any of that kind of nonsense.

And a long twitter response from Latoya Peterson:

http://storify.com/jaysmooth/latoya-peterson-the-work

Ultimately, I think we need to learn to listen past hurts and slights. It doesn't mean that we ignore them.

It means we focus and center our end goal in all that we do. Let our work be a testament to what needs to change.

And from Brittany Cooper's twitter tl just tonight:

My quibble w/ the piece is that it is sympathetic to white feminists in a way that does not characterize my work, beliefs, or approach. But I care most about building the political project of Black feminism & that means it can't be reactionary. So I called out the toxicity and I stand by those statements bc I find it unproductive for the world Black feminists are trying to build.

I have long argued (privately) that our current phase of online activism is very much hobbled by the logic of neoliberalism and its emphasis on the individual, in ways that many of us are completely unaware of. Much online activism exalts the particular at the expense of the collective, rewarding individual episodes of catharsis and valuing them with considerably higher esteem than the more hard-nosed and less histrionic work that sustains a community. This is the dark side of the anxiety over the “tone argument.”

feel like this is very insightful and could be applied to a lot of things

just like how the primacy of the individual is so fundamental to our culture as to be unquestioned

That's a great essay, particularly the section on the tone argument:

But in the process, “the tone argument” came to be understood less as a complex piece of social machinery than an easily identifiable trope; it then became a badge that could be waved at will in any discussion to absolve one of responsibility for their words. Even though we as leftists quite literally wrote the book(s) on why and how language matters, we suspend that understanding when it comes to our own community members because we have come to value the sanctity of their anger over the integrity of the wider group. Some of us excuse this on the grounds that we provide the only safe place for certain people to express anger without being shamed for it, and that living with oppression leaves us with pent up rage that demands expression.

The individual catharsis, then, comes to matter more than the collective, and responsibility to a wider community is blurred, if not quite lost.

It’s why it was difficult for many in the trans community to challenge the #DieCisScum hashtag, for example, because any who questioned it would be charged with “tone policing” and denying the community’s right to be angry. But the problem always was that this pseudo-therapeutic exercise in catharsis only made a few people feel better while starting a violently unnecessary and unhelpful discussion with hordes of cis people who laid their own hurt and anger at every trans person’s door. It took a tarring brush to the entire community for next to no meaningful gain, other than sticking it to “our oppressors” for the benefit of a handful.

thought that quinnae piece was great + otm

those tweets really valuable too IO, thx

from @prisonculture:

We don’t know how to live outside of oppression because it is like the weather, ever-present and so we replicate it, all the time. But we want liberation and so we must work towards it. And that work involves criticism, analysis, and grounded practice. As people who have and will continue to build projects and organizations, we understand that discussion/analysis and grassroots organizing are co-constitutive. Also, there isn’t a neat separation between the online world and a separate place called the “real world.” In the 21st century, these places are one in the same. As such the concept of “twitter feminism” strikes us as dismissive and probably a misnomer.

http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2014/01/30/interlopers-on-social-media-feminism-women-of-color-and-oppression/

That is so so so good, thank you.

I think it's quite within the realm of possibility that, if what we want is some form of "radical democracy" and if we have abandoned emancipatory narratives, then that democracy might look something like what is beginning to emerge within (and you could even say is being modeled by) communities like you see in contemporary feminist discourse. a radically complex profusion of voices, perspectives, and criticism in which the members are constantly held accountable for who/what is excluded in the "unities" they form to take action.

I just want to EAT that Prison Culture essay and have it inside me forever in loving incorporation.

as a mathematician i love when leftist academics drop isomorphism :D

omg just busted out a mobius strip too <3<3

https://twitter.com/prisonculture/status/429005774338002944

I'm kinda curious how you do the heavy lifting of all this work on the Internet, which has a history of making everything terrible(I'm in the midst of reading the Nation piece). I mean, this seems like such a matter as needing folks to sit down and talk it out in person in real-time to reach consensus or compromise or some form of agreement. Is there a way to do that in an asynchronous form of dialogue on this group of networks that we've only had for a couple decades now and are still working out the kinks of productive online behavior and make sure that (most?) everybody feels heard?

In other words, is it currently possible to achieve some social goal without messageboard-style culture fucking it up?

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/31/the_fight_over_the_v_word/

Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate [Started by emil.y in February 2012, last updated 59 seconds ago by Mordy ] 106 new answers
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http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BfZeL9pCUAAXKMn.jpg

the defense ministers of Norway, Sweden, Netherlands and Germany

^dead end job

cool

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html

Feel like this sort of belongs in this thread and sort of doesn't. The article seems very subtly but significantly wrongly thought out imo.

idk if the wrongness is even that subtle

Basically boils down to another person with no background in the subject whatsoever divining the "hidden biological drives" that motivate us using one study plus "common sense."

I have point-by-point objections to a lot of it but I feel like there's an over-arching critique that I'm not putting my finger on rn.

One thing that I think is important to talk about is that we often don't know what equal relationships look like in various respects, and there are practically no models for them in our shared media/culture/whatever. Comparisons like "less" and "more" are, like...relative to WHAT?? What if the point of comparison for those qualities is profoundly flawed and in the process of being discarded, then why use it as a point of reference?

how about keeping yr nose out of other people's business for starters? that's my main objection.

not personal you there, just in general

I've heard so many saddening and problematic things from older women both irl and tangentially in documentaries and stuff, for ex that it was important to them in their marriages to never "refuse" their husbands sex no matter how they felt, or the woman in the orgasm documentary who thought there was something PHYSIOLOGICALLY WRONG WITH HER bc she didn't have exactly a certain arousal reaction that erased personal variation. They just X-ed themselves out in preference to their partners (btw a big FFFFFF UUUUUU to Caitlin Flanagan on this one). If those women had, in their generation, discovered that this priority wasn't meaningful to them, and stopped submitting to what was at the very least unrewarding and possibly non-consensual sex in their marriages, then statistically they'd be having "less" sex, sure, but WHO GIVES A SHIT when the point of comparison is marital rape? Just, no.

Yeah that dinner party sounds positively dyspeptic.

She also uses "assortative" mating to mean exactly the OPPOSITE of what it means (which I only know because of its recent usage by another pseudo-scientific NYT asshat, David Brooks)

In addition to Laurel's excellent points, I just feel like stuff like this is designed to play on gender anxiety and to either goad "egalitarian" people into questioning their views or to pander to people who already think "equal" marriage goes against "the natural order" or something. There's this underlying tone of "How's that equality stuff workin out for ya?!"

“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”

i'm sorry i couldn't resist

Lori gottlieb wrote that "settle for a man you don't love" article a while back. She's one of those Caitlin Flanagan backlash types.

that's why I'm not reading this

though I do wonder if it's all those women she advised to settle who are unhappy with their sex lives. Obviously that's because of feminism

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/306651/