Literary Clusterfucks 2013

also all the worst people on Twitter have praised her blog post: Shapiro, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss, Niall Ferguson. I think it’s sort of sad she’s become a tool of those particular culture warriors.

― horseshoe, Saturday, 19 June 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah I first came across it when the 2/3 liberals (also writers/artists) I am mutuals with retweeted it from a free speech angle. This innocent picture of someone attempting to 'learn' then 'struggling to comprehend'. Words about 'nuance' and 'complexity' follow (literature narrowly cast as a set of "messy stories"). Sometimes repeating a phrase that everyone else has said is totally fine.

yeah my position is honestly can she just not talk about this shit

I don't think putting this down to cultural differences really works if you look at Chimamanda's actual writing. I read Americanah which, as the title indicates, is very much about the Nigeria/diaspora divide and describes Nigeria, the UK and the USA with an equal level of insider knowledge; she's clearly not a victim of culture shock here. And of course as a feminist she's had to deal with Aimless' troll-or-at-least-stupendously-bad-faith "is western culture presumed to be so attractive or superior that one invariably must adopt it as soon as one is sufficiently exposed to it?" question from that perspective, too.

The actual divide imo is much more to do with age - you don't need to search far to find wealthy transphobic European or American women in their 40's - and while I've said before that her original comments seemed to come from cluelessness as opposed to bigotry, as is often the case, once the person doubles down on that shit there's really not much difference.

In spite of your calling me a troll, I thank you for posting something that provides its reasoning from evidence, not just its conclusions, making it of actual value to those who read it. You advanced the conversation.

To be clear Aimless I don't think you're a troll, I just think you were trolling with that particular comment - in that I don't think you need to assume some superiority of western culture to renounce bogotry, and that I don't think you believe that, either.

The constant mantra in the ask for 'evidence', 'conversation', 'value, usually comes from people who are the most ready to deny others their right to be left alone to live their lives.

bogotry.

.

I'm very far from an expert and I'm sortof hesitant to weigh in on this, but I do wonder if anyone on this thread, myself included, is really in a position to talk about feminism and its meanings in Nigeria.

It's definitely true that the closer you get to the centres of global power the more provincial and solipsistic the politics. So while mainstream US or UK feminism can be totally inward looking and know little about Nigerian feminism, you can be sure the opposite is not true. There's many reasons for this, some obvious like the large reach of american news and entertainment, the very large size of the Nigerian diaspora and the vulnerability of global south countries to the 'foreign interests' of powerful global actors.

Table is right to point out the enduring contributions of overlapping colonial legacies to contemporary manifestations of social conservatism in africa. I would add to this that this is a story that is very much ongoing and you can see how US aid continues to exert something a little stronger than soft power in undermining feminist causes across the world. A really good example of this is the 'global gag' that withdraws aid from organisations that provide abortion and related care or collaborates with others that do. So while I think it would be a mistake to interpret this in a way that undermines any notion of Nigerians having any agency (but being somehow guided entirely by these kinds of dictats) I think it also shows that its a bit of a stretch to see 'progressivism' in general and feminism in particular as the preserve of the west, especially as I doubt anyone on this thread really has any authority to talk about histories of feminism in Nigeria and Africa.

One might look at how the critiques by Nigerian feminists to IMF structural adjustment programs in the 1980s to see that there are often very different stakes for feminist struggle yet those critiques have influenced feminist and other political struggles elsewhere (probably most notably Silvia Federici).

It's a long open letter straight-up dragging a trans, Nigerian author, and it's a terrible look.

Otm. kind of gross that she pretends to make it about cancel culture in the abstract.

I don't think anyone is directly endorsing her position, so much as cutting her some slack in terms of the level of outrage, labeling and dismissal directed at her personally for having expressed a wrong opinion.

Hmm I'm not quite sure that publishing something to a global audience is simply 'expressing an opinion'

It may not be 'simple' but she is definitely expressing an opinion.

It's a long open letter straight-up dragging a trans, Nigerian author

Had she expressed that opinion to a couple of friends while out to lunch instead she would not be facing this current criticism, it might be worth dwelling on how those two scenarios differ

Like if I called you an asshole here and if I called you an asshole in a NYT op-ed I'm sure you would have quite a different reaction to the same expressed opinion

Yes. I am sure that is true. But a clusterfuck is a clusterfuck, wherever it happens. There were options on both sides for avoiding a clusterfuck right from the start, and simlar options for ilxors to avoid participating in the clusterfuck aspects of this situation, too.

if I called you an asshole in a NYT op-ed

The editors would probably have intervened before this went to print. At the very least, it would have been more refereed and measured.

How are we participating, commenting on it here? Is CNA an ilxor that I didn't know about?

How do you respond to someone rolling out a bunch of defenses of their transphobia and... fear of people who disagree with her? Fear of youth? without it being a clusterfuck?

Aimless, what exactly are you trying to defend here?

TERF wars always make me sad because they're always among people who ought to be allies. Which imo takes some allowances and graciousness on all sides, which are the things always lacking. (Especially on Twitter, that part is true.)

🧐

I'm sorry if "allowances and graciousness" is somehow offensive. They're valuable things for everyone.

takes some allowances and graciousness on all sides

writing and publishing are rather insular and are cutthroat competitive worlds, even when the amount of money and status at stake are extremely small. as such, rivalries can get quite bitter, like the range wars among cattle ranchers and sheep herders. this may be a factor in this particular inter-author wrangle.

Even aside from the transphobia, I found the tone of Adichie's essay really unpleasant. In particular the decision to reprint the two very personal emails Emezi sent her, in full, comes across very narcissistic to me - there's an implied "how dare this person write to me, when I am so much more important than her" that makes me more inclined to trust Emezi's account of events than Adichie's.

that's not very allowing or gracious of you

xp Sorry, "so much more important than them" - I forgot to check Emezi's pronouns before posting.

I totally agree, it's a bad essay. I couldn't even finish it because it came off like a rant. It's mostly an excuse for her to air personal grievances. A bad look. I'm also not super impressed with Emezi's take, for a lot of the same reasons. But also, everybody doesn't have to choose sides and have big fights over every single thing. It's exhausting for everybody. Alliances are only successful if they spend more energy on united effort than internal fighting. That's just how they work. I think some people have an overly rosy idea of what an "ally" is. You can't force them to think just like you, you just want people in the same ballpark. There are much bigger fights to have.

Except for, you know, the trans people who are being denigrated and attacked? Like Emezi? Who wrote the thread that horseshoe linked to well before the essay, and doesn't, for example, publish someone else's correspondence.

I live in a state that just passed about a bunch of explicitly anti-trans bills. And the opposition to them has been a unified front of LGBTQ activists and civil rights groups of all kinds, as well as what remains of our state Democratic Party. I personally know some TERFs, and while I don't agree with them on everything, they were right out there fighting the anti-trans bills too. They've been fighting for a lot of things for a long time. So I don't write them off. Like I said, there are bigger fights.

????

xp You have a wildly different definition of TERF than I am familiar with.

Like, have you read JK Rowling's letter, the one that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has defended several times? How on earth is that helping trans people?

I'm not talking about the intramural fights! I'm talking about political mobilization among allies. Endless flame wars don't help trans people either.

???????????????

I know, I know. It's not cool to say that people should work together for common interests and/or against common enemies. But it's true anyway.

¿?

xp Wait, is your theory that all TERFs are actually trans allies, unfairly maligned? Because that's the only way I can reconcile your comments here.

At least, that's the closest thing to a positive interpretation I can figure out.

The TERFs I know were 100 percent vocal and active against the anti-trans legislation in my state, yes. If that doesn't make sense to you, then you are conceiving of both them and the actual battle much too narrowly. If you don't have a definition of "ally" that understands the importance of that, then I don't know what to tell you.

Which is not to say Rowling or Adichie are acting like allies either. They're not! Hence the "on all sides."

"terfs did a thing that isn't reprehensible, therefore we should be nice to them"

love that anecdotal evidence of "some friends", always super convincing

xp I guess I'm confused why you feel the need to attack both sides here, in this thread, as somehow equally responsible for the dialog, and deserving of more grace than they get from every paper, news media property, the Guardian... Are TERFs the ones who are suffering here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YhipiMNiYk

TERFs could list all kinds of ways they're suffering, yes. Or did we achieve women's full legal and economic equality while I was sleeping?

That's exactly the kind of villain framing that's bad for building and maintaining alliances. There are in fact plenty of common interests and reasons to unite. Spending endless hours on internal fights makes all of that harder.

But I don't want to get into an intramural fight either. Like I said, they're exhausting and they make me sad.

I’m not on the same side of any wall as any terf, fucko

Intramural my ass.

Creep.

Lol at coming into this thread saying "both sides are bad, they should be nicer to each other" and then ducking out after saying how much you like your TERF friends.

You do realize that TERFs could stop being TERFs by just not excluding trans women from their definition of womanhood, right? Like, it's not some innate state of being, and they aren't suffering because they're TERFs. Why not just be a non-trans-excluding feminist?

tipsy mothra, do you know what TERF stands for, and that it's not just a synonym for "feminism"?

^^^

as a woman, i do not consider TERFs my ally in any way. they are villains and don't give a shit about women's full legal and economic equality because "full" would mean including *all* women.