there's our catastrophe

Mar 28

reading history of sexuality vol. 1 really helped me to understand that the multiplication of discourse(s) has material effects in itself, and therefore to identify the “I just wanna stay in constant contact about exactly what you mean by ‘no contact’” thing as manipulative and shit, but I don’t know how to say that in a way that isn’t alienating to people I don’t wanna alienate, and that makes me kind of sad

foucault could be kind of a dick but he’s p. useful to me as a feminist, and it’s a shame that so many shitty dudes I met at uni namedrop foucault for their bullshit arguments, because it means that a lot of people have really good reasons for tuning out as soon as he’s mentioned, like, it’s actually kind of a reliable wanker radar

I really believe in citing your sources and knowing the history behind your words. just because you can say something without explicit reference to the theory that you’re drawing on doesn’t mean you should. it doesn’t make your work more accessible, it makes other people’s work less accessible. when you do that you’re big-upping yourself and robbing the people you’re speaking to of access to a whole bunch of thinkers who are probably smarter than you, and I don’t wanna be part of that

but I also wanna talk to the people who have good reasons for tuning out as soon as I mention foucault, so

Sep 30

“People who are eloquent—as soon as I hear them, I turn the radio off and I don’t want to listen anymore. And I think others should have the same reaction. We don’t want to be swayed by superficial eleg—eloquence, by emotion and so on. What we ought to ask for is the opportunity to think things through for ourselves. And if that comes with a, you know, tenth-rate delivery, like mine is—probably is, as you say, well, yeah, that’s what I’d prefer if I had a choice.”

noam chomsky, you have a severe case of sour grapes

being an interesting speaker does not equal being a fascist demagogue and you know it, it’s a really important aspect of accessibility

this is like when I was little and thought that something must be good for me if it tasted bad

Jul 28

I just don’t like autobiography ok

or perzines for that matter

for some reason this is something that comes up a lot and I’m starting to get unnecessarily defensive about it

I don’t think liking personal narratives means you have better politics

it might mean you’re a better person on an individual level but I spit on the individual, so

feminists against memoir
feminists against personal experience
feminists against the personal
feminists against the self
feminists against authenticity
feminists against politically mandated disclosure
feminists against the confessional
feminists against pain
feminists for history
feminists for abstraction
feminists for theory
feminists for fiction
feminists for secrecy

Jul 27

wait

is it supposed to be parsed “sorry [that] I’m not sorry”?

I always thought it was “sorry/I’m not sorry”

wavering, uncertain, fractured, probably defiant but possibly not, as opposed to OH SNAP, you weren’t expecting this sentence construction, were you buddy

INQUIRING MINDS NEED TO KNOW: how/would you disambiguate “sorry I’m not sorry”?

May 4

about me

I don’t have much that’s actually “about me” in the strictest sense on the “about me” section here. it’s mainly a list of my interests. no a/s/l, no lists of privileges or oppressions. of course, all that tells you is that I obsessively and vainly curate my online presence so as to look, among other things, like the kind of person who doesn’t obsessively and vainly curate her online presence. and that I would secretly quite like universal subject status.

however, it’s also true that I feel like if I mention anything I have to mention everything. I really resent having to justify myself by dredging up my personal experiences. I avoid it when possible; I only talk about them for context, when it’s truly necessary to give what I’m trying to say any meaning. but this is often, because I need context, because I am not, actually, the universal human subject, the legal Reasonable Person, though I would probably be close enough if not for a quirk of fate, as my male-but-otherwise-very-similar-to-me brother likes to remind me when I get on his case for being The Man. like. I do often want to know very badly the position, the context someone is writing from, I understand that others might too, I get that. it’s just.

I don’t feel like I have an identity politic. just a life. I’m pretty much against a politics based around individual identities rather than structures of oppression and material conditions. but at least half the people who say that are loser social theory bros who just wanna live in their head and not deal with other people’s problems. I wish I could do that. I could, I guess. I’m not good. I’m lazy, and I mostly like comfort, and people telling me I’m clever and pretty. so when I am good it’s on purpose, it takes work, it doesn’t flow naturally from who I am, the position I was born into. half the time I just wanna be a literary critic, an analytic philosopher, something like that, and nothing else. on the occasion that I do shoulder any kind of social responsibility I want some credit. I’m not pure. I know that.

I can’t take all this endless reflexivity, this self-scanning. I’m not “confessional”, I swear. I don’t even like memoirs! they’re boring! why can’t I mention my life without it being called an overshare? I don’t get anything out of telling you all the things I tell you, I don’t really want to, I wouldn’t even mention it if you didn’t need the context, but it’s just another chore, it’s not a big deal. It’s narcissistic but it’s situational. I need to get through it before I get to my main point. it’s boring. why is everything seen as so heavy, so intense? it’s not really that heavy, I promise. If it was it would break my back. I’m not brave. I don’t ever say anything on the internet I would be truly embarrassed by if it turned up on the front page of the tabloids. the things you’ll only coax out of me after five years of friendship and half a bottle of vodka are the strangest, stupidest things, but I’m certainly capable of squeamishness and shame. I’m not really so blunt, nor so blasé. I, I, I.

I had to learn a lot about I-first statements when I learnt about active listening and assertive communication. As I recollect, they said it would be clunky at first but after a while it would become second nature. I don’t even believe in a distinction between first and second nature, I’m Butlerian like that. I use I-statements all the time now. They’re really helpful. To me, at least. I find that they defuse conflict before it even begins. I feel that they keep me out of trouble. I’m not sure that’s always a good thing, though, at least when it flows over into all kinds of discourse. I have, as many do, concerns about the way people feel they are owed an in-depth look at others’ lives and traumas before they decide if they’ll give them credence. I also feel like overemphasising identity is individualising and therefore defensive and therefore also a deadening force on some potentially productive and necessary intellectual conflicts.

Well, that’s my opinion, at least, grounded in my own life, my own privileges and oppressions, my experience and identity, unique to me, personal, heavy business, and unchallengeable.

Oct 5

been thinking a lot about my problems with a particular ready-to-pounce hypercritical activist discourse vs. the evident foolishness and oppressiveness of mainstream liberal norms of polite discourse

I think the difference here is that there is rage or flippancy and then there is people being sanctimonious and they’re not the same; in fact if anything prescriptivism re: tone is more similar than different to the hypercritical leftie prescriptivism re: language that I can’t stand; also that I associate this particular sanctimoniousness with white bourgeois social norms and a comorbid inflated sense of entitlement

going to keep chewing on that one for a while

Aug 8

Just North of Something Important: "The market"

barthel:

Dear journalists: please stop talking about “the market” as if it were an actual thing with concrete desires, motivations, and reasoning. As in, “the market reacted badly to the continued standoff over the debt ceiling.” This is bullshit. “The market” did nothing. “The market” is an aggregation of individual buying and selling decisions, the majority of which were presumably made for their own individual reasons and concerning their own individual companies, not the national political scene.

…

this is good, you should read the whole thing

see also: why I hate vague leftist talk about “big business”. please note that being against vagueness is not the same as being against structural analyses. obviously there are reasons (some of them structural) for why people act as they do, and obviously we sometimes need to break out general terms like “business interests” or “the patriarchy” or “the state”. but these are ideas, not real entities(/homogeneous collectives), and if we fall into thinking about them like they are then we’re just ideologues, incapable of understanding the specificities of any situation well enough to make a difference in it.

Jul 25

leonineantiheroine:liquornspice:dopegirlfresh:

lowendtheory:

This is re: my Odd Future post.

First of all, many thanks to mai’a, whom I’m pretty sure most folks reading this are already following, but should be if they’re not.

Second, I’m not quite sure that I did anything to justify the sexism and homophobia in OF’s music; in fact, I’m pretty sure I called it out. But I think that what makes it possible to ignore the fact that I was calling it out was the fact that I was also trying not to couple that critique with a retreat into a kind of smug critical self-satisfaction where I get to feel morally superior or smarter than what or whom I’m critiquing. It’s not only because I think that style of critique has led to barely disguised displays of racism.

It’s also because I think that style of critique often allows us 1) to get away with learning very little about what we’re criticizing by applying the same critical formula to everything and anything, so long as we can show evidence of the ways in which it is misogynist and homophobic—and, for that matter, racist; 2) to imagine our criticism as transcending the object of our critique by oversimplifying it (i.e. “TTC says stuff for attention”) or by performing a weird kind of doublespeak where we claim in one breath that it has no meaning and then, in the next breath, point out the homophobic and sexist meaning that is everywhere in it.

One of the cool things about the internet, and about tumblr especially, is the way that it allows for the quick propagation of all sorts of antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, etc., ideas. The appearance of sites like Color Lines, Jezebel, Racialicious, Feministe (sites which vary greatly in quality and ideological orientation), among others, have all been really important in popularizing antioppression ideas in general, and in producing a class of people able to problematize and critique oppressive discourses, especially those that can be found in popular culture.

One of the not so cool things about the internet is that it has helped to produce a class of people who are, relatively speaking, quite comfortable in their general anti-oppression stance. Anti-oppression discourse, nowadays, isn’t even about a politics (i.e. working collectively to change the world you inhabit) as much as it is about style—about speaking the right language, using the right terms, expressing outrage at the right moment, etc. Unlike previous generations of people discussing anti-oppression ideas, we who are members of this class don’t need to go to long, drawn-out meetings or to join activist groups in order to satisfy our desire to be against oppression. The discussion, in many ways, comes to us—just follow the right people, read the right blogs, etc. Anti-oppression, that is, arrives to us with the slick, polished ease of a commodity.

Without even talking about the billions of people who cannot access this kind of discourse precisely because the very late capitalism that provides us with cheap-ish computers and internet access needs to keep their wages incredibly low in order to do so, I’ll end by saying this: I believe that there’s a difference between producing evidence of oppression, explaining oppression, and fighting oppression. One can produce evidence of oppression without being able to explain why oppression happens. My problem with the Jezebels and Racialiciouses of the world, as well as with a lot of stuff I see around here, is that they glorify their own capacity to produce evidence about oppression without explaining it. Or if they do explain it, the explanation tells us very little: it relies on the fact that we know oppression is bad and the fact that it feels good to know that. This, I think, is why sarcasm works so well on Jezebel and various other liberal feminist blogs—it allows its reader to ignore the lack of analytical depth by allowing her to substitute the feeling of Knowing Better Than Someone Else Does.

You might think that people who analyze oppression professionally would at least think about the question of who benefits from oppression, a question that necessitates at least a critical view onto capitalism. The problem is, of course, that those who produce evidence of oppression professionally have a class interest in not explaining or learning to explain who benefits from oppression, because, at this point, many of them do. Folks like (Racialicious founder) Carmen Van Kerckhove have found creative ways to make a living off of talking about race (and talking about talking about race) without explaining much at all save the fact that racism exists, a fact that we seem not to be able to be reminded of enough.

But the fact that an entire industry has emerged to produce evidence about oppression without doing much at all to fight it should tell us something about where we’re at in terms of capitalism. Anti-oppression has become a commodity, too, and “we” are part of the machine by and through which that commodity is made and consumed. I’m not trying to trivialize or downplay the existence of oppression—oppression exists, and exists on a scale any in ways I am not even in a position to know or speak about. But I am trying to begin to understand how capitalism has enabled people to generate an anti-oppression discourse that allows many of us to feel as if we are doing much more to fight it than we actually are.

yes, yes, yes

anti-oppressive politics as decontextualised personal branding with no connection to social movements: kill

(via leonineantiheroine-deactivated2)

May 6

I find that opposition to overly academic language in the name of accessibility can easily cross the line into rote anti-intellectualism. which is…maybe not in itself the worst thing ever. like, many big ol’ nerds really need to get over the high school persecution complex thing. having been an outsider in the past doesn’t divest you of institutional privilege now.

having said that, bullying on the basis of nerdiness is a pretty common experience that can be quite traumatic, and can also be tied to broader social oppression. I was pretty mercilessly bullied in primary school for being extremely bookish. the equivalently nerdy boy wasn’t bullied, he was even kind of cool for knowing so much about dinosaurs. (the bullying was also highly sexualised, but nobody ever talks about sexual harassment between young children. probs because even radical people still have this idea that sexual harassment is about horny blokes not knowing the line, rather than a learned strategy of intimidation independent of the sexual inclination or maturity of the harasser.) I met the ringleader again as an older teenager and I expected him to not remember, or to apologise, or to downplay it. instead he said “oh, sorry, but I mean, you always had your nose in a book, what did you expect?” I was floored.

I’m not surprised by this kind of thing anymore. there have been any number of boys/men since him who have tried to shut me down by mocking my style of expression, some of whom have since admitted that they felt threatened by me. so I’ll admit this whole thing is a sore spot for me. especially when it’s men who take serious issue with my speaking/writing style, which it almost always is for some reason. but at the same time I have to be three times as confident and linguistically competent as the dudes in my classes to get taken half as seriously, so I’m in a bit of a double bind here. triple bind if I actually care about people other than myself, because sometimes I end up intimidating or silencing people who are actually marginalised re: speech, language. which is everybody, I guess, sooner or later. these things are complicated, who knew!

Gauche Sinister (“on nationality, class and linguistic privilege”) also makes some good points about English language and migrant experiences. to summarise: it takes skill and effort to learn a second language, and if you’re not white and Anglo there are severe penalties for less than perfect English, so it’s not fair to dismiss high skill with English as grounded in privilege — it’s often grounded in necessity. this was obviously not my experience but it is a lot of people’s experience. I also think Gauche is spot-on with eir observation that slang is rarely if ever subjected to the same amount of scrutiny as academic language re: accessibility.

moving on. I’ve known people to insist that everything written in the humanities needs to be immediately accessible to anyone fluent in the language it’s written in, or it’s worthless, bad politics. there are a lot of spheres of knowledge that I think need to be [more actively] democratised. medicine; botany; computer programming; veterinary science; economics; everything, really, these are just some of the most crucial, the ones that spring immediately to mind. but most of the time people aren’t actively decrying, say, the existence of complicated or jargonistic computer science terms. they exist for a reason, for precision’s sake, for brevity’s sake. people aren’t saying “don’t say megabyte, that’s jargon”. it would take way more time to break the term “megabyte” down into non-technical jargon. “you know, a million bytes, a byte is eight bits, a bit is one binary digit, I guess, basically. binary? oh geez.” I think there’s a lot of hating on the humanities going on in these critiques of “pretentious” language. it’s pretty right-wing, actually: grounded in the idea that social reality is just commonsense, that it doesn’t need to examined or unpacked. I also wanna note that the fields that tend to come in for the most criticism (sociology, literary criticism) are heavily dominated by women. in my experience philosophy — which is very male-dominated — gets a lot more respect. Especially if it’s not socially-engaged philosophy — pure metaphysics, formal logic and the like.

words are tools, among other things. you can use simple tools to make more complicated tools. then you can use the more complicated tools to make other things, things you couldn’t make with the simple tools alone. complicated tools, words, concepts are not immoral and not necessarily inaccessible. but they take work. I would argue for a politics of accessibility that’s based on opening up this kind of discourse to people, not just on simplifying it.

I get the opposition to theory for the sake of theory. I really, really do. I have very little patience for people who don’t care at all about the accessibility of their work. but I have also gained a lot from conversations and reading that asked me to do some work beforehand. I think other people have probably benefited from my more sophisticated understanding, too. it’s not the only worthwhile thing but it’s one worthwhile thing.

further reading:
Philosophy is supposed to be difficult @ the guardian
this judith butler article, “A ‘Bad Writer’ Bites Back”

Apr 18

“Consider the central problem involved in examining eating disorders from an ethical or political perspective: On the one hand, as feminists, we want to recognize that the personal is political and that eating disorders cannot be explained at the level of individual pathology. An adequate account needs to address the social or ideological domain of representation that in some way helps produce such disorders. This recognition has led to the critique of a representational domain variously described as phallocentric, phallogocentric, or patriarchal. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to locate women as passive victims in some point of innocence outside representation. Thus, the task for feminists has been conceived of as constructing autonomous women’s representations, and this task has appealed to an articulation of the female body. The body is, then, considered as that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a masculine representational logic. At the same time, the body has been targeted as the redemptive opening for a specifically feminine site of representation. In terms of eating disorders, this ambivalence surrounding representation might be cashed out as follows: the anorexic is the victim of representation, trapped in embodiment through stereotypical and alienating images — but at the same time only representation can cure this malaise; only a realistic, non repressive and less regulative form of representation will allow women to see themselves as autonomous subjects. We argue that this tension surrounding representation actually sustains the Cartesian mind/body dualism that it ostensibly criticizes.”

The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment, Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook, Signs, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 35-67. pdf.

tl;dr: it’s hard to get past the (often deeply harmful) use of the body as metaphor when your entire framework for critique is grounded in drawing symbolism of larger things out of the everyday. like, if you can’t get past seeing your body as proof of your weakness, seeing your relationship with your body as emblematic of a larger issue with (say) women’s exclusion from political space through internalised misogyny is not necessarily gonna help you live an embodied life. it’s still all fucking metaphor. but retreat to some kinda pre-thought pure sensory experience is not gonna happen either: we are always already ascribing meaning to the body, to everything. where to from here?

there's our catastrophe

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved. ⚑ ♀

I just don’t like autobiography ok

about me

Just North of Something Important: "The market"

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved.

⚑ ♀