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

It's def one thing to question the efficacy of anger and another to question it's validity. You can even share your anger in an explicitly non-angry way I think - ymmv but ime consensus building requires some level of tonal compatibility. idk.

Kendall has already said that she was interviewed for two hours but what was quoted was all they ended up printing.

Yes, that's how journalism works in an article of this length. She doesn't claim she was misquoted.

What I took from this is there's not a clean binary between justifiably angry people with less privilege and a thoughtless or malicious privileged elite. When most of the interviewees criticising this discourse are WOC, one of whom is trans and one of whom coined the word "intersectionality", they deserve to be heard. This, for example, seems like a real attempt at balance by both Cooper and the reporter:

There’s a shorthand way of talking about online feminist arguments that pits middle-class white women against all the groups they oppress. Clearly, there’s some truth here: privileged white people dominate feminism, just as they do most other sectors of American life. Brittney Cooper, an assistant professor at Rutgers and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective blog, is one of the black women who participated in #Femfuture, and she has spoken out against the viciousness that dominates Twitter. But she also emphasizes that the resentment expressed online is rooted in something real.

“I want to be clear: I think there’s an actual injury,” Cooper says. The online feminist efflorescence a few years back led to book deals and writing careers for far more white women than women of color. “Black women are brought into these mainstream feminist websites to bring a little bit of color or a little bit of diversity, but that doesn’t parlay into other career advancement opportunities.” On Twitter, by contrast, women of color, trans women and other people who feel silenced can amplify one another’s voices, talking back to people with power in an unparalleled way.

That doesn’t mean, though, that social media’s climate of perpetual outrage and hair-trigger offense is constructive. “There is a problem with toxicity on Twitter and in social media,” Cooper says. “I think we have to say that. I’m not sure that black women are benefiting from the toxicity.”

yeah when the "efficacy of anger" is being questioned in response to a person being actually justifiably angry in a given moment, well, that's a pretty fucked up response

idk, it's like a dale carnegie thing. ppl respond to certain tones + affects better than others. ppl generally don't respond well to being yelled at.

re: unity vs fragmentation, i feel like this unavoidable conflict between diversity-of-voice+singularity-of-purpose that keeps confusing and slowing the left is exactly the deep human-condition individual/communal conflict that needs to be addressed, understood, not transcended but somehow absorbed, digested, synthesized, in order to accomplish any of the dreams of progress and emancipation we fucked up so badly in so many different ways in the 20c; it is in some ways The Only Problem, so i have a lot of patience for this agonizingly slow process of exegesis even if the world seems to be collapsing as we do it.

like sure, the anger is legitimate. but that doesn't mean tactics are off the table does it? xp

oppressed people don't have the privilege of maintaining emotional distance from the subject of oppression, demanding different tone when these things re being discussed is p fucked up

Yes, that's how journalism works in an article of this length. She doesn't claim she was misquoted.

Yes, she wasn't misquoted per se, but she still clearly isn't happy with the way it was contextualized within the piece.

oppressed people don't have the privilege of maintaining emotional distance from the subject of oppression, demanding different tone when these things re being discussed is p fucked up

― 1 P.3. Eternal (roxymuzak), Wednesday, January 29, 2014 1:30 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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expression of anger can be a "tactic," but that's not even the problem with tone policing

right--for people whose daily lives and histories are intertwined with these questions, it's not a clinical exercise in argumentation

iirc dan said something abt this somewhere on ilx recently that i can't find atm but it was really well put

xp i understand your pov roxy, and i don't think anyone has to suppress all emotions. but i have heard oppressed people discuss their oppression without explicit tonal anger (and also without blunting the emotional impact of the communication).

"ppl respond to certain tones + affects better than others" = "oppressors get to decide how the conversation goes, sorry"

i just want it to be expressed with minimal jargon so that the message is more widely spread. when you have to learn the vocabulary before you understand the grievance, the righteousness is diluted imo.

xp Well of course she's not happy, because many of the voices in the piece are critical of her approach. A reporter doesn't have to make every interviewee happy - the responsibility is only to choose representative and accurate quotes from each interview. MK puts her case pretty strongly towards the end imo.

That you might have to put in some effort to learn a word or two to understand something a marginalized individual or group is trying to say, good god, the pain

Listen, that's part of my job, to teach people new words -- it's not as easy as you think it is.

it's a shame that non-snarky, non-angry communications are considered tools of the patriarchy - being respectful, esp to ppl in your own movement with whom you disagree, is not a mandate from the oppressor. it's how all kinds of communities form consensus. where are all these successful leftist movements that are derisive + sarcastic?

multi-xp

There are a lot of ways to accrue power in a group. Occupying the moral high ground can be a potent source of power, when all parties in the group agree that morality is an extremely valuable quality. The politics of race and gender are heavily reliant on asserting moral power, for obvious reasons. It has been their major tool in winning political rights.

Once it is well-established that this moral high ground grants power, the battle over who owns it can get pretty intense. As anyone who has spent time in progressive circles can testify, that battle over moral ascendance can easily turn to infighting, because, if anything, these are groups where the prestige of morality is sky high and even small increments of moral superiority can lead to increased power within the group, so that each increment is fiercely contested. It just seems to come with the territory.

RE: vocabulary, etc.

Sure, but so isn't trying to explain the daily reality of their lives. They have no obligation to make their message easy to swallow, including vocabulary. Yes, they want to be heard, but the privileged should get on their level, not the other way around.

righteous anger is not the same thing as snark/derision

Well part of the jargon thing is that academics have conferences, academics get published, academics get quoted in thinkpieces, and academics are part of the system that "wins" at tonal games, even if the material is NOT as reasonable, neutral, even-handed, self-evident, etc as the tone implies. If you want to hear people's real stories without jargon you have to go out and ask them, or join groups where normal people get the space to talk.

LL, I know for a fact that you DO hear people's real stories all the time and also that as a teacher you have a greater-than-usual interest in clarity and communicability.

the problem with academic jargon isn't whether or not white middle-class people understand it, it's that it marginalises a lot of people that those academics purport to represent and speak on behalf of

Murgatroid, i agree that ethically, the obligation to come to the table is on the oppressor, not the oppressed. but practically, the oppressed don't have the luxury of waiting around for the privileged to get on board from their own volition. the person who has the most at stake is the person who often has to make the most concessions - rhetorically if not politically.

indeed i do
also most of my students are WoC (i know this acronym; they likely do not), not privileged people too lazy/privved out to learn some new words

that was xp to IO, sorry

it's a shame that non-snarky, non-angry communications are considered tools of the patriarchy - being respectful, esp to ppl in your own movement with whom you disagree, is not a mandate from the oppressor.

What is considered "respectful" is not a one-size-fits-all constant, though!! Anyway, respect as a concept is maybe not the most useful, it's very intertwined with issues of status and the various ways of assigning status, and it's just super hard to make it work for you free of those associations. But if instead of respect, we operate out of LOVE, that's different. Love has room for ppl to make mistakes, and it's only possible WITH ACCOUNTABILITY. So anger experienced in love is different, and the options available to people that are in line with their dignity and self-interest and self-preservation are wider in an environment held together with love.

in other words lex super otm!!

In my experience w/ the kind of internet communities being discussed in the article, the anger is not the loving kind but the snarky/sarcastic kind. I don't want to pain too broad a brush, some ppl are excellent at making critiques that are easily assimilated. But on tumblr, twitter, ilx, etc, this is a rarity ime. Most of the time it's dismissive (and maybe justifiably so, but not productively so).

being earnestly nice and caring has never really caught on ime

anger experienced in love is different, and the options available to people that are in line with their dignity and self-interest and self-preservation are wider in an environment held together with love.

^^ bears repeating endlessly

xp Murgatroid, I'm unsympathetic to many complaints about jargon because the most important concepts aren't that hard to learn and grasp but "no obligation to make their message easy to swallow, including vocabulary" goes against every rule of effective political rhetoric. Anybody who wants people to listen and respond needs to think about the language they use, whoever they may be.

Anybody who wants people to listen and respond needs to think about the language they use, whoever they may be.
DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUH
sorry

The thing is, the people who most often use academic jargon, as you guys call it, don't even seem to be aiming it at a wide audience. They are writing for the privileged, those who have the time and access to do their research as to not be alienated by the conversation. It creates a bubble, unfortunately, and as for how to stop this kind of circle from happening, I have no answers as I am a bit outside of it. I do agree with lex that sometimes, the language alienates those it speaks for, but I don't think the answer is to simplify things until the marginalized can't speak of their daily lives with precision.

This blog post from awhile back explains my stance better than I could: http://www.redlightpolitics.info/post/71842333716/i-cant-think-of-any-high-profile-white-uk-feminist (it's pretty academic in itself, I know)

"guys"

My apologies, "some of you"

when it comes to academic bubbles and jargon i basically think a bit of checking one's privilege would not go amiss, just as people in media bubbles with platforms are correctly encouraged to do. i cannot believe it's possible to speak on an oppressed group's behalf while simultaneously excluding them from the conversation.

(MK, as much as i respect her, was guilty of doing this when a WOC friend of mine attempted to talk to her about these issues a couple of months ago on twitter)

some of that jargon is created by oppressed ppl tho

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