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

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

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