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

pretty sure you wouldn't understand the universe afterwards either fwiw

that's the joek!

chomsky is a chill bro and all but yes, structural linguistics, a bit passe.

never found butler anything but dense yet clear tbh, never sure where these ideas of her being such a terrible writer come from.

most philosophy texts are not good at telling you what the secret true state and meaning of the world is tho, this is true

ha, hadn't seen this martha nussbaum quote before

Nussbaum's "The Professor Parody" essay also raised the issue of Butler's style, calling it "ponderous and obscure" and "dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding."[54]

she kind of goes in on butler and does not stop in this essay http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

There are writers (whose exact names escape me because I'm drunk - Barrow, Penrose spring to mind) who do *exactly this*. They write about quantum physics in such a way to make it accessible. People like this, I have respect for as writers and thinkers.

tbh i hate the kind of academic that is afraid they are being tricked by texts they don't understand

continually mystified/bummed that these threads seem to inevitably devolve into CWW hostility tbh

Hey, I've got some yapping assholes buzzing round me telling me how ~hostile~ I am, before I've even got hostile, and then get all preachy when they manage to poke and prod me into anger - hey, you might get a bit fucking cranky after a while of that, too, you know.

Yes, but they don't actually give anybody any skills to handle quantum physics. And anyone who reads them will be reading ideas based on scientific testing but filtered through theory.

xxpost

there is a jargon to a lot of this stuff that becomes "familiar" with time but i think it's okay that difficult ideas are difficult. i couldn't pick up a quantum physics text and just breeze thru it until i understood the universe either.

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is totally changing the subject, but i have absolutely zero tolerance for obfuscatory overwriting in an academic critical/theoretical context. that shit is the biggest, most transparent load of horseshit in the world. if any of the people posting in this thread are academic type people, i really, really hope you don't write like that.

I'm not an academic. I never pretended to be. I'm an autodidact in pretty much everything. I see how a lot of people use walls of academia to keep the riffraff like me out, and hey, I'm suspicious of it.

they don't use it to keep you out, they use it to justify their having a job

they don't really care about you

since i know you're not an academic i wasn't criticising you there either.

put it another way - what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

ha, this topic has given us surprise WCC/contenderizer agreement

because you can spout untruths half-truths and platitudes in transparent orderly prose too

Academia is pretty much my family business and has been for generations, they kinda do care about me ha ha, at least I hope so.

what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

it annoys me in the same way that most bad writing annoys me.

eh it is not something that concerns me much these days as i live in my own little world (cept when i tried to explain deleuze to someone doing a phd in philosophy of science the other night, drunkenly. didn't go v well), but it just strikes me as odd that we're still in a place where people think that the sole inviolable rule of serious academic/theoretical writing is to be clear precise and to the point. (um, i think i'm xposting terribly here, should learn to type more quickly.)

Well, obviously as an academic I'm not welcome in this thread any more. So I'll see myself out. Bye, guys.

it's down to the privileging of certain forms of logic and truth i think

I've been following this thread with interest, though my knowledge/experience here is slight and I don't have much to add to the debate. The analogy with science writing made me think of a question though: what are the equivalent of good "popular science" books wrt feminism? I don't have the training (or the time, tbh) to jump into Judith Butler and get much out of it but I would like to read a good accessible introduction to the issues she and her peers discuss.

put it another way - what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

It doesn't make me angry. It does make me think that they're *hiding* something - like, maybe they don't understand their subject quite as well as they represent themselves if they can't come up with a usable metaphor for it.

Like, I don't understand a popular science book to enable me to walk into the Hadron Supercollider and switch on all the buttons, but understanding what they theories are about, and what they are for - they can accomplish that in a clear and straightforward way, even about something as confusing and brain-bending as the weirdness of quantum physics. But, like, Butler, she doesn't want to come up with a helpful metaphor to make you understand. She wraps everything in allusions to references with subclauses chock full of namedrops of disciplines she hopes you haven't heard of.

privileging good writing in the humanities should be the same thing as privileging 'good math' in science.

what makes people so angry about text they don't "understand"?

it annoys me in the same way that most bad writing annoys me.

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), donderdag 16 februari 2012 1:42 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SO text you don't understand annoys you like bad writing? I think NV has a very good point here tbh. The annoyance really isn't with that with which you don't understand, rather with you yourself not understanding it. I get that so many times tbh

there is a certain performative difficulty in butlers work, the complexity of the text as a set of entanglements in order to mirror the complex social configurations she is writing about. yes.

― judith, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:30 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

i love most of what you've said itt, judith, but i can't get on board w this. making complicated things seem complicated is dead easy. any hack can do it. hell, it's easy to do it even with simple things. making complicated things seem clear, however, is very, very hard.

there's a complex relationship between intellectual competition, narcissism and defensiveness that is just painfully obvious in a lot of "sophisticated" academic/critical/philosophical writing. no matter how much i sympathize with the forces that motivate it (it's their job to seem smart and someone else is always after the same grant money), i simply cannot abide it.

lol, WCC and i are on the same side now. go team philistine!

I'm still kinda scarred from 2 years of Crit Theory...Heidegger was pretty much where I threw in the towel, as far as impenetrability goes.

But I think it's a lot to do with patience, and being invested in the subject. I have mad respect for people who can parse Butler, for academics as well... I guess if anything the impenetrability makes me hate myself more than the subject. Like 'ugh, brain, WORK dammit'

i was merely pointing out that she was influential. her influence had permeated a lot of stuff you do like even if you don't dig her specifically. this was a sidenote to my main point which was really about who is and isn't allowed to speak about things. you keep mentioning how important and viscerally you feel these things. but other people feel and care about them too. people who aren't women. i don't think i should have to apologise for pointing that out. i mention butler more as somebody who isn't a gay man but whose work has been really influential for a lot of gay men. i was thinking more about overlapping identifications, etc. the trickiness of positionality.

roland barthes really could have used an interlocutor is what i mean

^ but at least he's kind of funny and charming about the impenetrability

she is writing for a different audience then. not everybody has to be a populariser? and i think it's an unsupported assumption that there must be sleight of hand or dishonesty because a writer isn't writing what you want to read.

Like, I don't understand a popular science book to enable me to walk into the Hadron Supercollider and switch on all the buttons, but understanding what they theories are about, and what they are for - they can accomplish that in a clear and straightforward way, even about something as confusing and brain-bending as the weirdness of quantum physics. But, like, Butler, she doesn't want to come up with a helpful metaphor to make you understand. She wraps everything in allusions to references with subclauses chock full of namedrops of disciplines she hopes you haven't heard of.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:46 AM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Okay, one last thing before I do fuck off out of here. THIS IS BECAUSE THE WORK OF PHILOSOPHY IS NOT IN A LABORATORY, IT IS IN WRITING. What you are looking for is a primer guide. What Butler provides IS THE RESEARCH.

what are the equivalent of good "popular science" books wrt feminism?

Like popular science, maybe you should pick a specific discipline that you want to concentrate on, because it's hard to give you a book that's gonna take on Biology, Chemistry, Relativity, Quantum Physics and Newtonian Physics all in one handy little pamphlet?

I haven't read the recent crop of overviews (Full Frontal Feminism, How To Be A Woman come up in conversations) because I'm a little beyond that so I'm probably useless to ask.

I guess if anything the impenetrability makes me hate myself more than the subject. Like 'ugh, brain, WORK dammit'

― Janet Snakehole (VegemiteGrrl), Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:48 AM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what makes me angry is when shitty writing makes perfectly smart people feel like this about themselves. it used to make me feel thick as well, can't remember what finally clicked and made me realise it wasn't me, it was the writers

the standard that some of you want to hold philosophical writing to seems to be the exact unexamined norm that much of the writing you're antagonistic to is setting out to unravel, which might account for a problem with it not being the thing you think it has to be

My Crit Theory hangups/hangover is probably another part of why I hang back in gender discussions. It's like watching people play double-dutch jump rope...I gotta get the mental hang of gender-speak before I climb on board. It takes me a while to get over my natural inclination to just recoil at the language, more than anything. Which is not on anyone but me, because you guys are all *really* good jump-ropers, fyi

yeah i've gotten so dumb, i'm gonna go back and reread all my books

oof man i'm out of here

privileging good writing in the humanities should be the same thing as privileging 'good math' in science.

― iatee, Thursday, 16 February 2012 00:46 (3 minutes ago)

it's more like privileging elegant maths in science though.

maybe i'm misremembering, but didn't you say something way upthread about the importance of changing patterns of thought in these matters rather than just having a 'case' heard? and isn't that exactly what seemingly obscurantist writing is often trying to do, in a v fundamental way?

harbl you are intimidatingly smart

only to my cat
are you my cat?!?!!

one thing that helped me feel less threatened by/defensive about whatever were talking about here, 'poststructuralism' or what have you, is to consider the texts in the same terms you might consider poetry or fiction, rather than say popular philosophy or science, i.e. reading through them for concepts and ideas and patterns that resonate or echo w/ me rather than for 'explanations' or 'directives' or whatever

consider too that 'gender trouble' isnt exactly a book for 'gender amateurs' or whatever. in the sense that these texts are rooted very deeply in specific academic concepts ie in the midst of 'important' academic battles, responding to or anticipating their own reception, etc.

this isnt to say that "derrida is just poetry man" or whatever but i think a lot of time its easy to get frustrated when something doesnt just unwrap itself for you. also for whatever reasons 'poststructuralism' seems to have a sort of totemic value among too-cool assholes in college so i think that turns people off. oh well. the nazis loved nietzsche so.

this is like 1m xps so sorry if im repeating someone

like does yeats or whatever make you feel "dumb"? i doubt it. but you wouldnt argue you necc understand all of it, either.

no I think that's good advice, max

max otm

but can we plz clear up if plax is harbl's cat? I like this idea

this was a sidenote to my main point which was really about who is and isn't allowed to speak about things. you keep mentioning how important and viscerally you feel these things. but other people feel and care about them too. people who aren't women. i don't think i should have to apologise for pointing that out. i mention butler more as somebody who isn't a gay man but whose work has been really influential for a lot of gay men. i was thinking more about overlapping identifications, etc. the trickiness of positionality.

I never said that men were not allowed to speak about gender - or even about "women's issues". A lot of people had these conversations with themselves, where they represented me as saying that, when I was saying things like:

-no batshit theories about testosterone without citations
-women should define being a woman, rather than ~patriarchy~
-often, when men join conversations about women those conversations tend to get very dominated by men and the women's voices disappear
-if you are a man who wants to speak about women's issues, you should check your privilege before speaking

^^^^^somehow all of this got translated into "WCC does not want men to speak at all, ever" - this kind of misrepresentation makes WCC very, very angry.

imo those writers aren't writing to lay audiences though or even MA students - it's hard to read because a) they're writing for themselves, writing as work itself, and b) they're writing to their peers because they're all doing research in a similar area and attempting to move the dialogue forward/around.

so no one should feel stupid reading those texts - they are difficult and require a certain level of education/knowledge rather than a certain level of intelligence. as with science, it takes an interpreter/another writer/media/etc to translate the meat of the text so that everyone can understand it and see how it fits in everyday life (which it may or may not do...)

so many xps

i totally approach this stuff like max, the pleasure of the text is an important part of the experience of it. pleasure not being dependent on parsing every word in one run through. different kind of reading etc.

oh max said what i said in a way too before i said it

sometimes you have to enjoy the struggle of the text