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

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

if you're worth your academic salt

max that doesn't rule out the fact that the big concepts inside those books could have been expressed more clearly if that were really an important goal or something that was rewarded within the discipline

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

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 4:51 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

eh, i don't think it's that at all. i don't object to complex ideas or sentences, so long as they're the best way to get an idea across. i do get annoyed by shitty, lazy writing. and i hate shitty lazy writing that bends over backwards in to convey really simple ideas in a hideously complex fashion, especially when the motive is so obviously a form of intellectual self-aggrandizement. how do you know whether or not your "brilliant" idea has to be conveyed in a complex fashion? you try to convey it as simply as possible and go with what works best. what you DON'T do is arrange it into endlessly looping unbroken chunks generously larded w jargon, redundancy and vague references to other texts. that's a ploy, and everybody knows it.

Max that is a wonderful post, it perfectly illustrates the pleasure and search for meaning, understanding without having to know every single thing that has been said about a certain subject before, without having to know the 'canon'.

many xps

i think the idea that "big concepts" are sitting there outside language waiting for a nice clean signpost is one of the problems "poststructuralist" philosophers are wrestling with

i was just gonna add but i see you did already rrrobyn that i see that highblown stuff the way i see medical journal articles. the cramped, tediously precise language of a clinical trial or w/e is not at all the way anyone, even a medico, would speak with clarity about the subject---it's just how you go around splaining it

^ this!
and it's okay and i don't think it limits the information to the realm of the "experts" either

i don't know, if you think philosophy is trying to bring about new concepts and ideas as a way of tactically engaging with the world, then those concepts are going to be unrecognisable at first. things to be grappled with.

that's a ploy, and everybody knows it.

"everybody" is working so hard here i feel sorry for it

it's one level of the information, and then it gets talked about at another level and so on (in class, in the media, in another discipline, by other people who use different words to express their ideas, etc etc)
xp

I think it's definitely a zen/patience thing. And honestly, I think I was maybe a little young, myself, to really be able to critically read Derrida or Deleuze or whoever 'successfully', you know? I honestly didn't entirely understand the COURSE when I took it, lol.

Maybe I could do with circling back to some of this stuff and actually reading it with more context now than I had back then.

Fwiw, Butler has actually copped to deliberately using language in a non-straightforward way, viz. the preface to the 10th-anniversary edition of Gender Trouble:

It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty?

It's not that the concepts are unrecognisable, it's that they are dressed up in clothes to make them look more out-there, more unrecognisable than they really are. And that's when I get a real case of the Emperor's New Footnotes about it.

albeit a completely unsubstantiated one

'gender trouble' isnt exactly a book for 'gender amateurs'

lol

i was just gonna add but i see you did already rrrobyn that i see that highblown stuff the way i see medical journal articles. the cramped, tediously precise language of a clinical trial or w/e is not at all the way anyone, even a medico, would speak with clarity about the subject---it's just how you go around splaining it

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:03 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark

"tedious precision" is by no means the problem that i and (i think) others are objecting to. some tedious, hard-science-style precision would be great. careful building and clarifying of concepts. frequent summaries. would be awesome. the problem is the endless, airy abstractions that clearly take pleasure in adding a few hundred extra words wherever possible.

ooh I like that quote, jaymc..

'consumer expectations of intellectual life' lmao

xp

yeah jaymc, this is why i said that "difficult" writing can have purposes other than "to make you, the hard-working reader on the street, feel bad"

tautologies were my biggest problem. when the paragraph becomes part of a chapter long ourobourous that you need a flowchart to parse...

but I was a rube, to be honest. probably still am.

It's not that the concepts are unrecognisable, it's that they are dressed up in clothes to make them look more out-there, more unrecognisable than they really are. And that's when I get a real case of the Emperor's New Footnotes about it.

― White Chocolate Cheesecake, Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:07 AM (30 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it seems to me that the language is intended to place such-and-such in an ongoing ~discourse~; it's not that the ideas are intended to be unrecognizable, it's that the writer is in conversation with ideas that have a history, and the work is an attempt to become a properly contextualized part of that history.

love that butler

hoos otm

well i'm just paraphrasing deleuze.

the problem is the endless, airy abstractions that clearly take pleasure in adding a few hundred extra words wherever possible.

when this is done, it seems to me to be more in the vein of what max was saying re: poetic texts - working through the ideas through writing, writing as conversation with previous texts, writing as process, etc

here is my consumer expectations for intellectual life: 'if you want many people to read and understand what you say, you should attempt to make your language as readable and understandable as possible.'

i think the idea that "big concepts" are sitting there outside language waiting for a nice clean signpost is one of the problems "poststructuralist" philosophers are wrestling with

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), donderdag 16 februari 2012 2:02 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, and not just for "poststructuralists". It's a problem for most philosophers now (though in a way all philosophers are poststructuralists now in this day and age). The desire from the reading audience (students, media) and even institutions like universities, right now is focused so much on popularised philosophy, the kind that borders on sociology, that it leaves no room for "hardcore" philosophy. Another subject and future thread all together, but still.

lol judith butler is pretty well cited so i'd saying she is doing as well as she wants to in that regard.

xp

the plain reader be damned imo.

out.

if you think philosophy is trying to bring about new concepts and ideas as a way of tactically engaging with the world, then those concepts are going to be unrecognisable at first. things to be grappled with.

― judith, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:05 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is simply untrue. i reject this thinking entirely. it's what causes these people to dress up their perfectly ordinary ideas (and that's the crux) in ridiculously overblown language. new ideas can easily be communicated clearly. perfect example in that quote from upthread. the point boiled down to: "the structures of oppression are not fixed. rather, they exist in time. consequently, they must be reasserted." but this basic and easily grasped concept was dressed up in piles of gibberish in order to make it seem more serious, difficult and "academic-y".

i don't think most academics want some kind of consumer majority to read and understand what they say!
if they did, they'd be journalists or romance novelists or something!
xps

eh, i don't think it's that at all. i don't object to complex ideas or sentences, so long as they're the best way to get an idea across. i do get annoyed by shitty, lazy writing. and i hate shitty lazy writing that bends over backwards in to convey really simple ideas in a hideously complex fashion, especially when the motive is so obviously a form of intellectual self-aggrandizement. how do you know whether or not your "brilliant" idea has to be conveyed in a complex fashion? you try to convey it as simply as possible and go with what works best. what you DON'T do is arrange it into endlessly looping unbroken chunks generously larded w jargon, redundancy and vague references to other texts. that's a ploy, and everybody knows it.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, 16 February 2012 01:01 (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"keep it simple"

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...)

This was exactly what I was asking about upthread; who are the interpreters that people in gender studies would trust/recommend? I'm not looking for a single book that unlocks all the secrets at once, but some recommendations for the layperson that give a feel for the landscape. If the answer is "it's not that easy, you can't isolate this area of thought and jump in" or "it's like poetry, the value of the text is not in the content and is therefore unsummarisable" that's ok too I guess.

max that doesn't rule out the fact that the big concepts inside those books could have been expressed more clearly if that were really an important goal or something that was rewarded within the discipline

― iatee, Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:01 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is what i'm getting at though--in an important way, i think, someone like butler ~isn't really talking to us~. she's not writing for her ideas to be understood by some imagined mass audience that's unfamiliar with the ground she's exploring. she's very much talking to, say, Althusser, more than she's talking to you or me.

like (i think?) emily said upthread--she's doing the experiments, so to speak, we're just here to write about the implications of the results.