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

anyway rrrobyn and NV are talking about this in much better ways than i am and i have to go do the dishes. fwiw i think the "emperor has no clothes" arg. is kind of mistaken but i dont really like that fable. in my version everyone would turn to the little kid and say "duhhhhhh" and get naked too.

"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.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 7:08 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, not to be all 'you know not what you say' but 'careful building and clarifying of concepts' is not what medical writing tends to be about. and definitely not frequent summaries. that's ~didactic~ writing. this is writing that needs to, for the sake of space, tersely attend to all the practically innumerate contingencies (and the papers that splain them) and statistical assumptions that undergird the endeavor. if you want to be peer-reviewed, then erecting a thicket of densely cited and referential technical prose is the way to do it. if you want to be read and understood by ppl that lack the training and shop-talk of yr academic peers, then you ought to take a different tack.

Butler's style is certainly demanding, and I've also read critiques (maybe Nussbaum's? I don't remember) that suggest that her work suffers from not being more rigorously grounded in history and biology. As a somewhat sexually confused 19-year-old, though, I found her theories on gender performativity quite exciting.

xppppppps

I forget if it was actually Spender or Lakoff who was doing the talk-back to Chomsky and which one was doing the talk-back to the other of the pair (because I borrowed those books off a friend doing a PhD in linguistics, they were not mine, also did I mention I'm drunk) but they managed to have this dialogue in a way that they explained what the beef was, and I didn't *have* to read the previous book in order to understand what was being discussed.

I don't get the feeling I'd be able to do that with Butler.

maax's version of the Emperor fable is one of my favorite things btw

to either get this off track or back on track:
i am coming to feminism i guess through a back door. didnt study it all in college, but ive taken a bigger and bigger interest in it since i've been married. my wife didnt study it either and wouldnt categorize herself as a capital f feminist but she is a v strong influence to me and inspires me to be a better person and partner to her and i think learning more abt "women's issues" has been something that has ~opened mah eyes~ wrt my selfishness and privilege as a man.

i'll admit my academic knowledge is nil, i mostly read abt it online. i came to it thru reading a dude who turned out to be an out and out lech psychopath (who still writes p good things, just is personally skeezy 2 me now...hoping some of u know who i'm talking about).

now i'm interested in learning more bc i see sexist power dynamics all the time in my vocation as a teacher. i work in a low income school and gender norms are v traditional and they play out in a number of pernicious and frankly infuriating ways. i often feel pretty helpless in affecting a greater change other than to redirect boys tryina act hard with young women, but i dont know how to do this and still appeal to their "masculinity".

im rambling. short version: str8 married dude/teacher wants to know more about feminism and ways 2 b a feminist ally in lyfe.

lots of xps: judith, thanks for the Wilchins recommendation; I'll check it out.

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".

yeah WTF at this 600 page general relativity book I have, just say "mass bends space" and be done with it!

Also did I mention it is 1 in the morning and WTF am I doing arguing about Butler on the interweb when I don't even like Butler. *throws Man Made Language at Judith*

derrida is probably one of the best examples of meaning being performed instead of explained. its a tendency that is particularly strong in late 20th Century philosophy and probably accounts for a lot of the difficulty people might be having with it where they expect a different type of engagement. not that derrida is a walk in the park even when you consider it like this.

can God write a sentence so convoluted and post-everything that even She Herself cannot parse it? mmmmm..

i blame the french for everything

i shd note finally that i am not suggesting that butler is not difficult nor that shes not intentionally making herself difficult nor that shes even "right" or "rigorous" or anything. just defending a style, i suppose its antecedent is nietzsche or maybe heraclitus even. you know 'meaning as performance' 'performance as meaning'

lol xxp what plax said

right the incentives thing is my main point.

I'm not arguing that butler doesn't have important things to say, I'm arguing that humanities writing in general doesn't do itself any favors w/ impenetrability, in fact, there are prob lots of people out there who really would enjoy things butler has to say, and the fact that she's so stuck in her 'I'm not gonna be limited by traditional definitions of 'good writing'' prevents those people from reading her. like, wcc, for example...

xp * 1000 to max

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

― obliquity of the ecliptic (rrrobyn), Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:14 AM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, this is a terrible defense. if journalists and romance novelists rendered their work into interpretation-hostile gibberish, it would not change the essential intellectual content of that work. it would still be saying basically the same shit about roger's horse and santorum's surge. the difference is that it would become totally useless to the vast majority of people. that's the only real difference.

that's what's happened in academic writing. the tendency of some people (self-regarding academics) to pride themselves on their ability to wade through the oceans of gibberish to find a kernel of sense has created an institutional mania for obfuscation. the only point of the style is that it excludes and is difficult. it does not facilitate the transmission of ideas and information even to its audience. if the academic audience could easily read and understand it, they'd sneer at its simplicity.

dogg did professors beat you up or steal your girlfriend or something

i am not married or a teacher but kinda in the same sitch as m bison here, in that all these authors you guys are talking about are people i had only the briefest glancing experience with in college. as an english major, who even took a theory course! <-- granted i was p much stoned 100% of the time i read for it

but yeah str8 dude/apprentice-level member of a guild that wields outsized and undeserved influence on constructions of gender wants to know more about feminism and ways 2 b a feminist ally in lyfe

Let's be honest, as a 19-year-old, I was probably also attracted to Butler's difficulty, why because I was pretentious.

fucken book promised a thousand plateaus and i only counted 46

max!

iatee yeah i think maybe the biggest thing missing is a kind of 'translation' level for this stuff. like a "science journalism" layer in the way discourse gets dispersed. otoh i dont think professors would be particularly welcoming to being "translated"

Can someone wake me up when this gets back to "women's issues" and off bitching about academia and the performative construction of philosophical writing, pls? kthxbye

just to throw this out there, being involved in occupy dc has allowed me to plug into what it means to be an ally & engage in all kinds of learning through our decolonize & liberate gender WG

so like, getting involved with feminist activist circles is a really good way to engage with this stuff ime

without even having to wade through any long sentences

hmmm beginning to think wcc's idea of 'women's issues' is 'wcc's issues'

"if journalists and romance novelists rendered their work into interpretation-hostile gibberish, it would not change the essential intellectual content of that work. it would still be saying basically the same shit about roger's horse and santorum's surge. the difference is that it would become totally useless to the vast majority of people. that's the only real difference."

well tbf this is a point partially conceded by some of these ppl here

except that also the deployment of gibberish would actually be the trying-on-of-language to a concept that, if said outfit really worked, could be used to simplify things, ungibberishly.

hmmmm beginning to think that snipes about wcc's supposed self-centered "issue" are a little too ready to hand for ilxors, keep it positive ;)

Bcuz I really wanna see m bison and gbx (hasn't gbx already been posting on this thread and saying awesome stuffs or I am just drunk?) get some answers to those questions. Coz those are really really good questions to be asking. And questions I wanna see answered.

but 'careful building and clarifying of concepts' is not what medical writing tends to be about. and definitely not frequent summaries. that's ~didactic~ writing.

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:19 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

i dunno, man. medical writing usually strikes me as exceptionally clear and direct, and i know nothing about medicine. the terms may be unfamiliar, but the way information is communicated is very straightforward. the writing style you find in theory and philosophy is very, very different, imo. it's not technical. it's aggressively hostile to decoding, and it's very transparent about this.

man, this thread

^^ i feel like that post means something

I know that, like "is Butler obtuse and how can I show off my knowledge of Derrida to other ILX boys" is like fascinating to those who are showing off on this thread, but seriously, it's less "WCC issues" and more "hey, you guys have a billion other academia and philosophy threads to talk about this stuff on, and I would really like to see guys like m bison and gbx who are saying WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP?!?!? actually get some good pointers about what they can do to, you know, help.

what i was saying with the journalists/romance writers thing was that, in many ways, people who deal in ideas and communication of those ideas exist on many levels and are sorting through the same ideas but in different ways - imo you can't really judge which ways have more or less merit based on the form of communication - just because we have brilliant poetry that perfectly explains what it is to be a woman married living an unfulfilled life doesn't mean we don't need a non-fiction book based on in-the-field interviews or an academic texts that say the same thing in a different way

what i would hazard, con, is that the medical writing you're getting is like just a few levels down the rhetorical ladder from atul gawande or something. i'm talking about the ground level raw meat shit you see in journals with very funny names and very very narrow purviews

anyway

as an english major, who even took a theory course!

Critical theory didn't really permeate the English dept. of my college in the late '90s. I encountered Butler (and Foucault and Barthes et al.) while taking a cultural studies course at the British university where I studied abroad, and when I came back to the States, I enrolled in Contemporary Continental Philosophy to continue that path.

WCC, "feminist theory" is in the thread title for a reason. It's fair ground for discussion, imo.

That said, I'll repeat my suggestion to geebs & m bison: reaching out to local feminist activist groups (they often do book club stuff, have meetings, lots of material on their sites) can be really helpful.

I don't read medical journals but it's entirely possible that you could say 'they have a prob w/ poor writing too, prob for the same mix of cultural and incentive problems'

I don't know, trying to force an abrupt end to an ongoing discourse is nagl imho. As the great late 20th century philosopher George Constanza once said, "a subject matter should resolve itself based on its own momentum"

xxxxps

I think that dismissing or ignoring the questions of newbies who would like to get engaged in active change (except for Big Hoos) is also NAGL but whatevs.

eh?

An important principle here that we talk a lot about in my working group is "Step up, Step back." if you'll forgive the long excerpt:

“Step up” means that men who choose to identify as feminists (or, if you prefer, as “feminist allies” or “pro-feminists”) are called to take an active role in the anti-sexist movement. Building a genuinely egalitarian and non-violent society requires everyone’s involvement. Empowering women to defend themselves from rapists and harassers is important; raising a generation of young men to whom the idea of rape or harassment is anathema is also vital. We need men of all ages in the feminist movement to “step up” and commit themselves to embodying egalitarian principles in their private and public lives.

Stepping up means being willing to listen to women’s righteous anger. That doesn’t mean groveling on the ground in abject apology merely for having a penis — contrary to stereotype, that’s not what feminists (at least not any I’ve ever met) want. That means really hearing women, without giving into the temptation to become petulant, defensive, or hurt. It means realizing that each and every one of us is tangled in the Gordian knot of sexism, but that men and women are entangled in different ways that almost invariably cause greater suffering to the latter. Stepping up doesn’t mean denying that, as the old saying goes, The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (TPHMT). It means understanding that in feminist spaces, to focus on male suffering both suggests a false equivalence and derails the most vital anti-sexist work.

Stepping up means, of course, being willing to confront other men. I’ve said over and over again that the acid test of a man’s commitment to feminism often comes not only in terms of how he treats women, but also how he speaks about women when he’s in all-male spaces. Many young men are earnest about living out feminist principles when around women (of course, some like Amelia’s troll and the lamentable Kyle Payne obviously aren’t.) But get them around their “bros” and their words change. Or, as is more often the case, they may not join in on sexist banter — but they fail to raise vocal objection to it. Stepping up means challenging the jokes and complaints and objectifying remarks that are so much a part of the conversation in all-male spaces. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a sine qua non of being a feminist ally.

Stepping back means acknowledging that in almost every instance, feminist organizations ought to be led by women. It means that men in feminist spaces need to check themselves before they pursue leadership roles. While that might seem unfair, arguing that biological sex should have no bearing on who wields authority in a feminist organization fails to take into account the myriad ways in which the wider world discriminates against women. Even now, we still socialize young men to be assertive and young women to be deferential. (Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but not enough to disprove that rule.) Part of undoing that socialization for women means pushing themselves to take on leadership positions even if they feel awkward about doing so; part of undoing that socialization for young men means holding themselves back from those same offices.

Stepping back doesn’t mean men should never speak up in feminist spaces. Stepping back is not about silently serving in the background. Stepping back is about the willingness to engage in self-reflection, to defer, and remembering that the most important job feminist men have within the movement is not to lead women but to serve as role models to other men. Stepping back is a way of renouncing the “knight in shining armor” tendency that afflicts many young men who first come to anti-sexist work. Women need colleagues and partners on this journey, not rescuers or substitute father figures.

so with that said i'm gonna step back

what i would hazard, con, is that the medical writing you're getting is like just a few levels down the rhetorical ladder from atul gawande or something. i'm talking about the ground level raw meat shit you see in journals with very funny names and very very narrow purviews

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:33 PM (5 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe, but i used to prep presentation materials for medical conferences, so i'm pretty familiar with the "raw meat" of medical writing, both figuratively and literally. what tends to make it impenetrable is either technical language or poor writing. i feel that in philosophy and crit circles, it's the product of a deliberately chosen (if perhaps unconsciously chosen) culture of obfuscation and poor writing. but that's just me, and i'm cool with letting this drop as i've said more than enough on the topic.

I understand that theory is an important part of the discussion of this thread, but I would just like to see it circle back to praxis when someone asks. If I can say that without being accused of having ~issues~.

x-post to Hoos bringing exactly the sort of thing I wanted to see, so bravo, well done hoos.

the tendency of some people (self-regarding academics) to pride themselves on their ability to wade through the oceans of gibberish to find a kernel of sense has created an institutional mania for obfuscation. the only point of the style is that it excludes and is difficult. it does not facilitate the transmission of ideas and information even to its audience. if the academic audience could easily read and understand it, they'd sneer at its simplicity.

no

oop, one more (i promise):

I don't read medical journals but it's entirely possible that you could say 'they have a prob w/ poor writing too, prob for the same mix of cultural and incentive problems'

― iatee, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 5:35 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

that's not true though. medical journals are like guidebooks for mechanics. doctors and mechanics are about equally averse to obfuscation. they just want the relevant information to be delivered in an efficient, sensible, and technically precise manner. writing shit that makes people tear their hair out with the "difficulty" would guarantee that you'd never get published in most medical journals.

nice excerpt, hoos
being a true colleague and a partner to women and feminism, even if you don't quite understand it all but are willing to watch, listen and learn, is more important than reading all the books - the books (theory and otherwise) are just a part of the broader understanding obv