Another Woman Hounded Out of Employment...

It’s meant to be bland reassuring bollocks-speak to appease the attackers

I agree. I think it's deliberately vague so that it can be read either way. I would have more respect for them if they'd made a statement about freedom of speech but I suspect they think this is the best way to shut things down and let it blow over.

Thread for Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3413036-Class-and-Identity-Politics-Mark-Fishers-Exiting-the-Vampire-Castle?watched=1

That essay is amazing and really deserves its own thread. yes I've read it. There are so many insights in that essay.

It’s meant to be bland reassuring bollocks-speak to appease the attackers because (hopefully ) they have not actually sacked her / discontinued her contract.

As an art college they would serve themselves better by emphasising the importance of freedom of expression.

So much for not making another statement. They'd been better sticking to that.

I think it could be read either way but first and second glance reads like it isn't supportive of Nina.

The uni aren't handling this very well.

No it's criticising Nina for being a bigot. People needed protecting from her, they're saying.

Well, Nina is a woman and this has a protected characteristic so it could be read either way. Don’t know what to think of that, tbh.

LJMU have updated their statement. Am in a rush but just thought I'd put it on here.

Unless I'm reading it wrong it doesn't sound supportive of Nina.

twitter.com/ljmu/status/1058373785592758272?s=21

Great posts, Joan. Agree with everything you've said.

Someone upthread (kendoddsdadsdogsdead18?)asked about complaining to the University. Anyone can make a complaint to a University but it is more effective if you have the name of a specific student. Neither of TWP are LJMU students but the other student whose Twitter was screenshot a few pages back most certainly is. I linked in a previous to the student discipline policy at LJMU which explains that to make a complaint, you contact the Student Governance Office at [email protected] with 'full details of the incidents and should include any evidence available'.

Look to women like the Julies Burchill and Bindel for authentic working class voices that are literate while still being able to express righteous anger and controversial views that challenge the imagined superiority and cultures of the 'elite' class.

The pubes no doubt hate both of these women and would like to see them silenced

Oh and also it matters because they have adopted that shitty fake working class yoof accent in their writing which doesn't affect them negatively because they can code switch at will (they do it throughout their interviews and writing if you look), they are using it as an identity for sales, but working class women (and men) have to live with those stereotypes about our 'illiteracy' and behaving 'common'. We have to live with the stereotypes of Vicky Pollard etc.

Excellent post Joan.

I don't know what class they are-not sure why it matters

It matters because they are representing themselves as rebels against upper class art culture (and getting lauded for it) while attacking the rights of women which will overwhelmingly impact working class women (as we rely upon access to sex based public resources that are under threat by TRA demands, for one thing). It matters because this specific attack on Nina Edge impacts in a big way on a community involved in grassroots actions to protect and preserve itself and Edge as an artist who provides important support for that.

It is important because they are attacking feminist activists (Inc many working class women themselves e.g. Julie Bindel) and academics who provide representation and inspiration for women who are developing their analysis of male supremacy and therefore will be considering and creating activism to thwart it, as well as pushing for women-centred cultural and political changes that will, again, impact working class women who rely on public services, and will benefit from equal pay (which has disproportionate impact on lesbian couples) , support for mums, support for women in crisis (e.g. mental health, male violence at home), maternity services, public toilets and changing facilities, etc etc etc. And we haven't even got into the topic of working class girls, who are being indoctrinated into self hatred while being denied safe spaces in the schools most of them have to be at all day 5 days a week compulsarily (unless they are in the minority who are home educated).

The white pubes are appropriating our voices as working class women and attacking our precarious rights and the feminist activists who fight for our rights. That matters!

Great description. Adolph Reed was also someone I found when looking into critiques of identity politics.

That essay is amazing and really deserves its own thread.

NotMeOhNo wrote: My view is that identity politics favours the class elites of all marginalised groups.

Mark Fisher's Exiting the Vampire Castle (2013) is an interesting essay about class and identity politics (some of the original formatting lost from quotation):

The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.

The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.

I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.

www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/mark-fisher/exiting-vampire-castle

I don't know what class they are-not sure why it matters-but they are self absorbed twats.
There are a LOT of subjects and injustices worth fighting for in this world. The right to get people sacked because they don't think men are literally women is not one of them.

My view is that identity politics favours the class elites of all marginalised groups. That's why it is such a repellent, anti-collective, hail-thy-leader ideology.

I'm with Joan. More bourgeois tells than you could shake a stick at. Particularly the sharp elbows.

I've just been reading a couple of interviews the white pube have done. My conclusion (as an actual working class woman) is that the pair of them are fakers. They're doing a horrible parody of working class young voices, which they are able to get away with and get noticed for precisely because they are not working class.

Joan 👏👏👏👏👏

Jean - I suspect that XVLX is actually half of The White Pube. She only opened an account yesterday.

Xlvx

I didn't say they are upper class, I said they aren't working class. Your points are all odd to the point they seem deliberately disingenuous.

1. Most kids from wealthy families go to university even if they don't need to, everyone knows that, and nepotistic networking is enabled quite nicely there.

2. I expect few families, even wealthy ones, just buy their kids flats when they've just left uni.

3. Mummy and daddy do fund them, they provide them with homes and support them while they write trash on the internet about other people's actual work.

4. A woman speaking about the danger and impact of opening women's spaces to men is not comparable to racism or homophobia. When comparing women and men's positions in society, it is women who are the marginalised and oppressed group. You have it the exactly backwards in your analogy. Insisting that women (female people) submit our language, identity, boundaries and spaces to men (male people) is a male supremacist position. How those men 'identify' is irrelevant.

And university students aren't 'children' who need to be protected from 'teachers' - they are young adults who should expect that their views will be challenged, and that they should work on developing informed arguments.

5. Criticism is not just talking shit, or it shouldn't be - it is the practice and communication of a critical analysis.

I don't think you have an argument here, you're just being defensive because I said the pubes are performing a parody of working class. What in your eyes makes them look working class, their inability to write in actual sentences?

I am loving Whit Pube.

LOL’d about 4 times readyng their busy output.
“Get in your baths at 7pm”

“Panto dames are women”

The DrAdrisn marionette “struggling to stop the knees bending backwards while the head faced forwards “

“IT IS ONLY BY MAINTAINING THE UPPER CASE THAT TRUE PROGRESS TO WOKENESS CAN BE SHOWN”

“HARRY POTTER”

I am wetting myself. Please, please, Whit Pube, keep this up.