Meet the Other Phone. A phone that grows with your child.

Meet the Other Phone.
A phone that grows with your child.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Queer theory resisters

101 replies

Awayfromitall · 13/12/2018 12:02

As has been noted before on this forum, trans activism has appropriated academic queer theory for its own political ends. This explains its success on university campuses. Finally, some scholars within queer theory have begun to resist.

blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/conversion-therapy-v-re-education-camp-open-letter-grace-lavery/

This piece is really worth reading. It makes many points noted by posters on here, but grounds these in queer scholarship. Some interesting quotes:

"the conundrum of why race, which has far less biological grounding than sex, should be socially constructed in the current moment as much more fixed and immutable than gender ..."

"Those who justify aggression as a response to the “violence” of being misrecognized fail to notice that everyone shares this experience on various registers of gender, race, age, class, professional status, nationality, religion, disability, attractiveness — the list goes on."

On TRAs:
"Imagining itself as standing up to authority, this cohort falls eagerly into quasi-medical discourses of diagnosis and cure and rushes to invoke juridical structures of rules and punishment. Calling itself progressive, this cohort presents an uncanny mirror image of rightwing politics with its exaggerated outrage, divisive us-and-them rhetorics, and attacks staged as self-defence."

"Is this demand to suppress voices that questions perhaps because you have no answers to our queries, starting with this one: what does it mean to clam to be “in fact” a woman? That question is grounded in a rich and complex body of feminist and queer scholarship — from Simone de Beauvoir, through Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, to the broad project of deconstructive linguistic theory that is central to queer theory in — that argues that no one is “in fact” this social and linguistic category of “woman.”

"How different are today’s medical regimes of “gender confirmation” from those diagnoses, or other forms of doctoring aimed at altering individuals to conform to — and thus reinforce — holistic norms of gender?"

And this scorcher:
"Our perspective leads us to challenge the deployment of pronouns as a marker of any kind of stable gender identity. We are particularly skeptical of the specialist-approved “they/them” as a marker — a euphemism really — for gender fluidity. Pausing to note the oxymoron of a stable category of fluidity, we observe that this one does more to unsettle distinctions between singular and plural than between masculine and feminine."

"Further, we reject the rituals of social interaction that require a confession of stable gender identity as a precondition of speech (my name is such-and-such and my pronouns are blah, blah, and blah)."

"Ultimately, if we truly value diversity, we have to be allowed our differences." [And that includes difference based on sex. Amen.]

OP posts:
Knicknackpaddyflak · 13/12/2018 14:45

“We see this throughout history, throughout any act of slavery, colonization, or oppression. The dominant group can’t subordinate another group merely through brute force. They also need to engage in this sophisticated process of dismantling the group as a group, and this is done through banning their language, their religion and destroying their way of life.”

Exactly the actions of TRAs against women.

Bubonicpanic · 13/12/2018 15:12

If everything is a performance anyway, why do we have to take this particular performance (shall we call it "TRA outrage medium rare") so terribly seriously?

Because they are causing such a noise and grief out of all proportion. This sucks up so much time that people dont have to spare. To my earlier point, they need telling to shut up, not coddling. The D&I answer is to coddle. I'm in the pay side of HR so all I can do with NB or gender identity data is impute a sex or delete the awkward fuckers. D&I are fucking up the protected characteristics.

AspieAndProud · 13/12/2018 15:20

I’m reading Leonard Susskind’s Special Relativity and Classical Field Theory: The Theoretical Minimum right now and it’s bloody hard going.

But at the end of each chapter I’m thinking ‘Ah, yes, I see it now’. It’s worth the effort. The author has something to say and I want to understand it. There’s a contract between the author and the reader that the author respects.

If you can pack a book full of equations about a very difficult subject like Relativity and make it comprehensible to someone who’s maths stopped at A Level it ought to be possible to explain sex and gender. I don’t think queer studies is about communication. It’s about obfuscation.

Bubonicpanic · 13/12/2018 15:27

It’s about obfuscation.

It deliberately is. This paper that Whittle produces sets this out. It deliberately confuse sex and gender to demobilise sex as the protected characteristic. It uses loads of misleading waffle about examples from history to prove this is perfectly normal.....

Here is just one of them....

3.4 To determine sex, firstly a decision has to be made as which of the individual�s features were be evaluated in order to make that decision. According to Reis (1992) the Roman natural historian, Pliny (c.23AD-79AD) took the view that there was no such thing as a hermaphrodite, only cases of mistaken sex when the size of the clitoris was misinterpreted. It could be argued that this is not an accurate representation of what Pliny said in his Natural History,[6] and modern translations make numerous interpretations, but on referring to the original text one sees that Pliny actually said very little. But the interpretation used by Reiss represents the idea that sex could be determined by sexual activity as determined by the use of the clitoris/penis. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, Reis argues that the individual had the power to �choose� their sex though their own choice of sexual activity � their psychological preference.

FWRLurker · 13/12/2018 15:49

This is great! I am glad to know that some of my colleagues in the humanities aren't completely muzzled / woke.

deepwatersolo · 13/12/2018 16:53

They are literary scholars, dealing with words, not genes or hormones. So they know they can only talk about linguistic and social categories. I actually appreciate the humility.

It is not humility to actively ignore material reality, just 'cause one's expertise is 'linguistic and social categories'. Quite the contrary, actually. Surely it does not take any degree for a human to acknowledge that, say, food and water are material realities one's life depends on, or male and female bodies are required for mammalian reproduction.

YetAnotherSpartacus · 13/12/2018 17:00

Thanks for posting OP. I look forward to reading the full article.

R0wantrees · 13/12/2018 17:03

They are literary scholars

Steady... there's a difference between the social sciences and those who study literature! Wink

Post-modernism as a literary theory seems to have escaped and gone a bit haywire elsewhere.

AspieAndProud · 13/12/2018 17:19

Literary theorists ought to read literature rather than academic papers about literature or academic papers about academic papers about literature.

Everything is at least two or three times estranged from the object of study.

Materialist · 13/12/2018 17:22

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

R0wantrees · 13/12/2018 17:35

YY Rowan It’s boggled me for years that social scientists or activists believe literary theory has more salience in politics than political or economic theory.

Exactly and also that they have chosen one type of literary theory.
There are many. Their context, relevence and limits are understood by those who study literature.

Materialist Have you read 'The Pooh Perplex' & 'Post-Modern Pooh'?

LangCleg · 13/12/2018 17:37

I can count on three fingers the number of activists in my community who even understand that we’re no longer on the gold standard.

LOL!

Awayfromitall · 13/12/2018 19:17

Haha, Materialist, well said - you make the pithiest observations Grin

And about literature, well the two men who wrote this piece are literature/cultural studies professors. And (depressingly), they can say what they say because they are senior men. They have the good grace to acknowledge this. I have to hold my tongue at work so bad just to be able to do work that I think is important. But it's hard, paying the tithe. So FWRLurker, good to know there are kindred spirits out there.

I know there's a difference between social science and literary theory. And literary theory should stay away from social policy.

OP posts:
Awayfromitall · 13/12/2018 19:25

Sorry, forgot to address your point, deepwatersolo. I have much respect for the sciences (unusual for the humanities - many here think that science has only existed to keep women down) and I enjoy reading your posts on here. You pull no punches and take no prisoners, if I may say so.

But what I meant when I talked about humility - I think the two authors know that material reality exists (because, dur, nobody needs a university degree to know this) but they acknowledge the limits of their own scholarly authority.

And why anybody would cite a Roman historian as proof that one can really choose one's sex is beyond me, Bubonic. That's just demented. The Romans believed all sorts of weird stuff and practised many things that we'd find abhorrent. Who publishes this stuff?

OP posts:
crsacre · 13/12/2018 19:42

Thanks for this, Awayfromitall. It's heartening to see resistance to trans nonsense even within Queer Theory.

kesstrel · 13/12/2018 19:59

What I thought, reading this, was that perhaps this could be the start of some serious fight-back within gender studies departments. While there's a certain schadenfreude in seeing them being hoist with their own petard, it would undeniably be useful if a number of influential Queer Studies academics starting to create a movement against this nonsense. Less easy for humanities students to ignore than scientists are.

Bowlofbabelfish · 13/12/2018 20:19

adding epicycles indeed.

Queer theory is bollocks. It is word salad. It is obfuscation, I work in a field that uses so much jargon that apparently your first degree or two you learn as many new words as someone learning a new language.

And you know what? That jargon is there to render complex concepts into defined, accurate, precise terms. words mean something. it’s a point of pride among every scientist I know to be able to explain even mind bending work in simple terms. There is a book for toddlers called ‘baby loves quarks’ for example.

The way queer theory uses language is designed to confuse and destabilise. Verbs and adjectives getvused as nouns and nouns get repurposed as verbs. People get othered.
Words and how they are used are used as weapons - to confuse the person you’re talking to.
This entire victim laddering, the othering And the creation of tiny in-groups comes from queer theory. The language that actuallyvmeans almost the opposite of what you think it should is another in joke. It’s like children using a madebup language on he playground, exceptbits used mainly to attack anyone who isn’t in the in group.

It’s bollocks. It’s mangling language and meaning, it’s dangerous bollocks. It’s a key tool for so many of the bad things we are fighting at the moment - all the ways people are trying to blur language and concepts in order to put the boot firmly back on women’s necks, and to gain access to vulnerable women and children - the language of that is the language of queer theory.

So it can sod off.

Bowlofbabelfish · 13/12/2018 20:22

So the whole disingenuous ‘well what is sex really anyway? It’s fuzzy and complex’ ‘whatvis a man, well it’s complex’ etc... The language of that is the language of queer theory.

It can sod off. All the way. Sorry if it’s your discipline, sorry if you use it for good, but it’s one of the most powerful tools for the stripping of women’s rights just now and I loathe it.

FWRLurker · 13/12/2018 20:23

BTW I just found out that the diversity officer where I am is Nonbinary...

AspieAndProud · 13/12/2018 20:29

Pliny was a genius, let nobody deny it:

Male corpses float on their backs but female corpses float on their faces as though nature were preserving their modesty even in death. — Pliny, Natural History, 7.77

Or how about this?

It would indeed be a difficult matter to find anything which is productive of more marvelous effects than the menstrual discharge. On the approach of a woman in this state, must will become sour, seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits. Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately; brass and iron will instantly become rusty, and emit an offensive odor; while dogs which may have tasted of the matter so discharged are seized with madness, and their bite is venomous and incurable. — Pliny, Natural History, 7.13

Bubonicpanic · 13/12/2018 20:30

Awayfromitall

Sorry, I forgot to link the actual paper:

socresonline.org.uk/12/1/whittle.html

Whittle was and still is an advisor on trans - you may know this already. They make use of this waffle to blag politicians.

iguanadonna · 13/12/2018 20:31

Ok, some bits are salady, but this is dynamite:

Here are some related questions: is the success of those venerable movements — of feminism in the 1970s-’80s, of queer activism from the 1990s into the 21st century — the reason they come under attack? Feminists and queer activists fundamentally altered the culture in ways few thought possible. Does this proof of the potential for collective social change so threaten the dominant order that all the blandishments of advanced capitalism — therapy, cosmetic surgery, makeovers, Kardashians — are rolled out to convince the young that their elders were wrong to seek and find solutions to their problems outside neo-liberal structures of competitive individualism?

vaginafetishist · 13/12/2018 20:33

Great take down Bowl

Bubonicpanic · 13/12/2018 20:36

BTW I just found out that the diversity officer where I am is Nonbinary..

I think this is a requirement for the job. The rest of us in HR think they are useless dicks.

Really they should just concentrate on sorting out childcare/family leave so women with jobs can get on with them.

PencilsInSpace · 13/12/2018 20:49

Yay, I'm not ugly after all! I've just been violently misrecognised on various registers of attractiveness. I love this shit! Grin

I always thought gender and trans ideology grew quite naturally out of queer theory rather than appropriating or colonising it.

This is an interesting development though.

I don't know how influential these two Christophers are. Either they'll be sent to the gulag or the wheels really are falling off now.