What is your opinion on queer theory & academic politics?

I can understand that to an extent. I don't think anything is "Clear cut" really. Most things are varying shades of gray.

My problem is that it's becomming increasingly harder to discern between someone with a genuine interest in equality, and people who are just throwing around the words to justify their own actions. Mostly some misguided form of Misandy.


Though I am thinking about it ( or did last night ) and I'm starting to get the feeling that "Tumblr Feminism" ( by that term is blanket for Social Media and is not exclusive to Tumblr ) is actually just one of those "I took a year of Psyche and I basically know everything about it" situations.

 

I suspect that if you really dig into _________, you'll find that Tumblr ________ is actually just one of those "I took a year of Psych and I basically know everything about _________" situations.

Fill in the blank.

 

Yeah...you've lost me here. ^^"

 

She's saying that tumblr is notorious on so many subjects (In my opinion, especially humanities and "soft" sciences). As a result, it's not really a good reference. That's not to say tumblr doesn't have anything good on it or that it lacks sensible people, but in general it's difficult to take tumblr serious because at the end of the day it is a social platform/blog service where anyone could say anything, really. It's not a good representation for feminism that's backed in academia/research, if you want to apply it to here. Of course, academia has its own issues, and "non-academic feminism" is still valid in its own way, but I won't get into that.

 

People need to stop citing Tumblr as a source of sociological trends. It's really bad, especially when the people doing it have selection bias and don't know how to apply basic statistical methods. I'm not making a comment about anybody in this thread or even in the EC community. But on the internet broadly, it's striking how many people make claims about Tumblr as though it were a proxy for liberation movements without understanding the key differences between Tumblr and offline movements, and without actually having done sampling and sentiment analysis to have any solid figures behind their claims about the prevalence of harrassment and extremist advocacy.

My engagement with queer politics has been more extensive than with lesbian feminism. There might be a difference between lesbian separatism and lesbian feminism, and to the extent there is, I'm grateful for it. Lesbian separatism is an inhumane political philosophy and a wholly politicized sexuality. Lesbian feminism--that is it say, the feminism of lesbians who frontline the concerns of lesbians--I have a more sympathetic engagement with. I still feel that there is a bit too much negativity about male sexuality that isn't wholly explained by the understandable objection to patriarchal heteronormativity (that is, the assumption that even lesbians are and should be sexually available to men). Instead, I have found the political views of queer theorists more humanistic, and I have found their sexualities unpoliticized.

The recognize properly that only violence and remediation are political.

And fucking is for fun.

~ Adrienne

 

Tumblr is a pretty bad place to get information from in general though. You should see how bad the LGBT community is there. They all want straight and cis people to die and they all want lesbians to become bisexual or at least open their minds up to men or males, and if we don't we get rape and death threats.

However, I don't hate all GBT people just because I despise the Tumblr GBT movement.

 

Allow me to rephrase then.

Whatever brand of feminism ( since we don't want to address it's level of influence and where it's coming from ) that SUCCEEEDED in passing a law that targeted a group of people in a discriminatory way ( Manspreading ) THAT ONE!!!!

I'M TALKING ABOUT THAT ONE DAMMIT!



No, but seriously.



I'm just really frustrated because you try to bring up certain issues and everyone wants to cherry pick the subtlties of what you're saying instead of focusing on the main point of what you're trying to get across.

Anyways...that doesn't matter I guess.

I think I stole your topic here ^^"


Funnily enough I made my original comment hoping someone would try and explain some of this to me, because everything you were saying flew right over my head. >.>

 

0. I'm definitely open to the possibly that is was a feminist philosophy that is responsible, but I think we would have to look more at the legislative (or city council, if that's the case) history to determine whether or not that's the case. I have a hard time believing that if feminist political theories struggle to garner support to remediate much more important issues, it's suddenly powerful enough to get a stupid regulation like this going, when such a regulation is much less likely to be popular. That just seems incoherent to me. I can't argue with the facts, but I think we need to find them.

1. If I suppose that some kind of feminist political philosophy motivated enough people to pass a city ordinance, law, or whatever the hell it is making discourteous spreading a criminal offense, then I am to immediately conclude that feminist political philosophy has misplaced priorities. If you're conversant in feminist political philosophies, you'll be aware of the fact that feminists vigorously debate amongst themselves about certain things, even at times foundational issues (for example, whether or not sex work is wrong. Hint -- it's not, and any feminist who tries to tell you otherwise is carceral trash.) Since I read feminists on a daily basis, I would be quite aware of this kind of advocacy and waste of resources taking place, and I would be equally aware of a lot of condemnation taking place.

Now you know how I feel almost all of the time on this site.

Queer theory is just a liberation theory about the LGBT community. If you'd like explanation about a particular question, I can probably look into it or supply my own answer.

~ Adrienne

 

I'm feeling particuarly lazy today so I won't be breaking apart your original reply into sections. My apologies if that makes it hard to follow my response ^^"

While sometimes I like to overanalyize things, other times I like things to remain simple so as to the "did feminism lead to this" questions let's apply a simple timeline and do a little 1 + 1 = 2 logic.

At first there is no law, but then feminists ( or people carrying the title ) begin an online/offline campaign called Manspreading. A short while after this campaign begins a new law is introduced making the thing they were campaigning for a reality.


^

That seems to me to be pretty straightforward. What do you think?


Yeah you see certain tactics pop up over and over again. I'm probably one of the people who's done it to you I'd imagine. A lot of my argumentation is strictly impulsive ( like most of my behavior ). I think this world would be in trouble if I ever took a minute and planned anything out XD

One example I've begun to notice is what I'll call 'baiting'. Atheists and Feminazis ( to distinguish between your particular brand of feminism ) are the biggest ones guilty of this I've observed.

Now Atheists will do something like "Draw muhammad" to bait Muslims, and then when the Muslim people naturally get outraged they'll look for the most violent of the backlashes and point to it and scream, "Look! I told you their religion is evil!"

Now for our other group I'll use Anita Sarkeesian as my example.

Anita will say something, or release a video that will be controversial. Unlike the atheist example she doesn't necessarily say anything designed to generate an angry response, but rather says something that is highly debatable and going to lead to argumentation and backlash. Then she points to the very worst of her comment sections and creates a strawman of all male gamers which she points at and says "See look! I told you gamers were misogynistic, just look at these awful things they say about me!"

note: She also does this in her tweets at times as well.

But anyways that was me getting totally distracted and going off on a pointless tangent.



As to your final comment.

I'd like to figure out what Intersectionality theory is exactly. My understanding so far is that it's some complex system of oppression, oppresors and how everyone is being oppressed in varying degrees by society.


Also Cultural appropriation is apparently a thing too.

I guess the concept here from what I could gather is that White people who like rap music and dress up like rappers are stealing Black culture and those further oppressing the black community.

^

an example it also applies to any non-white culture ( from what I can gather )

 

I posted on your wall, because I don't think this discussion deserves more topical diversions. The subject of the thread is queer theory, so I would like to confine my response to that. I intend to do justice to your topics of interest, but I feel that's a more personal conversation, and out of respect for everyone else, it's only fair that we limit that to a personal conversation.

I'm confining my remarks to what is topically related, which leaves only one part of your post--the question about intersectionality.

Intersectionality is nothing more than the idea that many people are marginalized by different factors. We know that, in certain respects, when all other factors are held constant, white people are better off than those not called white, the rich are better off than the poor or middle class, men are better off than women, straight people are better off than gay, lesbian and transgender people, cisgender people are better off than transgender people, gay and lesbian people are better off than bisexual and pansexual people, and able-bodied people are better off than people with disabilities.

I want to explain things simply, so I'll state what the most important implication of this is, then move on to other interesting corollaries. The most important thing is this: because of intersectionality, the only valid approach for positive social change is one that takes into account the realities of all people who can be marginalized, and the choice of strategy must not be one that exacerbates the oppression of another group within a movement. This is because the simple reality of it is that people who join the group to achieve a certain aim will feel alienated and then leave.

What does this mean? Let me be even clearer about it. It means that the feminist movement should never have sidelined the concerns of black women or lesbian women as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. It was less effective as a result. It means that the US labor movement should never have excluded black people from unions or union leadership. It was less effective as a result.

What does it not mean? It does not mean that everybody has to shut up unless they are a black, Jewish lesbian. It means that black folks and LGBT people ought to get together and figure out the best strategies to acheive their collective aims together. It doesn't mean that white people never have anything of importance to say. But it does mean that the solutions white people advance for social problems shouldn't involve using state power to do it (since, as a result of other pre-existing problems like racial profiling, increase police presence in poor neighborhoods of color, and so on that increasing state policing power and strengthening the criminal law are more likely to be used against people of color, rather than helping everyone).

I hope that helps.

 

Hmmm...

Ah fair enough.