You see something absurd. You hear something absurd. You read something absurd = Yeah,TNTG. Posts tagged academia.
“ I am a lesbian woman of Color whose children eat regularly because I work in a university. If their full belies make me fail to recognize my commonality with a woman of Color whose children do not eat because she cannot find work, or who has no children because her insides are rotted from home abortions and sterilization; if I fail to recognize the lesbian who chooses not to have children, the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who
is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail
to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.
is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail
to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own, and the anger which stands between us then must be used for clarity and mutual empowerment, not for evasion by guilt or further separation. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.
— Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, 1980. (via fuckyeahfeministartandliterature)
“ So if by “intellectual” you mean people who are using their minds, then it’s all over the society. If by “intellectual” you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that’s different. Those people are called “intellectuals” — but they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a healthy reaction. - Understanding Power
— Chomsky (via thartist72)
“ The turn to diaspora in contemporary criticism is more than just a faddish adoption of a new critical language for the sake of newness. The turn to diaspora signals a demand for finding a way to speak about the complexities of connections between communities, of the unredressed griefs and disarticulated longings from which collectivities emerge. The turn to diaspora responds to what David Scott, citing Kamau Braithwaite, calls “an obscure miracle of connection” (Scott 1999: 106). Diaspora brings together communities which are not quite nation, not quite race, not quite religion, not quite homesickness, yet they still have something to do with nation, race, religion, longings for homes which may not exist. There are collectivities and communities which extend across geographical spaces and historical experiences. There are vast numbers of people who exist in one place and yet feel intimately related to another.
—
Cho, Lily. “The Turn to Diaspora.” Topia 17 (Spring 2007): 11-30.
(tons of great readings here: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/resources-recourses/articles/ )
“ Feminism is too important to be discussed only by academics.
— How To Be a Woman (via explore-blog)
“ For men to “confront” pornography means neither repudiating sexual pleasure nor ignoring the content of our sexual imaginations. It will require that we listen carefully to women, that we take seriously their pain, anguish, confusion, and embarrassment about the content of our pornography. It will require that we listen when women tell us about the pain and terror of sexual victimization, as well as their exhilaration at their claiming of a sexuality. This is not easy; men are not very good listeners. We’re not trained to listen to women, but trained to not listen, to screen out women’s voices with the screaming of our own needs. It will mean, therefore, listening to our own sexual yearnings, unfulfilled and, perhaps, unfulfillable, and exploring the mechanisms that will allow us to empower ourselves, and create images that arouse us without depicting the punishment of others as the basis for that arousal.
— Michael Kimmel, The Gender Of Desire: Essays On Male Sexuality (via wretchedoftheearth)
“ Let’s start by pointing out that intersectionality isn’t such a scary word, and gasp, plenty of people who haven’t been university-educated are capable of looking it up and understanding it. Here’s a good definition. It’s not that hard to understand. It’s essentially a useful way of saying that things like sexuality, race, class, religion and ability overlap. For example, a white woman’s experience of sexism may be vastly different from a black woman’s. Has your brain died from exhaustion yet? It’s so condescending to suggest that non-academics just aren’t smart enough to get this.
“ Cloistered in elite universities and increasingly leaning towards neo-liberal ideas on race, economics and politics, [Neo-Liberal Black Intellectuals] are separated from black working people, the poor and the black middle class. While Obama, remains popular among African Americans as symbol of racial progress, his policies, that favor large banks, Wall Street and the military, places him and those black intellectuals who “take their cue” from him, at odds with the fundamental economic and social interests of the vast majority of African Americans. […] Elite universities demand that black intellectuals assume a post-racial sensibility and lifestyle; on the other hand, the black masses daily experience the most savage racism. Faced with this dilemma, neo-liberal black intellectuals become apologists for race and class oppression, while performing a not very convincing symbolic blackness. […] Black intellectuals in the second decade of the 21st century should not take a cue from Obama’s presidency, but from Du Bois. They should stop being afraid of Du Bois’ radicalism and anti-imperialism and end their kowtowing to the conservatism of the white academic establishment.
—
Anthony Monteiro, professor of African American Studies at Temple University.
Read.
(via mehreenkasana)
‘populist’ feminism: because I grew up poor now shut the fuck up
as I’ve learned from the editors of the vagenda, whenever the project of white feminism is put in doubt, just make recourse to a starving person (who you aren’t) and say ‘THIS PERSON CAN’T EAT YOUR ACADEMIC THEORIES!’ because, for some reason, that person can eat blogs. especially blogs about pop culture from a feminist perspective, starving people are sated each and every day by the brave work of defending the good name of lena dunham.
the flipside of the insistence that feminism only be ‘populist’ or ‘non-academic’ is that it takes all of the political struggle that went into creating and sustaining programs in women’s studies and casts it aside, because nobody told us that studying a topic in a post-secondary setting would mean that subject is difficult! feminism can’t be about intellectual heavy-lifting, we’re only talking about women, after all!
nobody says that about particle physics. who is this physicist who says things about physics that I, a lay person, can’t understand? the nerve of it! you’d almost imagine they had been studying physics for 15 years because it’s a complex field of inquiry…
and this isn’t to say that obscurantism (or just shoddy writing) isn’t a problem in the academy. but I’m tired of these played out caricatures being tossed around whenever a supposedly ‘populist’ white feminist is criticized for being facile and racist. the ‘Populist’ White Woman (mid-20s, dopey haircut, runs a blog) chastises the Academic Feminist (late-20s, chic haircut, wrote a book for an academic press that’s full of jargon and impenetrable analyses of the prostitute in Joyce), for not doing more to help the Starving Woman (resembling Pig-Pen from Peanuts and carrying her young child around with her).
and those are the three options: you’re either an academic feminist or you’re a real feminist or you’re one of the voiceless women that the real feminists are always talking about when they want the ‘academic’ feminists to stop calling them racist.
as always, it never enters the equation that there might be, especially now that it has taken up residence on the internet. a startling failure of imagination structuring white feminism. the white feminist imagination can only ever proclaim (from the Vagenda editors to Hugo Schwyzer and all points along the continuum) that ‘what feminism needs is more voices - a whole chorus of them.’
except no ‘academic,’ ‘esoteric,’ or ‘theoretical’ voices… and no actual poor women’s voices, and no Black women’s voices, and no undocumented voices, and no trans voices, because white feminism is only ever interested in those voices rhetorically. because ‘discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse.’
and that’s precisely where non-white women are in the white feminist imaginary: the audience. white internet feminism will bloviate about choruses of women’s voices, but they freak out when those voices get put to use because, as members of the audience, those voices aren’t meant to speak at all! they’re supposed to sit down and shut up while the dumb members of the panel chide the smart members of the panel for being too theoretical.
and that speaks to the persecution complex, the narcissism, the elitism, and the racism of the white feminist blogosphere. ‘other’ women can speak just as long as they’re not interrupting a white woman.
“ Slowly I began to understand fully that there was no place in academe for folks from working-class backgrounds who did not wish to leave the past behind. That was the price of the ticket. Poor students would be welcome at the best institutions of higher learning only if they were willing to surrender memory, to forget the past and claim the assimilated present as the only worthwhile and meaningful reality.
— bell hooks (via wretchedoftheearth)
