cw: tumblr

[nerdflighter]

1. the more I hang around tumblr, the more I wonder how any good politics ever arose out of there. I've been engaged in oppression jokes discourse all morning -

oppression jokes are jokes where I go "I oppress blondes!" and then my blond friend goes "am I a joke to you?" and I go :). they're also used badly by radfems and exclusionists to say things like 'men/aceys want to be oppressed so bad'. I still think they're funny, especially because I'm hardly going around dropping them into random people's inboxes unless i know they're okay with it. most of the oppression jokes I make happen in private chats and servers, or on my blog. but a bunch of people decided that their boundaries has to be everyone else's, otherwise those people were immoral oppressors (a line of thought that came from people who harp on constantly about how tastes in fiction aren't an indication of morality or reality) and now I'm just tired.

and then I saw this stellar fucking take, which yeeted me out of my consciousness and into a nether dimension full of soulless ligbeets screeching about how ~50 years of academia are completely useless because their tumblr-educated ass said so. I have not yet recovered (please tell me all the ways in which that post is wrong: I'll love you forever if I don't already)

how did we ever manage to turn out a single good take? why is that place so bad? (don't answer the second one). i love tumblr, but increasingly i have to wonder why.

Comments

[wolby]

I don't have a very strong investment, so I'm not defending the OP so much as trying to figure out what the argument is. :) I don't think her argument is incorrect, even if I don't necessarily agree with (or care about) her conclusions.

[[Welp, post by email did not work, here's the rest of it:]]

• it's queer studies, generally, and it doesn't just study lgbt people (im not arguing with you, but with their points as outlined by you) it also studies a whole ton of other things that no other department will touch

Huh, like what? Genuine question, bc I may skim queer theory books but I never even took a class in it so my knowledge is v basic.

• why is radical/institutionalized a dichotomy? do people stop being radical when they join college?

I should have said more: I personally find my third bullet point to be a boring discussion, because I don't think things need to be radical to be moral. (In a 'leftists arguing on the internet about right and wrong' sense of the word 'moral,' I mean.) But my understanding of the argument is that the master's tools will never disassemble the master's house, and/or the revolution will not be funded[1]. People don't stop being radical when they go to college (whatever it means to "be radical"), but going to college (and taking a queer theory class, or teaching one) is not a radical act. And I don't have a problem with that! But not everyone agrees.

[1] by government/private foundations/philanthropy/mutual funds/any other source of income for universities. [In the US,] FAFSA would not be giving kids loans to study queer theory if the federal government thought it posed a serious threat to the kyriarchy.

queer can be and is a word of the streets and a word of academics and the fact that it can occupy both places simultaneously without losing meaning and worth is the source of much of its power, imo

I'm not sure what this means; can you give an example?

I can't think of a good way to say this, so I'll say it poorly: it's a bit rude to call someone's personal feelings & experiences "iffy." I'm pretty sure it's just that tone is hard on the internet, and I am definitely not immune to those problems. :)

[nerdflighter]

it's queer studies, generally, and it doesn't just study lgbt people (im not arguing with you, but with their points as outlined by you) it also studies a whole ton of other things that no other department will touch

queer studies also studies phenomena like MSMs (who may not identify as any form of lgbt/queer), queer literature/queer interpretations of not-explicitly-lgbtq literature, the relationship between race and queerness, mental illness and queerness, non-normative subcultures (which may not be Queer in and of themselves but exist at odds with cisheteropatriarchy and are thus queer) like kink and furries and incels

2. i dont think everything has to be radical all the time to be valuable. like...i genuinely don't think there's anything radical about wearing a burkha or makeup or heels, but the fact that doing that makes some people feel comforted/empowered/happy is enough. and it should be enough. and just because something isn't the most radical doesn't mean it can't be valuable in other ways: some change, possibly the majority of change, happens within institutions, by people who worked to get to a position of power so that they could enact real and material change on the world. EA style, so to speak.

3. my bad, sorry. I didn't mean to delegitimize anyone's experiences - I've had similar moments myself, and I honestly can't say why I said that or thought it was a reasonable thing to say...but the fact is that I did, and I'm sorry.

[wolby]

re: 3, thanks, much appreciated.

1. I think OP was talking about methods (e.g. not limiting Literature to "deconstruction" or "postmodernism" or whatever the heck else there is) rather than subjects: she's saying that "queer theory" is just one approach to studying gender and sexuality in general. I don't know enough to understand the alternatives, unfortunately.

2. I think we're on the same page here! Making change within institutions is important to me too, and feels like my work, but it's definitionally not radical ("from the roots"). OP's argument seems to be that she wishes the word/identity "queer" was [still?] radical but the power of the word is decreasing, and the widespread adoption of the word in large, publicly- and privately-funded institutions is just one proof of that. Not necessarily the cause of the decrease ("that’s already kinda happened"), but if one wanted to preserve/further/exploit the power of the word, this is the wrong way to go about it.

(frozen)

[nerdflighter]

Huh. Well, I still don't agree with the OP, but thanks for the explanation!