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]

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!