wisdom at least partially involves knowing what matters and what doesn't, and therefore not getting wrapped up in fights that don't matter. you can make your life easier by learning this
do you have opinions on the marxist humanist-marxist postestructuralist divide
I feel like the people who get stuck on this are dinosaurs of the 20th century honestly. As far as the original debate I think it was really more like a debate centered in Europe between those committed to an older style of democratic mass politics and the Enlightenment vision that accompanied it (humanism) and a newer generation who were skeptical about what total mobilization did to the nature of politics, seeing an element of conservatism and conformity in it, and wanted to think more flexibly about politics and focus on everyday micropolitical tactics though also often lost sight of the “big picture” out of skepticism (poststructuralists). And ultimately both of these were products of the crisis of the mass party form in the later 20th century and the debates that resulted from it. There were plenty of people who took positions that were associated with one while technically advocating the other. For example Frantz Fanon was a humanist yet he made critiques of Western civilization mostly associated with the poststructuralists, and Henri Lefebvre began as a kind of humanist but then became one of the first of the poststructuralists but did so by following the concerns of his humanist phase. I find these kind of more independent figures to have much more long lasting significance and interest personally although there’s still a historical weight to revisiting the intellectual side of the crisis of mass politics in the late 20th century to deal with the impolitical situation we’re stuck in now
I think also I’ve been getting more irrationalist when it comes to political formation and strategy, which I don't necessarily love but I think it is what it is. people don't experience the world in an objective or ordered manner and if narrative and emotion is what people to respond to, better to find the right narratives and emotions rather than insisting we’d win if people would just think straight.
Feel free to ignore this if it's too awkward but what are your main issues with Tumblr Trans-feminism, and do you have any suggested reading on the matter?
To your second question, read Talia Bettcher's entry on "Feminist Perspectives on Trans Issues," and Perry Zurn's entry on "Trans Philosophy." You could also throw in Mari Mikkola's entry on "Feminist Perspectives on Sex and Gender." Then explore the citations that strike your interest. What resonates with me may not resonate with you and I think the subject of "transfeminism" is too expansive and tangled to do it justice in just a few readings. Forewarning that there is sometimes some nasty stuff in there, both because transfeminism has had to respond to transphobic material and because philosophy (especially Anglo feminist philosophy) has proved especially accommodating to transphobic actors.
I don’t know if it’s specifically a Tumblr problem. I am generally skeptical of what I see as social-media-driven political forms, especially those that are participating in some form of ideological nostalgia rather than innovation and creativity. But I think there are layers here. The TL;DR is that social media is a bad avenue for these discussions, because the nature of the platform means that a lot of the actors here are more interested in promoting themselves as glamorous radical philosophers. This has consequences for what kind of audience they cultivate and what kind of work they produce.
Problem of Forum:
By virtue of taking place *on* Tumblr it has all the regular problems of social-media driven political forms - being easily animated by populism, shallow rhetoric, daily clique drama, and authoritarian-personality clout demons. Whoever can talk the loudest, be most inflammatory, and repeat the slogans the best, sets the tone for discussion. And there are emotional (and sometimes financial) incentives to be that person within the attention economy. Plus there are unique problems of trying to do theoretical work on Tumblr, a website that historically pumps out two things: fandom content and social-justice posturing. It selects for people who 1) care a lot about TV shows and video games and fiction and/or 2) care a lot about seeming maximally left-wing according to their personal definition of that term. This can color the way people interact with (trans)feminist ideas.
Formal / Procedural Problems:
Let's set aside the political question of whether "feminism" is an unqualified good to which trans women should readily and uncomplicatedly attach ourselves. In English we often use the word feminism interchangeably with "women's liberation" and "women's radicalism," and I'm not sure that necessarily expands our power to act as trans women. (Compare "womanism" and "mujerismo" for an example of what I'm referring to there, though those bring their own conceptual problems.)
"Transfeminism" necessarily implies some relationship with "feminism without a prefix." If you're going to meaningfully participate in transfeminist thought, you will need some familiarity with both feminism and transgender social thought alike. You don't have to be an expert but working knowledge of the two realms of thought, and their uneasy relationship, will get you way farther than being a total novice.
But because of the forum problem, if ideas are going to find purchase with a Tumblr audience, they have to be easily digestible, they have to be narratively or rhetorically compelling, and they are often going to argue that disagreement with conventional wisdom proves or creates some sort of moral rot or potentially even danger (see this anon I received for an example of this rhetoric). If you want your essay to get attention on Tumblr you can't be overly academic or conceptual or complex (though you might want to appear that way), you need to keep your readers excited. It's not necessarily fun - or easy - to carefully find and engage with current literature on the things you're talking about (which is why probably the most common transfeminist book recommendation is a book from 2007 by a now nearly 60-year-old woman). Here we have the engagement with political and social thought as a form of play, which I'm not necessarily opposed to. But I dislike the way it's approached.
Now, you can produce simplistic, logically and emotionally shallow content while also doing the reading. People did it a lot back in the day when this site was basically the town square for Radical Grad Students. But it's much, much easier to churn it out without doing so. There's a whole mode of writing that is conducive to these things, actually: polemic. And much of the writing that I have seen in this vein is closer to polemic than it is to the careful structural analysis its authors act like they're making. "Dump Your Puppygirl" was illustrative - it had no substance because it was largely an embellished personal anecdote, so you could project whatever theoretical meaning you wanted onto it.
There are uses to polemic. The continued preoccupation with Andrea Dworkin is revealing, because although Andy talked a ton of stupid bullshit throughout her career, what many of her fans remember is what resonated with them emotionally. The ways that she managed to summarize their pain, their resentment, their mistrust of men, their feelings of objectification and exploitation and disposability. That isn't something without social value. This is why people are so defensive of Dworkin in particular and use her as a synecdoche for a defense of "radical feminism" as a whole. But polemic as an exclusive or even primary ingredient in an intellectual diet is going to influence the way you interpret, read, think, and write.
Trans women have extremely good reasons to be resentful, socially isolated, and mistrustful of people that are not trans women. That is a typical outcome of transmisogyny as a political force, especially in a moment where multiple societies are deadset on using us as a scapegoat for their social decline. Another consequence of being oppressed is frequently being denied a good political education or having somewhat limited political consciousness. So, circumstances being what they are, a lot of trans women - who, anecdotally, seem to skew younger either in terms of transition timeline or literal age - are trying to find an outlet for their resentment, isolation, and mistrust. This is, on its own, fine, or even good. It's better than festering. But, many of us find that outlet in low-effort, low-quality content, whether that be Tumblr posts or Substack essays. This content is being largely produced by the aforementioned clout demons.
So we have writers who are producing low-effort content because that's what's easy to produce and easy to find an audience, and an audience that resonates with that content because it appeals to their emotional instincts and offers easy methods for articulating their very real pain. In turn, the trans women who are weaned on this stuff - wanting to feel like they are participating in something meaningful and worthy of social attention - turn around and produce their own low-quality, low-effort content. Potentially with even less substance now, because they learned this stuff not from sustained, reflective engagement with complex material, but from memes, slogans, discourse posts, polemical essays, and anecdotes. All of which are fine, in isolation, but again, not as the only ingredients in an intellectual diet.
This isn't unusual or even unique to trans women - transmasculine grievance politics ("transmisandry," "transandrophobia," etc.) or even arguably "heteropessimism" is just the same impulse dialed up to eleven, where people that are oppressed in some way channel their feelings of resentment and frustration and bitterness into a malformed, unproductive anti-politics. What we are seeing, across the board, are the results of trying to do social and political thought in the era of algorithmic capitalism. It results, largely, in more superficial understandings of subjects, more ideological stagnation, and decreased ability to act, as people are constantly fed concentrated and intensified doses of what they're already reading, watching, listening to. Confirmation bias on an industrially generated scale.
Additionally, many of the Tumblr transfeminists are correct that this website is chockful of wannabe KiwiFarmers who are parasocially obsessed - to a prurient degree - with trans women. This is an environment that is practically designed to make trans women dig in their heels to bad or underformed ideas, just by virtue of all the willful and overt social terror that being an outspoken trans woman online can subject you to. This fact is also useful for the clout demons, however, because you can use it to insist that disagreement or pushback against them can only exist maliciously or carelessly due to the inherently increased vulnerability of being a trans woman. This has an overall silencing effect on people with good intentions. It is, explicitly, a demand for people not to exercise their powers of judgment or skepticism because to do so would put others at risk. (And, to be fair, sometimes our powers of judgment should say to us "okay this is stupid, I'm logging off." Dare to dream.)
Substantive Problems:
Because of these formal problems - a starting line of resentment, polemic, and superficial engagement with theory - I don't think transfeminism's Tumblr variant actually has any coherent body of ideas beyond "trans women are women" and "cis women and other queer people incl. trans men/nonbinary people also perpetuate transmisogyny against us." Which, while true, are not the most interesting observations - I know them because I go outside.
Nobody can really agree on what the *point* of all this is. It ends up looking a lot like either begging* people that aren't trans women to listen to us for once or, when that inevitably fails, walling ourselves off into a form of trans-pessimism. The latter is particularly odious to me because it feeds into every isolating impulse we already have because we live in societies that structurally discourage our agency and our modes of expression. It encourages us to close ourselves off to the possibility of meaningfully connecting with people different than us and thus primes us to be taken advantage of.
* (or impotently demanding, which is the same thing)
This lack of substance is reflected in how a lot of transfeminists adopt a hodge-podge of radical signifiers, a slurry of Marxist/feminist/liberal lingo without a cohesive framework to hang them on.
A couple of my least favorite writers in this vein often make reference to being "materialists," but what this word is doing for them is basically left open for the reader to project onto. Calling yourself a "materialist" gives you some radical Marxist chic but is so nebulous and often misunderstood that you don't have to commit to any thornier theoretical work.
Some of them will also invoke "radical feminism" quite frequently. But again, what ideas are trans women actually supposed to take from radical feminism? It is rarely specified! When it is, it's something vague like "the concept of abolishing patriarchy through radically restructuring society” (which, I would note, is not a radfem-exclusive belief). Because, if you specify, then you have to 1) engage with and discuss complex theoretical material, and 2) be able to articulate why radical feminism declined and became what it is now - which is, funnily enough, a means for (mostly) cis women to channel their resentments and endlessly backbite each other. I wonder if this is sounding familiar.
Because it's Tumblr, there's also a lot of talk about intersectionality and male privilege and performativity, which are treated like unquestionable concepts that are totally congruent with the two other aforementioned frameworks rather than rejections or at least weighty modifications of them. Our transfeminists aren’t reading Ashley Bohrer.
The result, to me, is that it inherits all of the weaknesses of these frameworks without retaining any of their strengths.
To me the substantive failure is the failure to ask, what is transfeminism meant to do? Is it meant to make a few specific women personally better off through publishing deals or Ko-Fi accounts or glowing comments from feminist academics? Is it meant to raise consciousness, or to merely define and outline transmisogyny as a social force? If it is a form of political thought, what *politics* are actually entailed by it? What/who are we in conflict with, who can we act in concert with, what specific values animate us and what strategies and tactics will allow us to make those values real?
As I've written before, I think the function of transfeminine political thought should be to expand our power to act, and particularly our power to act in concert with one another as political subjects. This is why radical feminist cis women in the 60s and 70s spent so much time on consciousness raising groups. But some of the reasons those groups fell apart and devolved into endless factionalism was because they had no cohesive theory and rejected opportunities to become more cohesive; because they tried to paper over the differences among women (particularly class and racial difference) that would limit the effectiveness of their strategies; because they had an outsized obsession with policing interpersonal behavior as a consequence of foundational assumptions (“the personal is political”); and because they crowded defensively around specific personalities. I think we as trans women have a tendency to repeat cis women’s political mistakes (which makes sense, both being women) and I think we should avoid that at all costs.
I did not care for The Boy and the Heron at all really, felt like an extra-concentrated version of all the things in Miyazaki's overall filmography that really annoy me
site moderation is very obviously busted and biased heavily in various ways. but also some of these ladies getting termed have like the worst self-preservation instincts I have ever seen.
honestly i get why elizabeth holmes is convinced she got martyred because you have to think about it from her perspective, literally the entire valley runs on guys just running their mouths until another guy buys them out and turns their scamup into a data services provider and then eventually that guy sells it to jeff bezos, why couldn't it happen for her too? oh suddenly the medical establishment is too good for a para industry of scam bespoke home lab testing that tells you nothing validated? suddenly everyone has not been caping for the mormon dna race science or the gut microbiome fascists or the psychiatry fandom spit testing? it's so much worse to give your blood to a blonde woman recreationally? vengeance for her & anna delvey.
One thing Nevada the novel was really strong on is the seductiveness of other people's problems, and the urge to mentor and advise. Other people's problems as an opportunity to feel worldly and wise, chasing the pleasure of making someone else experience fresh epiphanies that have become old news to you, other people's problems as an exercise in philosophizing about life in a context where you won't pay the costs of any conclusions you recommend, other people's problems which look so clear and simple and tractable next to your own, other people's problems which feel so pleasantly low stakes because you don't actually care as much as you think you do.
I was pretty surprised by how much of Scarface has giallo/horror DNA - the chainsaw scene, the helicopter hanging, the weird psychosexual fixation on his own sister, all feels very kindred with a lot of De Palma's surrounding output in the 70s and 80s
as some have pointed out, only to be basically ignored, nonbinary identity necessarily troubles most everyday language about “sexual orientation.” which is why the attitude towards our inclusion in the category of lesbian is just vibes (with all the problems of prejudice that brings)
"we whose task is wakefulness itself" @bimboficationblues - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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