sophistry and butch feminism

rhetoric · queer theory · feminism · ink · drafting with tumblr

[doggirlpaws]

The spirit of Diogenes is alive and well

[rowark]

This is funny, obviously, but even if you don't go to the extreme of the example above, this is a separate seat for one person, with a back and 4 legs:

But it's not a chair. It's a bar stool.

This, however, are all chairs:

Each one is missing at least one component of the chair definition above.

So like... it's almost like strict definitions are exclusionary.

[grrdis]

Identification with others occurs before the first keystroke in a browser, rather than at the moment of interaction. The algorithms and programming, even when the user is not specifically identified or even online, predetermine the type of website that would be most fitting for each individual. The user is simultaneously active and passive in the identification process; active in searching for ideas and knowledge, but passive in the function of the algorithm that groups people together. Digital consubstantiality is an unconscious process, insofar as it is a neurotechnological process that occurs in the background of our cyborgian minds: the computer and networked server.

Aaron Hess, “You Are What You Compute (and What is Computed For You): Considerations of Digital Rhetorical Identification,” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 2014, p. 13

[grrdis]

Judy!: 1993 Judith Butler Fanzine Gives Us An Irreverent Punk-Rock Take on the Post-Structuralist Gender Theorist

Punk rock and its accoutrements—including the handmade, Xeroxed ‘zine—pass into history, replaced by Taylor Swift and Snapchat, or whatever.

Thinking about firing up this account again for use in my summer course on Rhetorics of Gender...

[grrdis]

UC Santa Cruz Reinstates 41 Graduate Students After Months-Long Strike

The strike for a cost of living adjustment earlier this year galvanized students at nearly every single campus in the University of California’s 285,000-student system.

Thinking about how UC caved (because how else would they have functioned as a university?) and rehired the students they fired for a wildcat strike--thinking about this in light of ongoing graduate employees strike at the U of Michigan.

[grrdis]

Ph.D. students need more support in their dissertation writing (opinion)

Writing is required to succeed in and eventually leave graduate school, writes Laura R. Micciche, yet Ph.D. students often don't receive enough support for this mostly invisible private work.

[grrdis]

A Semester to Die For – Spectre Journal

In our latest dispatch, an English professor argues that plowing ahead with university reopening in the fall is akin to the Thatcherite mant

[grrdis]

Envisioning a day in the life of a faculty member on campus this fall (opinion)

Lia Paradis envisions a professor’s typical day on campus come September.

And this is a vivid imaginative pair for the last post.

[grrdis]

Open-but-Physically-Distant Campuses are Unworkable (And You’d Probably Hate Them)

Last Friday was National College Acceptance Day, the day when colleges traditionally ask students to plunk down their deposits for the next school year. Though many schools have extended that deadl…

This is really spot on.

[grrdis]

I remember being an undergraduate student and being put off by queer theory’s constant pointing out of homophobia and opening up of queer wounds. I understood that the world was anti-queer. Anti-me. I didn’t need queer theory to tell me the advertisement on my cereal box also wanted me dead. When I came across Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a grad student, I felt suddenly engaged with queer theory again. What can academia do to heal, to comfort, and to reform dominant understandings of the world into something that enables queer people to keep living?

Game Studies - Time and Reparative Game Design: Queerness, Disability, and Affect by Kara Stone

[grrdis]

Did our employers just requisition our homes? - ANU Gender Institute - ANU

A cross-campus virtual institute at ANU focussing on issues of gender and sexuality in both research and employment.

[grrdis]

Students Across the Country Are Going on Strike

Students say that universities, despite their massive endowments and ongoing fundraising, are not meeting their basic needs as they continue their education in the midst of a pandemic.

[grrdis]

Daniel Stanford discusses solutions for online teaching that may help save bandwidth, be more accessible to students, and create a unified online learning environment.

A nice little graph of alternatives to live meetings, in case you too can hardly hold one thing in your head at a time.

[grrdis]

I remember long arguments with fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin about whether 'history from the bottom up' was the only socially responsible history to write and about whether, indeed, one could justify one's desire for graduate training at all. In the end, most of us got degrees and became university teachers, accepting the need for discipline even as we hoped to make our history more relevant by overturning canonical teachings and exposing their (conservative) foundational premises. Without discipline, there was no way for us to articulate the problematics that concerned us, no historical frame within which to pose our questions and answers, no structures in terms of which (and against which) fundamental critical challenges could be posed. Disciplines carried with them a whole intellectual history of contest about the legitimacy of questions and the frameworks for answering them and so provided the conditions of possibility for their own critical transformation.

Joan Wallach Scott, Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom, p. 25

[grrdis]

In the borderlands deserts, the distinct smell of the creosote bush is the harbinger of the single most important environmental factor: water. It is the smell of desert rain. I always take a little sprig of creosote bush with me when I conduct oral histories about the plant. Its smell often conjures nostalgic memories of childhood that speak to the ways that the environment seeps into our personal histories and identities.

Problems of Place: How My Nana Taught Me to Listen to Plants – Environmental History Now

[grrdis]

We do not all need to be race scholars. But we must all be cognizant of race. We need the voices and presence of racial rhetorical scholars to be widely circulated, cited, and canonized. We need the voices and presence of rhetorical scholars whose work is less about race to remind themselves that rhetors and discourses, bodies and places, effects and affects, are fundamentally raced, and to participate in circulating, citing, and canonizing the work of racial rhetorical scholars. We need the histories that we tell to signal and center the ways that race has made those histories. We need the moments that we identify and the futures we envision to attend to racial specificity. Race must be centered in our disciplinary practices, if not because of the fundamental racial-ness of discourse and the art of rhetorical criticism, then because race informs our political possibilities and limitations and our critical judgments.

Lisa A. Flores, “Between abundance and marginalization: the imperative of racial rhetorical criticism,” pp. 17-18, in Review of Communication, vol. 16, no. 1

[grrdis]

Critiques of the university that presume the derivative nature of the academy from the economy implicitly and unconsciously place a ban on modes of differences as sites of political subjectivization. They become spaces of consensus as they dismiss minority culture and minority difference as formations completely overwhelmed and determined by commodity culture, whether within or outside the academy. Such stances disqualify minority difference and minority culture as potential sites of dissensus with the potential to create fissures and to make room for the inadmissible.

Roderick A. Ferguson, in The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference, p. 18

[grrdis]

Radical scholarship includes often conflicting customs and traditions and it is also shaped by the temperaments and experiences of its producers who lean in one way or another as a result. Radical scholarship is absolutely truth-telling, even when it knows there are no absolute truths; and it is oppositional, often cranky if not unrelentingly angry. Radical scholarship also harbours lived epistemologies that structure, either implicitly or explicitly, the questions its practitioners ask and they answers they give.

Avery Gordon, “The future of radical scholarship,” p. 84 from Race & Class, vol. 47, no. 2, 2005