#thinking through things

[infjdoodles]

[elvy-chae]

Bernard: You’re strong for going through all this.

Jae: I’m....not.

Bernard: but-

Jae: I need you to listen.  I don’t feel strong.  I feel empty.  I feel hollowed out.  I shuffle through everyday because it’s easy.  Killing myself would take effort I don’t feel.  Curling into a ball and refusing to do anything would mean explaining to people why I refuse to go along with the normal routines.  And I’m so tired.  Tired of seeing their faces turn to pity.  Tired of all the sorrys they think mean anything.  So I go through like nothing happened.  Not because I’m strong, but because I’m tired and hollow.

[extrasenscry-archived-blog]

Okay. I’m gonna really think about making David before I do it. I have the things all set up but...I have to mentally prepare myself. Can I put myself out there? Will I do a good job? I’ve wanted him for a while but...I already have a hard enough time getting things started and getting steady partners on lottie and ruth so...ugh...idk

[yourfaceislesmiserables]

throwin this under a cut?

So I’m not a big valentines day person and I only see Jake in the weekends anyway, but all we did last weekend was watch The Walking Dead. So we need to get out of the house. I was thinking about going somewhere fancy for dinner (but soooo many people are gonna be doing that), or doing a candle dinner...or if the weather is good going on a hike...or maybe both? 

[ninjaruski]

Salvation without Change

If I'm going to think locally about my position in academia, in philosophy in particular, Ultron's quote makes perfect sense. Most of the discourse surrounding inclusion in academia, particularly the humanities, hasn't been for the sake of including minority voices: it's been for saving the humanities. These departments want more minority scholars, more minority voices, more minority work not because they find it interesting, though some might, but because their own lack of diversity is killing the disciplines.

When I look at the efforts of my department, my faculty, all of their calls for diversity have been for the sake of saving the department and not for changing the way philosophy or my department operates. They're content with the perpetuation of the status-quo, even in the presence of minority scholars because the presence of the minorities acts as a shield against accusations of bias, which allows business to continue as usual. Diversity, as Sara Ahmed puts it, becomes a way to hide the lack of diversity such that the status-quo remains unchanged. Thus, I could say the following:

"You want to save philosophy, but you don't want it to change."

This is apropos, given how academia has framed its call for inclusion. In general, "diverse hires" are intended to be minority bodies speaking about minority issues with minority voices, they are subsequently less encouraged to do work in areas not related to the way in which systemic oppression acts against their bodies. Put another way, women, LBGTQ, and people of color are assumed to be working on areas that have a direct relation to the kinds of oppression or exclusion that they experience as a result of their embodiment.

This assumption "ghettoizes," to borrow a phrase, the minority body into a small subset of the field which then is forced to justify itself as valid in its contributions to the rest of the field. In doing so, the field manages to maintain its "sameness," while preserving its integrity because the dominant discourse in the field does not have to engage with the "diverse" bodies that it includes for its own salvation. Diverse fields and bodies therefore act as a kind of "life support," a saving grace which enables disciplines to continue in their previous functions without change: the field is saved, but it is still the same field with the same problems.

If we are to push this idea that philosophers want to save philosophy, but they don't want it to change, the reasons why philosophers who engage in more culturally nuanced and, dare I say, relevant, philosophy are also marginalized. To treat popular culture as philosophically relevant and insightful would imply a change in the way that the field views what things should be considered from a "philosophical" perspective, what things count as "real" work. Philosophy, it has been argued, is concerned with "real" issues; the way popular culture orients our perspective is irrelevant to questions of being or the nature of the self.

Yet this could not be morewrong: what we represent in our cultural artifacts and products can tell us more about how we view ourselves (or how a dominant minority views itself and the world) than abstract investigation. This need to preserve philosophy as the investigation of "hard" issues, in an abstract sense, is an undercurrent running through philosophy's lack of application and the devaluation of ways of doing philosophy that apply our abstract theorization to the world around us. To treat something like #GamerGate as philosophically significant would be to alter what philosophy takes as philosophically interesting, which is something philosophy is not prepared to do.

All of this has confined itself to my field of study, my academic space, but we can look at how it plays out in other areas. Concepts of race and blackness, to take my lived experience as ground, are also subject to the same kind of problems. We want to save blackness, black identity, black culture, but we don't want it to change. Cornel West calls this a kind of cultural conservatism (ironic since he's blind to his own perpetuation of cultural conservatism), and I think that's an apt way of putting it. There exists this need to preserve a kind of atomic essentialized structure of blackness as a referent, which drives a demand for stasis within the black community even as the world around it, and the community itself, changes.

That is not to say that black movements are the only movements with this trouble: LBGTQ communities have this problem, Feminist communities have this problem, Latin@ groups have this problem, groups on nerodiversity and disability have this problem, and a lot of this has to do with the way these groups have had to define themselves in opposition to oppressive structures. However, in defining themselves, they seemed to have assumed that this definition will remain static. Thus, when attempts to move "forwards" are made, they are not made with reference to the possibility that they too must change as society changes.

What I'm getting at here is the following: we all want to save our worlds, but we don't want our worlds to change. And this is a problem.

[abotl]

Social Justice and Social Media

For those of you who missed this, Helen Lewis posted a thing. It was received wonderfully by some and horribly by others, There was some brou and then some haha was added on Twitter and I say this dismissively because I think social media is a fucking powder keg of people looking for something to be pissed off about...which explains, perhaps, why I'm making this post. 

Because I can and I'm tired and did I mention that I can?

I have like three followers. Which is great, because I use Tumblr as a way to make myself laugh when my brain needs a distraction and smile at the "pretty". Basically, I'm awful at the social side of social media and that works in my favor here. Obviously, I'm writing as though someone is reading this, but that's a rhetorical device.

So. Here's what I want to say: "Social media is not social justice." Sharing something on Tumblr does not make you a better person. It's a method of identification. The act of changing your icon to the HRC's logo on Facebook is a statement that (ideally) matches your identity. It's a game of identity politics, it's a way of belonging. And it's anything but JUST a game, but it is a performance. You are performing social justician.

This is not, inherently, a bad thing. Identifying with movements for change in the world is not a bad thing. But social media substitutes the illusion of action for substantive change. It's super easy to say something online and then, because you have done something online, do nothing whatsoever to actually make the kinds of change you ostensibly identify with. The glory of the Internet is that it makes action virtual...the downside is that there's still a real world and you haven't fixed it. Signing change.org petitions are great for some things (anything where PR matters), but pretty bad at actually earning rights.

You are not a bad person for failing to change the world all by your lonesome in one night. You are not even a bad person for identifying with movements for social change and then doing nothing, because that is how you become a new person, by performing a new persona. There's nothing wrong with social media justice as long as you know that what you are doing is a reframing of yourself and an act of solidarity and NOT social justice in and of itself.

You are verging into questionably justifiable territory, however, when you conflate changing the world with replying on Tumblr and deciding to fix the world by yelling at other people. There are two reasons why.

It doesn't work. I'm too lazy to actually hunt down the research, but it seems like explaining to people why they are wrong is an ineffective way of making them change. Which is frustrating, I know. Someone acts like an asshat around you, you want to set them straight. Hell, I'm doing that now. But this is for me. I'm assuming no one else will read it. Still, the temptation is to tell them that they are wrong and it doesn't work. There has to be a better way and there probably is. But it involves effort and posting screeds is easy. I do it as a form of procrastination. You will not change people by replying to their Tumblrs with a complaint and I say this as someone who has learned the hard way and who bitterly regrets making a complete ass of herself the two or so times she has done so. (I also regret having done that because both cases I vividly were so not worth getting upset over to begin with.)

There is a fundamental distinction between calling out a person for using language you dislike when they are in your home and walking into someone else's house and shouting at them for the conversation they are having. There are plenty of safe spaces on the Internet whose owners are explicit about the fact that by safe they mean "safe for them". I am okay with that. I think that everyone is entitled to make their own rules for their own spaces and especially blogs that provide a forum and a service can ban the word "it" for all I care. The Internet is not a democracy and you are not entitled to wander into someone else's home, throw poo on all the furniture and call it free speech. They say no poo flinging, you either put the poo down or walk out the door. That is how admins and moderators work. The problem is that your dashboard on Tumblr is not your safe space (and if you want it to be, that's what Safe Dash is for). Finding someone else's Tumblr post and calling them out for --ist language is less clear cut than calling out someone in the comments section of your blog. On the one hand, they're wrong. On the other hand, they are entitled to be wrong on their own Tumblr. One's Tumblr is a window into one's house, it allows a glimpse from a public space into a private, but it is not, in and of itself, a public place. There are no clear standards for how to deal with things that bother you that happen through the windows of someone else's home.

So where are you left? How do you deal? And here's where I think Helen Lewis is mistaken because her post came across as "I shouldn't have to give a shit about other people ever" rather than "You have no right to walk into my personal space and tell me how to speak". Example - I will use the word bitch. My computer is occasionally a whiny bitch. I am, far more frequently, a whiny bitch. I am comfortable with using that language about myself and my technology. There are places where I think such language does not belong, but I will entirely resist your attempts to come into my life and tell me that any use of the word bitch is sexist and I should desist. No.

I would love to provide a set of rules for when to get offended, but that is both impossible and, in its own way, deeply offensive. Having said that..

abotl's set of questions you should ask yourself when you are tempted to call someone out on Tumblr for their use of language.

Is it about me?

Is it an offensive term?

Would I expect someone I respect to know better?

Would I call them out in the real world if I heard it?

What stereotype or stigma is perpetuated if I sit here and keep my mouth shut?

If the answer to the first four questions is NO and you can't think of an answer to the fifth, then by all means, STFU.

But the idea is not to have a cut-and-dried response for each possible set of answers, it's to ask people to think about these questions. They are nothing more than a useful approach. Because language is complicated and, quite frankly, I'm having issues word-ing right now. This is not easy to talk about. We like answers, we like rules for interactions, we like knowing we've done right things and by GOD, we like being self-righteous. 

So maybe that's where this post has to end. Let language be complicated. Let it be imperfect, sometimes. Measure your own speech, control your own spaces and remember that the Internet is not a democracy and its not your backyard and the other people are allowed to be here too and sometimes they are allowed to say things you would not have chosen to say and you need to judge how to respond and each case is different.

One final note: You don't get to determine what other people find offensive. Which is another problem I had with Lewis's post. Other people get to determine what they find offensive and the fact that there isn't an offensive consensus is okay. And if someone is offended, that's their prerogative. The corollary to this one is that you don't get to get offended on someone else's behalf unless they have made it clear that they are offended. You don't get to tell me that bitch is marginalizing to women. You don't get to tell me how to speak about being a woman on my own page. It's silencing my experiences and THAT's why I have a problem with social media justice. Social justice is supposed to be about making space for the absolutely gorgeous symphony that is everyone speaking for themselves, but social media becomes a bunch of privileged people shutting others down in the name of justice. YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!

[holmeswatsons]

i think i'd undervaluing certain people on here by insinuating that i only consider us to be semi-friends, because that's not true; it almost implies that we aren't quite even friends yet, and i'm very sure we are. 

but at the same time, i'm not sure where the line between "friends" and "close friends" begins and ends. i could name at least three people i would want to consider myself "close" friends with, but i have no way of knowing if they feel the same way. sometimes i think we're there, but then i see the way they interact with other people, and suddenly i feel like i've overestimated things. i genuinely just don't know if anyone considers me their close friend.

[missgreenwalt]

Compartmental gnosticism is a disgusting thing to me. If I claim to believe God is all-powerful and all-sufficient, why would I want to separate certain aspects of my life from Him?

When I relate with people, I should not be thinking, "When we're better friends, I'll bring up God then. Now is not appropriate." Is He not much more important than that? I need not bring Him up in ever conversation or shove my beliefs down one's throat, but to believe God does not belong or have involvement "yet" is rejection to Him. When I consider who I date, I want God to be guiding me in the decisions I make. If I want Him to be the foundation of my relationship with someone, I cannot introduce God into the relationship after it has begun--how can He be the foundation then? When I wrestle with my political beliefs, I cannot separate them from my "religious" beliefs--did God say He wanted to rule over every aspect of my life except politics, or relationships, or friendships? No! There is not one bit of my life, no matter how small or menial, that God does not have the right to rule over.

God created man with a purpose, that is, to glorify His name. Everything is meant to bring glory back to God. He is generous in giving us joy in doing this, for He has designed us to find our ultimate fulfillment and joy in serving and praising Him. Thus, the decisions I make are to be in submission to the Father, for this is not my own life to live. My life has never been my own; it has been won over by the blood of Christ, who has every right to direct me as He pleases, as glory is brought to Him.