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[Jeff-DSA]

I thought this was an April Fool's Day joke and then I thought it was just tumblr feminism. I'm not sure how to feel knowing that this is real.

 

[pants]

She's basically trying to combine all her individual interests into one cohesive postmodern whole.

This reminds me I need to buy that ice cream making PC that gives blowjobs on the side.

 

[Cagey]

I'll wait for the Anarcho-Marxist critique of this Eco-Feminist milk study before I render an opinion.

 

[tokkun]

Just so we are clear, feminism deserves A HUGE DEAL of credit for advancing science

If you mean something beyond making it more culturally acceptable for women to work in science, I would be interested in hearing it.

 

[Coconut]

Still, if I had a choice to be a cow or a bull, I would choose to be a cow. Being milked all day is better than being slaughtered!

Depends on what type of bovine you are not all cows are milk cows and not all bulls are slaughtered.

 

[Kite]

I was expecting this to be an April Fool's prank but it's real...? No way.

 

[Yrael]

Sure, but what I linked to is not a tumblr, a casual blog or a storify that someone put together from random tweets by random people. This is actual academic feminism. A public university officially recognized this work as satisfying their academic standards to a sufficient degree that they granted Guertin a doctorate. Canadian taxpayer funds were spent on this. Looking at her CV here is scary because it shows this wasn't just a fluke where a nonsensical thesis happens to sneak through. That could happen anywhere, only in a reasonable field it would sink the writer's academic career. In academic feminism, though, it looks like the content being nonsense either doesn't matter or is considered a plus. Guertin has been employed by multiple universities and institutions since, doing "research" that appears not unlike the thesis.

Thanks to the magic of Wayback Machine, we can still appreciate the thesis in its entirety. For some reason, Guertin has taken it offline recently.
https://web.archive.org/web/2011051....utoronto.ca/academy/carolynguertin/diss.html

Nah, you get that sort of thing occurring in all kinds of literary fields.

Bill Watterson made this rather hilarious comic as a send-up after reading a particularly pretentious book of art criticism:

(Even the hard sciences aren't always immune, in part because of the pressure to rush out as many papers as possible.)

If you mean something beyond making it more culturally acceptable for women to work in science, I would be interested in hearing it.

That in itself is a pretty big deal.

 

[perfectchaos007]

Depends on what type of bovine you are not all cows are milk cows and not all bulls are slaughtered.

True. I would actually prefer to be the alpha bull that just gets to mate all day

 

[Funky Papa]

Sure, but what I linked to is not a tumblr, a casual blog or a storify that someone put together from random tweets by random people. This is actual academic feminism. A public university officially recognized this work as satisfying their academic standards to a sufficient degree that they granted Guertin a doctorate. Canadian taxpayer funds were spent on this. Looking at her CV here is scary because it shows this wasn't just a fluke where a nonsensical thesis happens to sneak through. That could happen anywhere, only in a reasonable field it would sink the writer's academic career. In academic feminism, though, it looks like the content being nonsense either doesn't matter or is considered a plus. Guertin has been employed by multiple universities and institutions since, doing "research" that appears not unlike the thesis.

Thanks to the magic of Wayback Machine, we can still appreciate the thesis in its entirety. For some reason, Guertin has taken it offline recently.
https://web.archive.org/web/2011051....utoronto.ca/academy/carolynguertin/diss.html

I didn't call it tumblr feminism because it was on tumblr, but because it had the same quality. The point remains: fringe positions like hers are not representative of the feminist movement as a whole. That she's an academic is of little importance in the grand scheme of things. As a matter of fact, those loons are sadly over-represented in the academic field.

If you mean something beyond making it more culturally acceptable for women to work in science, I would be interested in hearing it.

Uh? That's a HUGE deal by itself. I mean, Marie Curie anyone? Besides that, science has benefited inmensely from empowering women and treating them as equals, or at very least, humans worthy of some consideration. Just take a look at the strides in medical science made possible by the interest in female contraception. Or the progress made in psychology and antropology.

 

[Ganzlinger]

Getting milk from a cow is traumatizing in several aspects. Getting split from their newborn calves, being forced to wear milk sunction cups while standing still for hours There is pain being inflicted both physically and mentally. Just because the cow cant say or think I am oppressed doesnt make it less valid.

My dad had a small farm and we had these cows wearing milk suction to produce milk. I can say that they didn't mind it at all. They were just standing there eating their meals like it was no big deal. And it didn't take hours. There was no milk after some minutes and they just would go back to the fields. I used to give a pat on their heads.

 

[perfectchaos007]

My dad had a small farm and we had these cows wearing milk suction to produce milk. I can say that they didn't mind it at all. They were just standing there eating their meals like it was no big deal. And it didn't take hours. There was no milk after some minutes and they just would go back to the fields. I used to give a pat on their heads.

stop it you're ruining the narrative!!

 

[joelseph]

On the flipside with pigs males have their balls ripped out several days after birth because if they make the meat taste strange. Where are the male pig rights activists? MPRA!

Spoiler

One of the most baffling things I have read.

Lower testosterone levels equals better tasting meat. Pigs aren't the only animals that are castrated at a young age.

 

[captainnapalm]

I remember reading this sentence in an article on animal rights which kind of stuck with me:

The fact that we will take a cow with a natural life span of 30 years, impregnate her six times and take away her baby six times and kill her after she has had mastitis for five years is dreadful.

Yeah, that sounds pretty dreadful. Cows apparently show great distress when their calves are taken away.

It's just another symptom of treating animals as a product to be exploited for maximum value and profit.

 

[joelseph]

apparently show great distress when their calves are taken away.

Humans tend to project human thoughts and emotions onto animals. I grew up on a Angus farm and personally weaned the steers I would show at the county fair. "Great distress" is hyperbolic.

 

[Fuchsdh]

This is the stuff that gives academics a bad name.

It also feels like a paper I would have written at 14, where I kept checking the Microsoft Word reading statistics to boost the readability to college-level. "Maybe if I use big words and impenetrable sentence construction, I'll sound smart!"

I remember reading this sentence in an article on animal rights which kind of stuck with me:

The fact that we will take a cow with a natural life span of 30 years, impregnate her six times and take away her baby six times and kill her after she has had mastitis for five years is dreadful.

Yeah, that sounds pretty dreadful. Cows apparently show great distress when their calves are taken away.

It's just another symptom of treating animals as a product to be exploited for maximum value and profit.

Dairy cows and all livestock and non-companion domesticated animals only exist on this earth due to human desire for maximized value and profit. I don't see any way they would continue to exist if we stopped considering that, unless you're going to get nonprofits to fund wildlife preserves for farm animals.

 

[captainnapalm]

Humans tend to project human thoughts and emotions onto animals. I grew up on a Angus farm and personally weaned the steers I would show at the county fair. "Great distress" is hyperbolic.

Distress is not an emotion solely reserved for humans.

 

[East Lake]

She's basically trying to combine all her individual interests into one cohesive postmodern whole.

I never realized this until sort of recently but it seems to me that this is the whole point of postmodernism. To cast doubt and scorn on science, which despite flaws has the greatest track record, and then by extension all social sciences and coherent history gets dumped out with it, and then is replaced by whatever totalitarian view an academic has, whether it's coherent or not.

 

[Kinyou]

On the flipside with pigs males have their balls ripped out several days after birth because if they make the meat taste strange. Where are the male pig rights activists? MPRA!

Spoiler

One of the most baffling things I have read.

Male chickens are shreddered shortly after they hatch because the farms don't have use for so many males. A German politician recently made a proposal to change that. Through new tech farms could figure out the gender while the chicken is still in the egg, so if they kill it while it's still inside the egg it would be more like an abortion.

Anyway, so weird to bring gender politics into this.

 

[captainnapalm]

Anyway, so weird to bring gender politics into this.

I agree. The article itself is an example of the kind of thing that turned me off from academia. But I have some sympathy for the basic gist.

 

[kirblar]

I thought this was an April Fool's Day joke and then I thought it was just tumblr feminism. I'm not sure how to feel knowing that this is real.

Related: 18% of social scientists consider themselves Marxists. (Even though the overall total is only 3% of university faculty.) It's an issue where these theories were all developed years ago, in the 50s/60s/70s/80s back when it was seen as a legitimate alternative to mainstream economic analysis as a framework. We've figured out that it doesn't work, but all these flawed concepts that used it as the base of analysis in other fields of study are still out there being passed on because so many become overly attached to dogma. You can see the same effect with Austrian economics as well, where the good ideas have been absorbed by the mainstream, and whats left today is a shambling zombie full of the bad ones.

 

[Valhelm]

Yikes.

 

[Femmeworth]

The excerpts in the OP aren't as "out there" as I was expecting.

 

[benjipwns]

Related: 18% of social scientists consider themselves Marxists.

The Marxism part of that table is the only useful part. "Radical" and "activist" are so vague as to be meaningless.

And that's where you'd expect to find full-blown Marxism. It's always been a "social science" that works its way into nooks and crannies vulnerable to pseudoscience. And postmodernism and class-based "studies" are ideal grounds because it's one of the few places Marxist theory is viable.

 

[Funky Papa]

The excerpts in the OP aren't as "out there" as I was expecting.

The intellectually offensive stuff is at the link. The milk bottling bit I pointed a few posts back is my favourite one.

Edit: Oh, benji. You don't get to talk about political ideologies that are only viable in pseudoscientific context, my dear

 

[RockTurtle]

reading the paper, i get the feeling the author took the term "mother earth" literally.

 

[The Technomancer]

I never realized this until sort of recently but it seems to me that this is the whole point of postmodernism. To cast doubt and scorn on science, which despite flaws has the greatest track record, and then by extension all social sciences and coherent history gets dumped out with it, and then is replaced by whatever totalitarian view an academic has, whether it's coherent or not.

Postmodernism isn't anything. Or rather, its everything, and kind of useless as a label as a result

 

[Guevara]

stop it you're ruining the narrative!!

.

You and your pesky first-hand experience. Cows are being oppressed whether they know it or not.

 

[The Technomancer]

I didn't call it tumblr feminism because it was on tumblr, but because it had the same quality. The point remains: fringe positions like hers are not representative of the feminist movement as a whole. That she's an academic is of little importance in the grand scheme of things. As a matter of fact, those loons are sadly over-represented in the academic field.

Basically. Let me know when work like this garners any actual political clout.

 

[Poodlestrike]

reading the paper, i get the feeling the author took the term "mother earth" literally.

Welcome to ecofeminism!

 

[kirblar]

The Marxism part of that table is the only useful part. "Radical" and "activist" are so vague as to be meaningless.

And that's where you'd expect to find full-blown Marxism. It's always been a "social science" that works its way into nooks and crannies vulnerable to pseudoscience. And postmodernism and class-based "studies" are ideal grounds because it's one of the few places Marxist theory is viable.

You'd expect the radical/activist tags regardless of political affiliation anyway given the nature of Academia.

 

[RockTurtle]

You'd expect the radical/activist tags regardless of political affiliation anyway given the nature of Academia.

i'm a radical moderate

 

[Mael]

I'm reading the article and by god is it a mouthful trying to sound deep while saying nothing so far.

On the subject of the impact of mankind on land mammals.

I don't think there would be that many of them if we weren't there to farm them...

 

[Kurdel]

clearly you condone pastry-archy

Holy shit, this slayed me

 

[Funky Papa]

i'm a radical moderate

Well, Radical Centrists are a thing, although I prefer to call them useful idiots or just glib.

 

[RockTurtle]

Well, Radical Centrists are a thing, although I prefer to call them useful idiots or just glib.

dammit, is there anything that doesn't have extremists?

 

[kirblar]

Well, Radical Centrists are a thing, although I prefer to call them useful idiots or just glib.

No one’s less moderate than moderates - When people have batshit crazy views on both the right and left side, they show up as Moderate in surveys, despite being nuts.

 

[CrimzonSamurai]

I'm sorry what?

I think they're getting at studies that have shown lactose intolerance has a rate of like 5-10% in the West (Europe/America) and 90-95% in Asia and Africa.

Just quoting because this specific argument in this article and elsewhere drives me insane. The reason that the lactose tolerance levels vary so widely across the continents is that when Europe was settled during the glacial recession it was still too cold to have a reliable agricultural harvest every year, and led the peoples there to an over-dependence on livestock. Milk is super nutritious, and being able to drink it at age 25 was a big advantage for those people when their turnips didn't pop up.

Ugh. SCIENCE! Dammit.

 

[Xe4]

They're right for the entirely wrong reasons. The problem with the milk industry is not the patriarchy trying to hold down female cows, its the horrible conditions many cows face, and the overabundance of beef and milk playing a part in ecological destruction and climate change.

These could be solved by simply regulating the industry more (making USDA standards mandatory), and by starting a campaign to get people to eat less beef, and more fruits, veggies, and "good" meat, such as fish, or even chicken, which are both better for the environment and for people's health.

Adding feminism to the mix just over-complicates a fairly simple issue, as far as issues go.

 

[Mael]

Adding feminism to the mix just over-complicates a fairly simple issue, as far as issues go.

That's a really good way to describe this bolonia of big words trying to pass off as a paper.
I've seen more coherent and less BS from legacy VB4 code or from antivaxxers.
How is this academia in any way?

 

[East Lake]

Postmodernism isn't anything. Or rather, its everything, and kind of useless as a label as a result

What do you mean? Give me a practical example lol.

 

[DeathoftheEndless]

She writes in the most complicated way possible. She would make a great textbook author.

 

[Mael]

Reporting on his experience of eating human breast milk cheese in the
Village Voice Blogs
, Robert Sietsema reported “it feels like cannibalism” (a sentiment echoed in several other postsonline) and enumerated concerns that seem representative of those expressedon the blogosphere: “human instinct” says “there’s something fundamentally disgusting” about it; excess breast milk should be donated for the nourish-ment of premature and critically ill babies; no one knows the effects of humanbreast milk on adults; and human breast milk products have not undergonethe medical testing regularly used to screen cows’ milk. But from a feministposthumanist standpoint, Sietsema’s final concern was most salient:
Women are not farm animals. Human-breast-milk cheese casts them in that role. There isnothing “ethical” about milking humans. What woman would consent to being milked for the culinary pleasure of others, unless strapped for cash? The natural result of this happening on a large scale is the exploitation of poor mothers, who will be tempted to sell milk and feed their babies formula.

"Human Breast milk may prove a health risk because its effects are rather unknown on adults and may have unwanted effects.
But screw health issues, women aren't cows to be milked! That's the real problem!"
WTF.

 

[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

Basically. Let me know when work like this garners any actual political clout.

Well, a bad thinker and worse writer like Judith Butler established much of the intellectual groundwork for modern, third-wave feminism, so it's not as though the bad stuff always stays relegated to the fringe.

 

[tokkun]

Uh? That's a HUGE deal by itself. I mean, Marie Curie anyone? Besides that, science has benefited inmensely from empowering women and treating them as equals, or at very least, humans worthy of some consideration. Just take a look at the strides in medical science made possible by the interest in female contraception. Or the progress made in psychology and antropology.

Yes, that is self-evident. I thought you meant something a little more science-specific since you individually mentioned science and the arts rather than productivity as a whole.

 

[East Lake]

Well, a bad thinker and worse writer like Judith Butler established much of the intellectual groundwork for modern, third-wave feminism, so it's not as though the bad stuff always stays relegated to the fringe.

There's an old article on Judith I have bookmarked that seems rather apt.

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler's work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler's casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of "interpellation," you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler's work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler's prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with "Consider..." or "One could suggest..."--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims.

Take two representative examples:

What does it mean for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? Is the act of presupposing the same as the act of reinstating, or is there a discontinuity between the power presupposed and the power reinstated? Consider that in the very act by which the subject reproduces the conditions of its own subordination, the subject exemplifies a temporally based vulnerability that belongs to those conditions, specifically, to the exigencies of their renewal.

And:

Such questions cannot be answered here, but they indicate a direction for thinking that is perhaps prior to the question of conscience, namely, the question that preoccupied Spinoza, Nietzsche, and most recently, Giorgio Agamben: How are we to understand the desire to be as a constitutive desire? Resituating conscience and interpellation within such an account, we might then add to this question another: How is such a desire exploited not only by a law in the singular, but by laws of various kinds such that we yield to subordination in order to maintain some sense of social "being"?

Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one's own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move. When Butler does follow that "direction for thinking," what will she say? What does it mean, tell us please, for the agency of a subject to presuppose its own subordination? (No clear answer to this question, so far as I can see, is forthcoming.) One is given the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler's books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler's notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don't go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

http://perso.uclouvain.be/mylene.botbol/Recherche/GenreBioethique/Nussbaum_NRO.htm

 

[Kittygirl]

Still, if I had a choice to be a cow or a bull, I would choose to be a cow. Being milked all day is better than being slaughtered!

Especially since male baby dairy cows usually become veal.

I love meat, but can't stomach veal after I found that out.

 

[cooljeanius]

There's an old article on Judith I have bookmarked that seems rather apt.

http://perso.uclouvain.be/mylene.botbol/Recherche/GenreBioethique/Nussbaum_NRO.htm

Props for citing Martha Nussbaum! Now if only I could remember what it was by her that I had to read in college...

 

[Deleted member 231381]

Related: 18% of social scientists consider themselves Marxists. (Even though the overall total is only 3% of university faculty.) It's an issue where these theories were all developed years ago, in the 50s/60s/70s/80s back when it was seen as a legitimate alternative to mainstream economic analysis as a framework. We've figured out that it doesn't work, but all these flawed concepts that used it as the base of analysis in other fields of study are still out there being passed on because so many become overly attached to dogma. You can see the same effect with Austrian economics as well, where the good ideas have been absorbed by the mainstream, and whats left today is a shambling zombie full of the bad ones.

Marxism has a different meaning in academia to the popular conception, though. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with political beliefs or whether you're a Communist or what-not (although that is over-represented too, at least from personal experience), it's just a term used for a paradigm of theories that focus on dominant/excluded social groups and belong under sociological frameworks. Of course it's going to be pretty prevalent in the social sciences, it has powerful explanatory value, the same way institutionalism or rationalism do.

 

[Femmeworth]

Postmodernism isn't anything. Or rather, its everything, and kind of useless as a label as a result

Depends on the scope and context.

 

[bomma_man]

Related: 18% of social scientists consider themselves Marxists. (Even though the overall total is only 3% of university faculty.) It's an issue where these theories were all developed years ago, in the 50s/60s/70s/80s back when it was seen as a legitimate alternative to mainstream economic analysis as a framework. We've figured out that it doesn't work, but all these flawed concepts that used it as the base of analysis in other fields of study are still out there being passed on because so many become overly attached to dogma. You can see the same effect with Austrian economics as well, where the good ideas have been absorbed by the mainstream, and whats left today is a shambling zombie full of the bad ones.

Is there a difference between finding Marx a valuable analytical tool re class and capitalism and being a revolutionary though? One does not necessarily follow from the other. Maybe I'm just part of the self perpetuating soft science system, but in these days of unprecedented inequality I don't think Marx is particularly out dated in every regard.

I mean, have you ever read the article the 'tragedy of the commons' came from? Great idea, but the article is wack job neo-Malthusian authoritarianism.