Most don’t have a grounding
AND ANOTHER THING.
Because I missed it the first time around.
“Most don’t have a grounding in feminist theory” – so she’s saying if you’re not an academic with a grounding in feminist theory, you’re…suspect, shall we say. Not quite good enough. Inferior. Not up to Sally Hines’s standards.
So she’s saying feminism is for academics. Like her. She’s saying it’s an academic subject, with an academic theory, and if you want to argue and dispute claims and ideologies as a feminist, you’d better have that academic grounding.
So she’s saying a political movement, a struggle against oppression and baked-in contempt, is not for most people.
Imagine saying that about striking workers. Or climate activists. Or refugees. Or anti-racism activists. Imagine saying it about any other political activism. She wouldn’t, would she. She’d call it elitist, wouldn’t she.
But somehow feminism is for people like her, especially her. It’s not for the rabble who simply are women and don’t want to be treated as second-rate.
Of course Hines is exactly the sort of person Orwell had in mind when he said “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them….” Imagine what she might have accomplished if she’d been able to redirect all the effort she’s wasted in mental gymnastics, self censorship and doubletalk into something useful and worthwhile.
I’ve been bleating for years about the language used by academics that (to my mind) actively prevents the academic grounding that Sally Hines apparently wants us plebs to have. So much academic discourse (even the stuff not written exclusively for an academic audience) is incomprehensible to someone with a high school education. Academic papers are typically impossible, meaning you need someone to interpret it for you, and science journalists haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory lately. It seems to me that if academics wanted to be understood, they could be, I imagine they’re clever enough. So I can only guess that being incomprehensible is the point – it’s supposed to be inaccessible to the plebs.
Keeping things in house, acting as interpreters, gatekeepers and guides gives merchants of obscurantinism control over the narrative. Would Judith Butler be as influential if she wrote simply and understandably? She takes adantage of the all-too-common belief that things that are complex are difficult to understand, and there “must be something to it” if it’s coming from a professor.
But there’s a difference between specialized vocabulary (which can involve a lot of technical jargon), and obfuscatory bullshit. The core of genderism is that “gender identity” is essential, trumps material reality, and carries the “authentic” self, and that sex is constructed, subordinate, and can be overcome, or changed. None of this is true, and this core untruth must be defended at all cost. We’ve here seen how honest, clear language is death to both gender ideology and trans activism. Media reports are straight out lies, calling men women, ascribing male crimes to women, characterizing statements of fact “transphobic” without quoting the actual statement made. And so on. This media deception is the public face of the academic games used to give whatever intellectual credibility genderism has in academia; both sides would be crippled by plain language.
It’s interesting that sports organizations seem to be waking up to the realities of the physical bodies their rules and regulations judge and qualify. The nuts and bolts of muscle bone and breath are stubbornly unmoved by appeals to “inclusion” that conceal cheating. (Would that medecine would become as heedful of the demands of human bodies entrusted to its care) It’s also interesting that reportage of sports’ awaking from woke is couched in terms of “bans” against trans athletes, and not as the recognition of the unfairness of letting males compete against women. Honest reporting would demolish the “arguments” for ‘inclusion” by showing that they were simply demands to be allowed to continue cheating. Their inevitably side falls in the light of clear language, whether it is on the sports field, the news room, the political convention, or academia.
That’s not an “ally” – that’s a servant, with an asshole for a boss.
So feminism (the word) ‘belongs to’ academia now? I remember a time when it ‘belonged to’ lesbian separatists. In both cases, the claim excludes the vast majority of women from the class analysis, meaning that anyone who espouses either position is doing the work of the patriarchy – divide and conquer.
Hines is, whether or not she’s aware of the fact, not doing any kind of feminism (the class analysis and women’s liberation meaning), but is someone who is happy to let all other women continue to suffer rising inequality, just so long as she retains a good position in the patriarchy.
@Arcadia:
What you say is true and fair about academic areas that are about ideology (rather than being grounded in reality), the areas that are vulnerable to Sokal-style hoaxes. As with theology, the smokescreen of verbiage is intended to hide the lack of good evidence and good reasoning.
But it’s not true about academia and science in general. In most of the sciences people are trying to write as clearly as they can, and the primary literature is inaccessible to the lay reader only because the frontiers of the subject are way beyond a typical person’s knowledge.
But, for nearly all areas of science, it’s possible to find well-written, popular-level books and articles that do explain things in an accessible way.
Coel, I was going to make the same comment. One reason science papers are inaccessible is the language of science requires a vocabulary most people don’t have. This is actually true of most fields, even those that are not academic. Try asking an auto mechanic to explain what’s wrong with your car. He has his own vocabulary and anyone not versed in the language will be lost in the jargon. My husband was a librarian, and if he gets together with other librarians, the conversation goes right over my head.
There have been a number of science popularizers, such as Dawkins and Gould, who are able to bring the science to the public (though Dawkins does sometimes tend to get going into jargon that needs to be parsed). The one area of science I can think of that is light on that is physics; mostly Neil DeGrasse Tyson right now. There are physicists writing books purportedly for lay people, but as someone who has taken physics and read a lot of physics, I can tell you I wouldn’t give most of the books to anyone outside the sciences to read and expect they’d understand it.
For once I agree with Coel!* I think that we have to be careful not to overgeneralize on academic works based on the small samples that we read of those articles written for an audience that requires jargony gobbledy-gook to mask the emptiness of the content. When I read many science papers I feel like I have a good understanding of the discussion, except for the statistical analysis portions that are beyond my undergrad training from years ago.
*I actually agree with you more than that, and appreciate the perspective you bring to many posts.
@iknklast:
Agreed, and to add to this, it is not just a matter of using different words (as if they were using every-day concepts, but talking in German rather than English). Rather, each of these jargon words represents a concept that is not present in everyday life.
Thus someone could be familiar with the car-mechanic’s word “carburettor”, but still not understand how a carburettor combines with other components into an engine. Imagine explaining that term to an intelligent and educated person from the 14th century.
Yes, agreed again. The problem here is that modern physics has progressed so far beyond everyday life, that it’s not just unfamiliar concepts. It’s that each of those concepts builds on a layer of other concepts that are also unfamiliar, and each of those concepts then builds on a further layer, and there are 4 or 5 layers of concepts between cutting-edge theoretical physics and everyday life.
Now, each of steps can be explained, but even if a lay person can follow the explanation of each step, being able to follow multiple layers of unfamiliar concepts is something that human brains basically cannot do (without vast amounts of work assimilating each step until it is familiar), even for intelligent people.
So take something like “the Higgs Boson was predicted as being necessary to complete the standard-model of particle physics, by then expaining why the other particles have mass”, and then ask how the Higgs gives mass to the other particles.
You can attempt to answer that with an imaginative analogy (which is a highly worthwhile thing to do), or, to do anything approaching a proper job, would take a whole book. Sean Carroll did indeed write a whole book that attempts to explain this. But, as you say, unless the reader is both interested in science and fairly capable of following physics-y concepts, they are going to struggle to assimilate it. Again, the problem is that the novel concepts come in layers upon layers.
And that means that — unfortunately — research papers in physics are never going to be accessible to anyone who doesn’t have a strong background in physics.
@Mike Haubrich
Thanks.
I don’t think the academic discipline History has this problem does it? Historians can write books that are both of value to other historians and accessible to the general reader? People like Richard Evans, Eric Foner, Sean Wilentz?
I wonder if that’s because they don’t need it. There is always more research to do, so there’s no need for jargon to make them look Important the way there is in lit crit.
[…] a comment by Coel on Most don’t have a […]
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Most don’t have a […]
I don’t think history has much in the way of specialized terminology to begin with. It may reveal or uncover terminology associated with a particular subject, but I don’t think that’s really the same thing. There is a certain degree of jargon and layered knowledge, though, to what is discovered. For example, there’s a lot of depth to the subject of medieval warfare, from the technological to the tactical to the strategic.
To Arcadia#2, I shall only say that there are plenty of explanatory books about science that are accessible to somebody with only a high-school education, so long as, at least in some cases, they are willing to put in a bit of work & thought. And where science proper is concerned Darwin on the origin of species, or Dawkins’ ‘The Extended Phenotype’, or the more popular ‘The Blind Watchmaker’, are hardly difficult to understand. And, no, one is not going to understand physics beyond a certain level unless one has considerable knowledge of mathematics, and one has to rely on good science writers writing for an intelligent & interested audience – and there are a number of them. And where the arts, or disciplines like history, are concerned, it must be said that the best, and most, of it is sensible. and not beyond the the grasp of anyone who is willing to address it seriously. Not everyone, or most of those, in the arts is Judith Butler, or some other kind of mistress or master of obfuscation, and it is well to remember that.
Regarding science, I recommend ‘The Music of Life: Biology Beyond Genes’, by Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University. It touches on very profound questions, and is written in a remarkably clear way that nevertheless requires, and compels, attention. If history interests you, I would recommend the essays of Tony Judt, Reinhart Koselleck, and the work of Richard Evans. These would insulate you against the obfuscators.