Speaking of medieval…
Via Kathleen Stock, a seminar at Sussex in 2021.
I find it so fascinating, that substitution of the image for the reality. It’s not a brute physical fact that children are children, no no no no, how crude and philistine would that be? No no, it’s an image, conjured up by evil cruel weird “transphobic activists.” It’s not a brute physical fact that mutilating genitals is mutilating genitals, no no, it’s a paranoid fantasy in the contemporary landscape. Everything is an image and a fantasy, nothing is physical or real – except of course for the obvious unmistakable fact that the trans child is the trans child.
Interesting. Why is the author of that piece so blithely unconcerned about children being injured?
Reminds me of this Bertrand Russell quote: “This is one of those views which are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them.”
I made the mistake of reading through the whole word salad, and the only thing I gleaned from it was that the fact that they’re citing someone surnamed “Awkward-Rich” suggests it must be a parody. Right?
I asked that question on Doc Stock’s tweet. It sure as hell sounds like parody, but we live in bizarro times.
Mind over matter. Image is all they’ve got, since reality is stacked gainst them. It wouldn’t take much tweaking at all to turn this into some parody of a naive, blinkered, navel-gazing, ivory-tower academic swallowed by their own clever, circular, self-referential hogwash. At some point, the world has to become real. And that point arrives every time you breathe, drink, eat, piss, or shit. We cannot escape the fundamental physicality of our existence. Somebody has to buy the groceries, or we starve, no matter how lofty and refined our thoughts may be. Literary criticism is all well and good, but elaborate word-play does not change the world, and it is foolish to believe that a metaphor or a parallel has any force to do so. Words might encapsulate the world, but they don’t capture it. It’s sometimes said that “Mathematics is the language of Nature.” Nobody dies in a computer simulation of a hurricane, tornado, or car accident. You can be fluent in the math, but if you get hit by a car, it will still break your legs, whether or not you understand the mathematical descriptions of the forces involved. Representation is not reality. The map is not the territory. Magritte was right: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
Working with words, it is easy to imagine that they have more power than they do; one’s own words even moreso. Certainly Orwell showed the dangers that come with the control and manipulation of language on a political level, how it can throw up obstacles to action and resistance by obscuring truth and reality. “War” might be “Peace” but an exploding bomb doesn’t care what you call it; the damage will still be real even if you call it something else. The bomb isn’t listening. “A rose by any other name….” We’ve all noted the dishonest language used to discuss “trans” issues, and how it hides what’s really happening. One of the strengths on “our” side is that that reality is still there, whatever names somebody slaps on it, or how studiously we look away. Wishful thinking and hopeful language don’t change biophysical reality. Just as well, too!
Clearly the writer of the above abstract doesn’t like the word “mutilation.” They accuse “transphobes” of framing transition as “mutilation,” as if this word is somehow innacurate spin that is hiding something else altogether. More DARVO, I’m afraid. The “framing” and spin is all from the other direction. Trans advocates are trying to sugar-coat a lie. You might call something a “neopenis” or a “neovagina”, but the bits of tissue you slice up and stitch together will never have the actual functionality of the organs you’re claiming they’re recreating, any more than anyone we see anything with a glass eye.
Once again, every accusation is a confession. “Transphobes” are imagining the “trans child” as “confused, decieved, or seduced” into transition. Yes, indeed they are. Thanks for that. Couldn’t have put it better myself. Somehow the Holy, Mystical (and completely fictitious) Trans Child Knows All and Sees All, possessing as they do, despite the barest minimum of “lived experience”, Wisdom beyond their years as well as a complete, perfect Understanding of their very Nature and Being, including the need to avoid the “wrong puberty” at all costs. Except for the ones who desist, or the ones who detransition, of whom we will not speak because SHUT UP TRANSPHOBE.
Thinking that they’re going to convince anyone outside their bubble with this bullshit is perhaps the greatest bit of hubristic posturing against reality of all, the academic version of changing the letter on someone’s passport from ‘M’ to ‘F.’ If they want to provide other trans activist, trans “scholars” with yet another footnote to pad out the list of sources in their self-contained, incestuously self-referencing circle of validation, let them. The world will go on doing what it does, however euphemistically camouflaged. The world isn’t listening.
I have become utterly bored with literary ‘theorists’ assuming that the mere application of some fashionably irrelevant idea to a literary work somehow results in a better understanding of the work itself as well as of the particular axe the ‘theorist’ is attempting to grind. It’s a pathetic cottage industry, and these clowns get paid for it. And the trouble is that these clowns get all the publicity and bring the academy into disrepute.
For a very interesting discussion of George Herbert’s poetry by people who genuinely know what they are talking about, here’s a recent programme from the BBC:
bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0024lyy