How to threaten power
Shall we read a little of that oh so edgy paper?
This paper suggests that a purposeful political embodiment of threat opens up and revisits a trans* politics of monstrosity and virality that not only questions but threatens power. Taking seriously the transphobic notion of transness as an endemic threat to feminism, gender, and rights, I present ‘trans* endemics’ as a political and scholarly strategy that asks, what does an embodiment of threat, indeed, being a threat, do as a possible site of survival and resistance for trans* bodies?
With a hey nonnie nonnie and a hotchacha.
But picking our way through the obligatory theory-speak, we find that he’s saying it’s cool for trans people (male ones, he means but doesn’t spell out) to be threatening because by being threatening they threaten power. Yes that’s right, a guy with a knife to the throat of a feminist woman is threatening power. It all makes sense now. The knife to the throat is a site of resistance for trans bodies. What else would it be?
When you see me walk down the street with my long blonde hair, heeled combat boots, and make up to die for, are you scared?
No. One, I don’t generally examine people walking down the street that closely. I’m usually thinking about other things, or looking at the view, or both. Two, you sound more ridiculous than scary. Three, get over yourself.
When I walk down the street, I see people who hate me and admire me; want to kill me, and want to fuck me. They see a threat, and I see a weakness.
You see people who don’t give two shits about you, that’s what you see.
I am both threat and threatened. I am the monster in your nightmares, I am the lamb for the slaughter, I am the butcher. Watch me take my knife to your throat.
You’re not the butcher, you’re a very silly boy.
TERFs see transness as an endemic threat to feminism, a ‘social contagion’, the frontier on which they’re going to defeat patriarchy. They don their JK Rowling masks and shout bloody murder about ‘female erasure’.
Yeah, stupid women, why do they object to the erasure of women? Let’s all put knives to their throats.
Let us harness this parasitic imaginary and suck the cis out of feminism. Let us be the endemic. Let us exist as the evil twin to queer theory, and let us bleed it dry for all it can offer us. Chu is wrong: trans* is more than ancillary notion to queer. But do we have to depart from queer entirely? Is trans* even fucking here yet?
If TERFs think trans* is an endemic threat to feminism, let us be the threat to feminism. We are the endemic, the viral, the toxic onslaught of ideology that attacks the very core of what you hold dear. We go unnoticed, right up until the moment they scream for mercy.
Dude fantasizes about making women scream for mercy, and that’s a “paper” in “gender studies.”
Am I a threat to you? Do I send chills down your spine?
Picture this: I hold a knife to your throat and spit my transness into your ear. Does that turn you on? Are you scared?
I sure fucking hope so.
Those are the final paragraphs of the paper. Scholarly stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.
I hate that this shit passes as “academic”. In addition to the fact that it’s simply despicable misogyny and ego-preening, it cheapens academic credentials of those of us that have done real scholarship.
It’s yet more evidence for a hypothesis I’ve been toying with that the various “studies” programs in the humanities are, in both methodology and content, less the soft science or even philosophy they pretend to be than they are (poor, sophomoric, navel-gazing) literature.
I’ll grant him this: he’s got the “monstrosity” part right.
He can’t see that he’s reinforcing patriarchal power? What a joke. There’s nothing new, bold, or threatening to patriarchal power about holding a knife to a woman’s throat. That’s been going on for centuries. Old hat. Get in line.
You want to be edgy and out there? Here’s a little experiment in “political embodiment” for you. Try holding that knife of yours to the throat of a rich, white, “cis” heteronormative CEO. See if your classmates (assuming they don’t disown you) will crowdfund your bail. Try it while Black in some jurisdictions, and you wouldn’t make it out of the building alive, assuming you even made it past the lobby without being shot.
Fuck off and grow up.
Clear statement – trans wants to take over feminism. They want to erase women (except the lesbians who will agree to fuck them). The erasure of woman is finally a stated goal.
Women are the endemic to feminism. (Don’t like the use of endemic; as an ecologist, I think he may not quite understand what it means. I’ve never referred to “an endemic”. Endemic is an adjective; endemic species is a noun modified by an adjective.) Women are the proper beneficiaries of feminism. Sorry, dude, that’s just how it falls. You were not born in the wrong body…but your brain could sure use some tuning up.
I wrote better scholarly papers than that in high school.
Not really, because when I read that, I also instantly saw green polka-dot baggy trousers and a tiny yellow top hat with a flower attached to it on a long, sproingy wire.
@1 I unfortunately completely agree; makes me wonder why I bothered sometimes. And I used to have a lot of respect for LSE.
Honestly, when I was an academic I was publishing stuff in either maths journals (where there aren’t many words at all) or computer science journals where there was less maths and more abstraction but the papers always started “We had a crack at doing X and Y is what happened.” Then they described X and Y. Some of the papers I co-authored on early cloud computing ideas upset quite a lot of people but I don’t remember them ever describing my clown outfit or threatening anyone with knives. And at the very least, I am sure, non-specialists could at least understand what each paper was about by reading the abstract.
We should remember that this is an MSc, though. Some MSc degrees in the UK are OK; there are some good MSc research programmes and people who have done the first two years of a PhD can sometimes transfer to an MSc. I used to teach on an AI based taught MSc which was pretty good and on an MSc conversion course for people with degrees in other areas who wanted to learn programming in a year. That was not so good in academic terms, but it did a perfectly good job of what it set out to do.
But some MScs are absolute nonsense. They’re the equivalent of doing General Studies and Drama for A levels; they tick the box of having an MSc but they don’t contribute anything to the sum of human knowledge. They are taught rather than research-based and as you can see above, what’s taught is not necessarily of high scientific value. The “master of science” is a bit of a joke anyway, but in these cases…
Speaking as a feminist who actually has had a knife held to his throat, let me say that the experience did not increase my respect for the knife-holder in the slightest. I imagine that any third party who had observed the incident would also not have been favorably impressed. If this guy would rather change minds than wind up in prison, he might want to experiment with a different attitude.
Yes! I was hoping the next post would be a look into this ridiculous ‘paper’.
He sees people, and also has an active imagination. And what he imagines he sees in others fairly drips with narcissism: everyone is thinking of him.
This is not even a sentence.
Worst of all though:
This guy wants transness to be a threat to power, and he makes clear that by power he means feminism. Not patriarchy, feminism.
latsot, I had to look up MSc; I never heard of it before. After reading a comparison with the MS, I am quite baffled. The description of MS the online source gave was nothing like the MS I earned. Perhaps it is different in the US, but at least one of the top universities they listed for the MSc was in the US, so maybe I’ve missed something. The way they described the MS degree sounded more like an MA degree. Weird. Has education changed that much? Or have I never realized something important, like, my MS doesn’t actually fit me for science, only for social work and counseling? Wow. Guess I should be glad I got my Ph.D.
He’s not interested in “changing minds”. He is not interested in putting forth any sort of argument, or having a discussion. This guy wants to shut women up. This is not an academic paper. It’s a threatening letter/ransom note. It doesn’t rate a grade some much as a call to the police.
Ikn @10, The way latsot describes it, it sounds more like an MA, but leaning heavily toward MFA (in the creative writing division, which can be completely subjective and absurd (like the MSc, some MFA’s are better than others)) Since it’s humanities based, it’s probably not very much like an MS here in the States. What irritates me is how much sheer crap is generated by some of these kids who have received PhD’s in the last 10 or 15 years, it makes some of the Universities look like expensive vending machines.
Latsot #5 — okay, you made me laugh out loud.
As for the “academic” paper: slam poetry. Did not win.
twiliter, thanks. That’s how I got it from the site I visited, but that’s why it confused me. That site listed the hard science jobs for the MSc, and the fluffy humanities and arts for the MS. I have both an MS and an MFA; while my MS was much more rigorous in many ways than my MFA, the MFA still required quite a bit of work. But it was, of course, quite subjective in a lot of ways, because how can you judge someone’s writing objectively? And since I wrote my thesis on science onstage, and I was the only one in the entire program that understood science, I probably could have BS’d my way through the entire thing. I didn’t, but I probably could have with enough jargon.
Perhaps I should read the whole paper so as not to be guilty of the same reactions to quote-mined out of context passages that Pink News and their ilk like to do, but it sure sounds like a pre-killing spree screed in the vein of Elliott Rogers. Am I wrong? Should this person be monitored?
Ikn @14, I have a friend with an MLA who thought it was more legit than an MFA, to whom I don’t really know, depends on who you talk to I suppose, but I think it really boils down to what you do with it. Art is wonderful, but it doesn’t masquerade well as hard science. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No no no, BS is a different degree. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
#12 twiliter: I suspect that a great many universities, even without the name ‘Trump’ before them, are expensive vending machines nowadays, inventing courses of no worth in good capitalist manner to draw in the rubes – that this should be from the LSE, where Karl Popper & Michael Oakeshott once taught.
Slate: Master’s Degrees Are the Second Biggest Scam in Higher Education
I suppose I am naive, but I found the article rather shocking.
Thank you, Sackbut, It’s a good article, isn’t it? It is shocking, although I fear I found it rather unsurprising.
This “paper” is nothing more than a lurid fantasy better shared in a LiveJournal in the early 2000’s.
I get the feeling that this MSc goes with Rimmer’s BSC and SSC. ( Bronze Swimming Certificate & Silver Swimming Certificate)
Tim Harris, I see the push at our school to do the same…and we have little prestige outside our local area. No one has heard of us. There is a battle between faculty and administration right now, both of whom claim to support high standards, but who identify that differently. High standards to the faculty means that you actually educate the students in what they came to learn; high standards to the administration means they are happy. They are doing battle right now with English and Math because they are trying to remove basic competencies in reading and mathematics that we currently require for graduation; the administration says that held up several students from getting their degree on time. Yeah. It’s more important that they graduate than that they learn anything.
They’ve also made it possible for students to get their degree without ever taking a science class. They added Psych 101 to the science curriculum; it is full to overflowing every semester while hard science classes are slipping in numbers. They used to put students in my Environmental Science course for the “easy” science…until it became obvious that it is not, in fact, easy, at least not if it’s taught correctly. I do not hold hands and sing Kum Bay Yah with my students, and we don’t sit around all semester learning about recycling for the 2000th time. They get the science of how the environment works, and why you shouldn’t try to get all chemicals out of the environment, and so forth. No New Age silliness in my class, just science.
So the administration did what any self respecting educator would do…they multiplied awards by giving them some sort of certificate for almost anything. A certificate for this class, a diploma for a couple more classes, and then a degree at the end. A student could probably come out with a dozen or two “awards” for doing nothing more than taking classes.
Meanwhile I’m sitting through harrowing ‘training’ sessions that tell me we should not give students deadlines; it’s too much pressure. Yeah, right. So next Sunday A.D. is fine if that’s when they want to turn in the paper? After they’ve been graduated for twelve years, because we don’t want to hold up anyone’s graduation just because they can’t read or do basic arithmetic? And we should let the student select how they are assessed. The example they give is to allow a student to do interpretive dance to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis. So the fuzzy subjective feel good nonsense from elsewhere will begin to pervade the sciences, and we no longer have anything that can live up to the name of education.
Sorry for the rant. I’ve been a bit…on edge…lately about my job. Just in case you didn’t notice.
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Yes, iknklast, it does not surprise me. I left school at 17, worked on farms and building sites and in factories for some years, and am largely self-educated. Though I taught English literature at a Japanese university and was involved in getting poets like Seamus Heaney, Les Murray and Christopher Middleton invited here for symposiums, I have never felt entirely at home in academic settings, but nevertheless respect genuine standards and believe it to be the duty of teachers to help students to feel the excitement of understanding new things and so to develop. What I loathe is how in recent years the power of highly-paid ‘administrators’ has increased, and the cynicism about standards that has accompanied it.
Oh, and I meant to add – don’t get too upset about the situation, even though I know it is upsetting.
This person is a serial killer in the making, and anyone who encourages him bears responsibility for what will come of letting him think this sort of attitude is acceptable.