Liminal trans liminalities
A paper I’m not much motivated to read.
A (m)Other’s Work Is Becoming Undone: Liminal Belonging and Trans Potentialities
Aw yeah, the oh so cute English Department parentheses; that’s always a good reason to read no further.
The Abstract:
In this relational ethnography, we write as two white afab genderqueer/trans parents who often find ourselves at best pulled between spaces and parts of ourselves, and at worst pressured to choose between the false dichotomy of our “illegible” place within transness/queerness and “aparent” place within motherhood. Weaving together autoethnographic vignettes of our lived experiences with the writings of QTBIPOC thinkers and pedagogues and their anti-racist white comrades, we reflect on themes of liminality, loneliness, hope, grieving, and love in mothering, kin, and community building and theorize, as queer trans (m)othering mother-ers, about the trans potentialities of being/becoming-with-longing queerly.
So, an extended diary entry by two self-obsessed twits. That passes as scholarship?
Since I’ve been devouring every gender critical book I could get my hands on in the past year, I thought I’d try Rebecca Jane Morgan’s Gender Heretics to see what the opposition is up to….
Nothing but name-calling post-modern gibberish, apparently…
Argh, the pretentiousness… IT BURNS!!!!!
Well, that about wraps it up for the English language. Record the time of death. No need to bother Poirot or Holmes with this one, the murderers have given us a written confession.
I have read many science papers and abstracts, which many people think are pretentious and unreadable. No self-respecting scientist would be willing to write such gibberish.
Well, they are definitely doing the usual, trying to tie gender critical thinking about trans with being racist, and trying to tie their issue to anti-racism. Unearned credibility, that’s what they’re seeking.
I was just thinking about that on the bus on the way home – the fact that other academic disciplines (not only science but also history, philosophy, law etc) have to produce the goods, not just faff around with puns and tedious solipsistic jokes. Why aren’t people embarrassed to do this?
Somewhat related: POLITICO article on the backlash against postmodernism and “le wokisme” in France.
France laid the foundations for campus ‘woke’ ideology. Now it’s leading a global backlash
I wonder if they ever mention the children. How are their little lives affected by the crippling oppression, angst, and inconvenience their birth forced on their Parental Units? I hope they have access to someone stable.
But they’re honorarily “non-white” because they identify as “anti-racist white comrades. “They’re People of Colour Adjacent! And the whole trans/queer/whatever thing? It also makes you less white! and absolves you of colonialism. “Autoethnography” allows you to cast yourself as Indigenous-adjacent, too! They are their own ethnicity! So, not white!! They’ve succeeded in transing themselves out of so many hegemonic, normative identities (including that of “woman”) that they couldn’t oppress anyone if they tried! They’re the Goodies! They’re so Special they’re scarcely in the same dimension as everyone else. They barely even metabolize or displace water! They’re so pure and untouched they’re almost neutrinos! Having done their damndest to extricate themselves from any taint of complicity or connection with the surrounding culture, I’m surprised that they haven’t distanced themselves from their own species and genus.
Any more vapourous and airy and they’ll disappear into a puff of rainbow (g)litter, emptying their fullness into a fullness of emptyness, with a (trans)formative change of state(ment), changing their entire way of being being-ing-ers.
AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC VIGNETTES! THEY’RE VIGNETTES OF AUTOETHNOGRAPHY! WE’RE NOT WHITE WOMEN!! WE’RE MORE INTERESTING THAN THAT!!
Sackbut #5. I read the Politico piece, which I suppose was fair enough so far as it went, which was not very far, but though I have small time for Foucault, Derrida et al (whom I have bothered to read), I have a lot of time for Pierre Bourdieu, who was a remarkable and illuminating thinker. Not to mention a more recent French thinker: Thomas Piketty. I thought the Politico piece got on to thin ice, though, when it too readily pooh-poohed right-wing shrieks about ‘globalism’. The shriekers don’t really know what they are talking about and would prefer an infantile nationalism and, almost certainly, anti-Semitism, as well as the Reaganite mantra about government being the problem, but it is a fact that the hollowing out and weakening of governmental functions in favour of the largely unaccountable power of banks, large corporations and the absurdly wealthy has brought on the dangerous mess that democracies like the USA & the UK find themselves in.
There is an excellent short book recently out: The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neo-Liberalism (& How it Came to Control Your Life) by George Monbiot & the American film-maker Peter Hutchinson. I recommend it.
Sastra, yes the children. I’m pretty much inured to this nonsense. I’ve been dealing with this sort of nonsense all my life (quite successfully, I think with a simple mantra – “Fucko and who?” as one of my philosophy lectures memorably put it.) But reading that gobbledegook I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be not a child but a minor part of an experiment and an utterly incoherent one at that. ‘They’ might be lucky to get out of that with their body intact but their mind is another matter. I know from bitter experience that narcissists do not make good parents.
Tim Harris @8:
That’s it in a nutshell. The desire for a simple answer to a complex problem leads both sides to impotent posturing that makes no changes (or in some cases makes changes in the wrong direction). To manage a globalism that doesn’t put the US at the mercy of Saudi Arabia, for instance, is a complex issue. To find a way to accommodate the overlapping and divergent needs…that’s where trans and the economy share a problem.
Trans is especially enamored of the simplistic. TWAW! We just want to pee! To recognize that the issues are much more complicated than their own beings is not possible for them. To come up with a solution…it can be done, but only if they get out of the way and let people who understand nuance roll up their sleeves and work on the problem (which, in the case of trans, isn’t a problem if you just recognize that TWAM). Once you get to the point of recognizing men as men, the main problem then is safety…protecting trans from male violence. Since we haven’t managed that for women, or any other group, I’m not exactly sure that is going to happen, but the issue of one group’s safety cannot be solved at the expense of another group, a traditionally vulnerable and marginalized group.
Thank you, iknklast! Yes, you are absolutely right to say that the desire for simple answers to complex problems ‘leads both sides to impotent posturing’ — and also to a fundamental frivolousness about politics that can be astoundingly dangerous. But this frivolousness has been helped greatly by the ‘identity politics’ that has been fostered by the neo-liberal ideology (with a strong dash of that loathsome creature Ayn Rand) that the market determines everything (a belief that capitalism and Marxism share) and magically always corrects itself without any nasty regulations; an ideology that has no care for the commonweal, and reduces people to isolated individuals who are out for their own selfish ends only, to ‘consumers’, not citizens; and that in addition immiserates most, while allowing a few to become absurdly wealthy and to wield power over others that they neither deserve or have a moral right to.
The great Judith Shklar criticised ‘identity politics’ many decades ago, and the very great Karl Polanyi, in his ‘The Great Transformation: The Political & Economic Origins of Our Time’, pointed out the perils that the immiseration of the many results in, and how it led to, among other things, the rise of Hitler as well as to the Russian Revolution. It has led in our time to Trump in the USA and to the destruction that the Tories have wrought in Britain.
This has nothing to do with what you said, but I am fed up with the ridiculously simplistic diagram of ‘extremists’ on the left and right, sandwiching between them an amorphous crowd of ‘centrists’, who are supposedly nice, reasonable people, un-anxious to rock any boats. This is a travesty. What is needed is to get people to think seriously about politics, and what kind of government would be good. And that has nothing necessarily to do with any vacuous ‘centrism’. The thinkers who have meant most to me where politics is concerned are Polanyi (I suppose I am a social democrat in the Polanyi mould), Raymond Aron, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, Pierre Bourdieu, and an old friend, now long dead, the poet C.H. Sisson, who was pretty right-wing but generally fair-minded, and from whose essays on political matters I learned a lot (he had been a top civil servant before throwing it all up to concentrate on his poetry).
As for Meghan A. Watts (who appears to suffer from a multiple personality disorder, judging from her choice of pronouns) and Cristina M. Domingue, they are deeply unserious people, bound up, it seems, wholly with themselves, even if it means the ruination of their child’s life as collateral damage. Their ‘geriatric’ Basset hound, happily, doesn’t give a damn about its identity and will any way soon be out of it all; not so much the child. I wonder at the universities and colleges who give them jobs, and at the academic press which publishes such stuff.
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Me, too. It isn’t always (maybe not even often) that the answer lies between the two extremes. There isn’t some magical golden mean, but people assume there is. They see or hear what someone calls extremism, and automatically put “wrong” in front of it. Abolitionists were once seen as extremists. Suffragettes were once seen as extremists.
Extremist is such an amorphous word, because it depends on the environment of the time and place. It depends on the position of the Overton window. It has nothing to do with right or wrong, moral or immoral, or anything else. If I say 2+2 = 3 and you say 2+2 = 5, and someone came along and said ‘split the difference’, yes, they’d be correct at 4. But that is only the case because the two answers (the extremes) are not only incorrect, but in the correct relationship for the correct answer to lie in the middle. Very few questions are actually like that, but people have been hit over the head with pundits preaching ‘centrism’ for so long they actually assume the correct answer will ALWAYS lie between the two extremes.
Maybe basic statistics, coupled with a good course of critical thinking, could help, but I fail to see that it would be a panacea for anything, since PZ almost certainly had both.