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Do Not Try To Understand Me
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Twitter produced something valuable? Sacre bleu!
The evolution of Menorasaurus
khms on Do Not Try To Understand Me
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite on Do Not Try To Understand Me
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Andreas Avester on Do Not Try To Understand Me
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Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden on Do Not Try To Understand Me
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ardipithecus on Do Not Try To Understand Me
…And a Suffragist To Be Named Later
Your Esteemed SJW-Pervert & Author of this Blog:
Crip Dyke is the long cherished internet-ego and sometime nom de plume of an entirely-too-wordy feminist, philosopher and failure who now makes her home at Pervert Justice. While her credentials are long established, some argument continues as to whether she is herself a handmaiden to Death, or whether she merely submits to the whims of Death's handmaiden as readily as to Death Herself.
Recent rants by people who probably more articulate than the author of this blog:
StonedRanger on Do Not Try To Understand Me
Pore over a pervert's past!
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Since Rosa Parks Wasn't Rosa Parks, Who Was? Irene Bad-Ass Morgan, That's Who
Over on Pharyngula, a discussion has been started about the propriety of using "accomplice" as a better word to describe the people that we have sometimes described as "allies" when discussing people that are not targeted by a specific form of oppression but nonetheless choose to work against it.
I started to write a comment over there about why I believe accomplice is appropriate, but it ended up becoming a treatise*1 about a woman named Irene Morgan*2. I decided that the thread shouldn't be cluttered by a comment quite as long as I was writing, but that Morgan deserved better than cutting that treatise short. So I've moved it to Pervert Justice as a post for your reading pleasure.
Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden
Court Cases & Decisions, Definitions & Background, Ethics, Language & Communication, Race & Racism, Words
Every Other Trans Person Is Wrong
I've struggled over the last four weeks with a post bashing around inside my skull. It seems unable to escape but also unable to calm down. I've wanted to write a rather lengthy post about language and the problems that I see with certain tendencies in trans* advocacy these days around language. But every time I go long-form, there's so much that I can't find a place to stop. So then I tried to go short-form, but that didn't convey the real difficulty of the topic I wanted to engage. So now I'm going in a completely different direction, with a seemingly unrelated introduction and then, probably, a short-form take on the topic itself, allowing you all to take from it what you will, given the context provided by the introduction/preface.
So a good, long time ago, the internationally celebrated center of learning that is UMM ran into a spot of difficulty: apparently some right wing jerks were being right wing jerks. Whodathunkit. Usernames are Smart, a longtime commenter whose work and thoughts I remember as generally respectable and valuable*1, disagreed with PZ Myers suggestion that Morris residents treat as trash any scattered copies of the Young Republican rag "The North Star". (Yes, they deliberately stole the name from the abolitionist newspaper of Frederick Douglas, which famously included one of the only ads promoting the Seneca Falls "convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman" to run outside of the State of New York).
I disagreed with Usernames' disagreement, and said so. The crux was that while I agree that white people should be accountable to people of color when attempting to address racism in the US, I disagreed that suggesting actions (like trashing any "scattered" copies of The North Star that weren't in their designated paper-piles) was the same as telling people from other groups what experiences define their groups. I also disagreed that waiting for people of color to plan a response is the right course of action when a white person is confronted with racism in that person's presence. This doesn't mean that white folk should be praise for anything they do, just for taking action. No, this is merely the natural consequence of refusing to put people of color on the spot, to make people of color responsible for ending racism.
Biological Sciences, Definitions & Background, Ethics, Language & Communication, Sexism & Gender Oppression
On the Corner: Postscript to a Beginning
Taking nothing away from the importance of the post on the birth of intersectionality, it was both a bit long, and it was focussed more on what Kimberlé Crenshaw thought than my thinking about her thoughts. There are some nuggets that I think are important, things that we will need to remember as we continue to explore Intersectionality. But I think they are best placed in this separate PostScript:
Definitions & Background, Feminists & Feminism, Intersectionality, Race & Racism
The Metaphor is not the Concept
Over the course of this blog, we'll be talking quite a bit about social theories and theory making. These theories have some similarities to scientific theories, but also some differences, so it's worth stepping back for a moment and contemplating them. In particular, I think it's productive to reinforce the idea that the theory is not the concept.
What is a theory? In these circles, in these uses, a theory is similar to scientific theory. It is a model used to discuss a concept or body of facts. Unlike scientific theories, social and critical theories reach their best when they explain a large body of observations and are contradicted by no repeatable, empirical observations, but they remain "theories" when they have not yet reached this pinnacle. Science has a separate category, hypotheses, for unconfirmed but educated speculations whose merits are debated in an academic community. Social critics? Not so much.
Definitions & Background