#the feminist scholar

[vamptoll]

Thinking about when Venus Xtravaganza said "I would like to be a spoiled rich white girl. They get what they want whenever they want it" and every feminist scholar in the world (including the nice non-radfem ones) got ABSOLUTELY furious and Superior over it

#just the obvious transmisogyny of it on one level but #also on the level of just a woman who was murdered wishing she could have privilge was treated like a clown #for haivng the wish at all #the transgender complaint #grad school life #that too bc we have to read those schoalrs because it really is EVERY feminist scholar and It is a struggle not to mention it

[susansontag]

if I’m allowed a bit of biological essentialism for a minute, just to take you all with me on a little thought experiment… I think it’s important to not conflate male dominance with patriarchy inherently. patriarchy is about social organisation and as such I’d doubt even the most essentialist of feminists would seriously claim patriarchy is somehow innate to humans (meaning, inevitable), and indeed a lot of research into hunter-gatherer societies and inferences into prehistorical social organisation would suggest patriarchy as an organising structure has not always existed

but this is quite different from the question of whether or not male dominance is ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ (note: none of these things means it’s good). in a vacuum, men are still, biologically, stronger than women, and therefore could assert their dominance over women physically if they wanted to. the question becomes, just because they could, would they, necessarily? (obviously some would, but some women can be violent too; I’m talking widespread patterns that have predictive power). lerner in the creation of patriarchy talks about how men could not get away, in societies where women lived amongst their families, with asserting themselves physically over women without the threat of those women’s families advocating on their behalf. there was real incentive to not hit your female partner if her relatives could come along (especially her male relatives) and beat you up

this is, obviously, highly simplified. but there is a question therefore of, if this threat didn’t exist, would men have done it anyway? certainly when those conditions changed, male dominance appeared, various evolutions in social organisation arose due to various factors and now here we are under patriarchy. so just because patriarchy itself is clearly not inevitable and required certain conditions to be met to arise, male dominance, and male willingness to assert this dominance through violence, is not necessarily ‘unnatural’. now it’s not necessarily natural either, and certainly the issue is that knowing for sure whether it is or not is almost impossible to achieve as we live under conditions of patriarchy, so who’s to say how men would have behaved towards women if things had developed differently. but it’s food for thought and it’s a good reason to not conflate those terms. male dominance on a societal level is patriarchy, but on an individual level it’s difficult to say whether male violence towards women is a social symptom or a biological one. certainly the way a society is organised (even under some patriarchies) can diminish men’s will to enact violence against women, sure, but that’s due to social and/or legal consequences. without those it’s hard to say. anyways that’s all the bio essentialism I’m allowed tonight I have no clue as basically none of us do

#I’m aware many feminist scholars will have talked at length about this subject #and welcome any discussion as always ladies ♥️ #feminism #moth.txt

[evildilf2]

Like I don’t know, is it not enough to call yourself an intersectional feminist, or even just a feminist? From what I do understand there are a lot of regressive ideas radical feminists hold even if you ignore the transmisogyny (sex negativity, anti kink, political lesbianism, anti porn and anti sex work sentiments, etc). Personally, that contradicts my own understanding of radical advocacy for women’s rights. I don’t think disagreeing with radical feminism automatically makes you a liberal feminist.

#all my little words #BUT AGAIN… I’m not like a feminist scholar so don’t come at me #or do like. I’ll have a conversation. just don’t make fun of meeee

[normalfem]

Makeup is so fucked up. What's wrong the face I have on now 😭😭😭

#feminist scholars have put it more eloquently than me but it really does boil down to that #whats wrong with my face and why do i have to paint on a new one.kill yourself #anti makeup

[marzipanandminutiae]

Yes or no: you will fight Greta Gerwig on sight

Y E S

#ask #ask meme #ask game #yes or no asks #tattedpetticoats #everyone thinks she's god's gift to feminist cinema and I just find her work deeply annoying so far #'OMG SHE SAID KEN IS JUST AN ACCESSORY!!!! HER BRAIN!!!!' #yeah and? Barbie fans and scholars and designers have been saying that for decades! why is nobody remarking on THEIR galaxy brains? #one celebrity says it and suddenly she's a genius having a brand-new idea? #and of course LW19 was. LW19. you know my thoughts if you follow me

[notchainedtotrauma]

Alice Walker approving of Joanne Rowling ? What a surprise. (Also I know you could have found a transmisogynoirist Black womanist and commented on how their views are parallels. Because even from you, that still feels extremely scorching)

Link here.

#stories from the void #Joanne Rowling for ts #Alice Walker #this is why womanists are talking about you like you were dead #this is why Black scholars read and comment on your work like you weren't still on this earth #this is why your Jewish daughter is a third wave feminist #but you haven't been adding anything of substance to womanism for a long time #and your opinions aren't worth the glue holding a peeling wallpaper #antisemite stick together #so of course add transmisogyny in the mix

[hexjulia]

As annoying as tumblr can be at least the For You page doesn't show me three local fascist politicians as people i might be interested in following. I know for a fact this cannot be based on people i actually follow. It's just location + current twitter algoritm favoring rightwing anything i suppose

#i mostly follow journalists and scholars. the only acrivists i follow are feminist and environmental ones. the only politicians leftwing lol #this is NOT based on my preferences.

[eesirachs]

what are your thoughts on how women are particularly singled out and criticized in parts of the bible? do you think characters like jezebel or salome deserve the criticism given to them? how to reconcile this with uncomfortable stories such as those of lot’s daughters or tamar? what do you think the takeaway of some of these stories are?

when we are holding these ancient texts, we must meet them where they are. we cannot colonize them. and we cannot orientalize them. they reflect a particular way of moving through the world, one that is so different from out own. there was a one-sex model. there was kyriarchy in ways we cannot know. there were categories of identity that were at once slippery and rigid.

biblical women (and again, this category works until it doesn't in the ancient world) are often handled with violence or with mythologizing. in both cases their bodies are removed from them. it is well to lament this, and to probe into silences, rapes, slander, incest, victories, anonymity. but it is also well to remember that these texts are not ours--not fully. the task, then, is to be both generous and critical. to note that the difference between jezebel/salome and, say, esther, is only semiotics. that rape and incest, lot's daughters and tamar, exceed their own representation and yet, there is an attempt to represent here.

these stories give us an opportunity to practice stepping into the ancient world without our own violence. to take them as entry-point. to name them as 'texts of terror' but to not allow them to bludgeon us. it is not easy. but there is always something to harvest

#feminist and womanist scholars give us so much from these #great great questions #ask

[zurich-snows]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with “woman” as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disavow with a flourish.

#gayatri chakravorty spivak #indian scholar #writer theorist translator activist #Indian scholar literary theorist and feminist critic #writer #author #feminist #literary theorist #feminist critic

[librarycards]

In the excess is where becoming occurs, and becoming’s inherent nonconformity with being and its sedimented logics act as fertile (demonic) ground for those who might be. Trans/figuration is an ode to those who are not yet permitted to be here but insist on persisting anyway. It attests to not finding or discovering, but cultivating room for the unanticipated to emerge. We are given the honor of awaiting those holographic and hieroglyphic mobilities that might come.

We cannot anticipate subjectivities to come, or even rightly call them “bodies,” because it accosts our agreed-upon requirements for sufficient identification. Indeed, the subject as it might come, as it might emerge, cannot be known beforehand and thus might always—out of definitional necessity—be castigated for its inadequacy, its wrongness. But it is this gesture of subjective wrongness that we must embrace if we are to engender the onset of radically reorienting what might be.

Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism.

[emphasis added; breaks added for accessibility]

#marquis bey #mine #transmad #readings #embodiment #phenomenology #trans #gender #gender abolition #abolition #btw the use of 'demonic ground' is a nod to katherine mckittrick another amazing scholar of the Black feminist digital humanities/ #radical pedagogical/citational studies

[jessiesjaded]

Even though that little cat has literally no teeth she muscled tigs out of the way and smashed a bowl of biscuits so clearly she must be feeling better 😂

#tigs was so offended #but hes a feminist and a scholar so simply stood by and accepted it

[shadow-pixelle]

Today I made a terrible mistake. This mistake was starting my Literature essay.

It's due in three weeks. It's 3000 words. Ok, not bad, I can do 1k a week and have it done for the deadline.

I had a word breakdown, telling me exactly how many words I needed per text to hit the minimum so that I could be comfortable getting it done. My word breakdown was putting it at about 1250 words per text, giving me 2500 total after the texts, and then needing only about a hundred for the introduction and conclusion to hit the minimum (10% leeway, so 2700).

Then my introduction was a bit over 200 words.

Ok, no problem, I think to myself. Means I either have less to do, or I'll be more comfortably in the limits in case I need to take things out. This is a good thing. So I move on to my first text, of which I'm talking about two characters; Carmilla, with my focus being on Laura and Carmilla. I'm expecting to spend most of it on Carmilla but start with Laura anyway.

I end the Laura segment at 1263 words.

And then wrote another 400 on Carmilla.

So my essay is now at around 1800 out of the required 3000, I've still got three characters of my second text to do (which is Dracula, for which I'm doing Lucy Mina and the three vampires in the castle), and then my conclusion, all in about 1000 words.

And then it gets worse, because I don't know whether I'm supposed to count quotes or not. Or footnotes. Because I think the teacher said footnotes count, but I don't remember, and since it's the holidays I'm not going to get an answer from the teachers any time soon. But if I do count both quotes and footnotes I'm at 1968 words, which means I've got the Dracula bits, the footnotes from those bits, and my conclusion in 1300 words (because my absolute maximum allowed wordcount is 10% above the 3000, so 3300) before I need to start actually cutting things out.

Not bad for about five hours of work, though.

#my life be like #uni stuff #oh god the coursework #long post beware #English Literature #this is my life now #i always forget how much fun writing an essay is when you're actually enjoying the topic #and retroactively applying a feminist perspective to characters that were written before feminism was a codified thing is really fun #like this shit is my jam! #(at least until i need to start arguing with other people in the essay) #(that bit sucks) #(like let me just rant about these people and how they fit into these interesting molds) #(that stuff is fun!) #(just don't make me talk about scholars and critics and stuff) #Dracula #Carmilla #also on the plus side my current minimum aka minus both quotes and footnotes puts me with 1000 left until i hit the minimum #so that one's a little less awful in that regard

[aresianrepose]

"We saw this with the European witch genocide in which oppressed women were targeted ... was targeted specifically to have an excuse to persecute widows, homeless, disabled, and vulnerable women who no longer had men to reign over them during a time of political unrest and scarce resources" Historically, men were also accused of and killed for witchcraft, and it was also levied against ethnic minorities. This feels like a misleading way of talking about witch hunts, and frankly unnecessary for the hysteria discussion?

I stg if someone else asks me (in a way that is obv in bad faith and not trying to further the conversation) about the use of the word genocide or talking about the witch trials, I'm turning off anon. It was an added example to talk about how hysteria has been used for centuries to discredit and target women.

It's not misleading at all. The witch trials, which spanned nearly 200 years across multiple countries, were a way for Europe to get the public to do what they wanted to do by using fear tactics drummed up to specifically target the weakest among the population. There were scarce resources and these unstable women, specifically the disabled, widowed, and hysteric, were a drain on their neighbors and were already causing a lot of social strain because of the war that took their husbands (providers/owners) from them, recent governmental changes in the ability to farm and hunt, and the lack of social wellfare. Where else have we seen political unrest, lack of food and resources, etc lead to the persecution and outright hunting of a group of people??

Yes, men were killed during the witch trials. Only if they were

A. Related to a woman who was accused. An example of this one was the son who was forced to eat his mother's severed breast.

B. Convicted of another crime or multiple crimes and witchcraft was just tacked onto it.

As I stated in my post, misogyny can affect anyone of any gender identity. Thanks.

Where did I say it was only white women???

Whips out my women, gender, and minorities studies degree with a specific actual thesis course on specifically "Witches, Harlots, and Mad Women." Go read Witchcraze by Anne Barstow, which as I stated in another post (and is literally in the references of the JT post), is a good introductory book to start looking into the genocide of women that took place during this time.

It's not unnecessary to bring this up since I was specifically talking about hysteria, vulnerable populations, politics, and how victims have been treated throughout history. I specifically chose the witch trials because I did my thesis on it, I'm knowledgeable in it, and I have the lived experience of an AFAB person. So rather than pick from a minority I would not have a right to speak for/about for the sake of looking at politics in media, I chose that one. Victims and politics, especially victims of the largest mass killing in Europe not caused by war, do go hand in hand.

#clovis writes #please stop #I Literally Have A Degree In This #everything I have stated I learned from my mentor who is a first nations woman who has multiple phds and been published #as one of the leading feminist scholars in this area of expertise

[susansontag]

speaking of legally blonde, does anyone know/have any good reading on its (and other films of its ilk) relation to popular antifeminist backlash? you try and search this and all that comes up is how girlpower it is lol

#surely some feminist scholars wrote about this #moth.txt

[thechronicmasochist]

I'm taking a class this term that's looking at Chicana feminism and activism and my instructor is so fucking smart and very cool and the other six kids in my class deserve to be hit with large sticks for talking over her all the time and making it so she can't give her fucking lectures on her dissertation topic.

#twice a week for two hours i have to sit in a room while six white kids #four of whom are legit high school kids #speak over this Chicana feminist scholar who is lecturing about her specialty #and try not to throw chairs at them #i shit you not yesterday she asked the class what manifest destiny was #and the fucking TEACHERS ASSISTANT recited a definition for MANIFESTATION like the spiritual practice #and none of the others knew what manifest destiny was

[lesbian-mulder]

The reviews of Hannah Gadsby’s Picasso show are rolling in……extremely embarrassing for everyone involved

#I’m not a modernist but #I’m offended on behalf of every female artist and feminist scholar of the past century #bad disingenuous art history drives me nuts #not only embarrassing but irresponsible #ramblings