Critical Theory and Queer Theory

Oh yes, this is high on everyone's agenda right now!

Yes, every university in the US has stopped teaching economics and physics and statistics and applied mathematics and evolutionary biology and computer science and now just teaches fisting.

Link, OP? (Just curious.)

[quote]now just teaches fisting.

Pics please!

For R3. It's paywalled. Apparently Critical Theory nutters are insisting medieval Anglo-Saxon studies are too focused on whiteness. (Gee: why would that be?)

It then goes on to say how Critical Theory is a theology that's captured campuses, and suggests you better adhere to it at the risk of your job, or your children will denounce you and you'll dragged from your bed and shot. Or something like that. I may have got it confused with 1984 or a Stalin article.

Anyway, like Queer Theory, this raging war seems to have flown over the heads of DL.

It's not at all possible that this is a big balloon of bullshit.

Thanks r5.

I'm Medieval-adjacent (field of study, not age!) and know something of this controversy. Am interested to read this.

OP, History is no longer taught in universities because it demonstrates white supremacy. Instead, fisting classes are taught. The ugliest male students are forced to lie down on a table in lectur halls and must allow the professor to fist them. If they reject the fist, that means they are racist. If not, they are woke. This is the reality we are living in.

I found a NY Times article about the same war.

"By the end of this week, some of the protagonists had either locked or deleted their Twitter accounts, as rubbernecks outside the profession started sharing screen shots and joking about the latest circular firing squad on academic Twitter."

It seems rather funny. But it seems academia is a scary place now with all these theories if you have to adhere to, or else.

"On Thursday, Dr. Bond tweeted an apology to Dr. Rambaran-Olm. “In defending our editorial decision, I centered myself & showed my fragility,” she wrote. “I apologize for this great harm"

LOL. Can we have this as the standard DL apology?

Can someone cut and past as both articles are pay walled.

US academia (as well as Hollywood) wants to rewrite history on the grounds of "equity". Making a past for people that simple didn't exist.

[quote]I centered myself & showed my fragility

What does that even mean?

I'll post the NYTimes piece, r12. Give me a minute.

Medieval Scholars Spar on a Modern Battlefield: Twitter

Medieval Twitter can be a noisy and fractious place, where scholars post articles, memes and, not infrequently, fierce blasts at each other.

But over the past week, things turned hotter than a pot of boiling oil, as a dispute over a spiked book review spiraled into a conflagration involving charges and countercharges of racism, bullying and deception.

It started when Mary Rambaran-Olm, a literary scholar who focuses on race and early medieval England, accused editors at The Los Angeles Review of Books of “torpedoing” a strongly negative review she had written of “The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe” because of their friendship with the fellow white scholars who wrote it. As the online furor grew, one of the editors posted a fierce rebuttal, accusing her of misrepresenting the situation, and saying the publication had killed the review because she refused to accept edits.

By the end of this week, some of the protagonists had either locked or deleted their Twitter accounts, as rubbernecks outside the profession started sharing screen shots and joking about the latest circular firing squad on academic Twitter.

The online fracas was the latest blowup in a field that has been roiled in recent years by acrimonious debate over race. Some scholars have accused their colleagues of not sufficiently pushing back against white nationalists who have appropriated medieval symbolism and weaponized a highly distorted version of medieval history.

Groups like Medievalists of Color have sought to diversify the overwhelmingly white field. And scholars have also pushed for a broader conception of the Middle Ages, looking beyond the traditional focus on Western Europe to encompass the Middle East, North Africa and even China, Japan and the Americas.

“The Bright Ages,” published by HarperCollins last December, was written by Matthew Gabriele and David Perry, two scholars who have been vocal proponents of diversifying the field. In it, they synthesize research from across the field to correct the popular view of medieval Europe as primitive, violent, drudgery-ridden — and entirely white.

In her review, which was commissioned by The Los Angeles Review of Books, Dr. Rambaran-Olm briefly praised the book before moving into an extended critique of its “white-centrism.” Ultimately, she wrote, in a version later posted on Medium, “the language and the core themes of the book don’t reveal brightness so much as ‘whiteness.’”

“While ‘The Bright Ages’ challenges some racist and fascist notions,” she wrote, “Europe, Christianity, and whiteness remain central themes,” while the authors “rely on their whiteness for authority.” Editors’ Picks ‘S.N.L.’ Takes on the Trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard The Man Who Controls Computers With His Mind Saving Modernism in the Hamptons

The editors killed the review in early March, after several days of editorial back and forth over length, structure and evidence. “This has nothing to do with Gabriele and Perry,” an editor wrote in an email to Dr. Rambaran-Olm, “and everything to do with us simply not having the same coordinated vision for how a book review should be presented and argued.”

The Twitter furor began weeks later, on April 24, when Dr. Rambaran-Olm, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, saw that the publication had posted a much shorter, more appreciative review of “The Bright Ages” by a different reviewer.

“Some shady things from the editors,” she wrote on Twitter. “My review *IS* coming out and it’s not whitewashed which is what this incestuous club wants.”

Others on Twitter jumped in, assailed what they saw as the racist treatment of a woman of color, and called on both The Los Angeles Review of Books and the authors of “The Bright Ages” to issue statements.

On April 27, Dr. Rambaran-Olm posted what she said was the nearly 3,700-word review “as the editors received it,” with only “four minor edits.” The post, which ran under the headline “Sounds About White,” was accompanied by a photo of the book next to a piece of bread, decorated with a frowny face drawn in what looked like mayonnaise.

And on Twitter, she posted what she said were parts of her email correspondence with the editors. In a telephone interview, she said she did not contact any LARB editors directly.

“I was waiting to see what they would do,” she said.

Dr. Rambaran-Olm is no stranger to the field’s battles. In 2019, she drew headlines when she stepped down as second vice president of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, saying it was encouraging and emboldening white supremacists by refusing to change its name. (The group subsequently voted to rename itself the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. “The term ‘Anglo-Saxonist’ is problematic,” the board said at the time.)

With “The Bright Ages,” Dr. Rambaran-Olm said, she had written “a balanced review.” The intention “wasn’t to take down two scholars,” she said. “It was an openhanded gesture to dialogue.”

But over the weekend, in a quickly deleted Twitter thread, Sarah E. Bond, a classicist at the University of Iowa who commissioned the review, pushed back strongly against the idea she would “kill a review for friends” and accused Dr. Rambaran-Olm of giving a selective version of the facts.

“You have gone to great lengths for days to not show our actual emails or comments in full because it would show: 4 editors voted down this review, including an editor of color,” she wrote. And, she said, Dr. Rambaran-Olm had posted a different version of the review on Medium, while also deleting comments from an editor of color.

Dr. Rambaran-Olm, she maintained, had refused “70 percent” of the edits, resulting in “an impasse.”

“This is not about whiteness,” Dr. Bond said. “It is not about protecting white men. It is about saying sometimes reviews and writing don’t work out in public spheres rather than academic journals.”

But the furor intensified as others chimed in. At one point two scholars of color suggested that Dr. Rambaran-Olm was not, as she says in her bio, part Black. (One later deleted the tweets and apologized.)

In the interview, Dr. Rambaran-Olm, who described herself as “very mixed,” with parents with Afro-Indian Caribbean roots, called the accusations that she had lied about her race “shocking.”

“I was blown away, after having a review rejected in the way it was, that it had descended into this mess,” she said.

And she connected it with Dr. Bond’s charge that she had misrepresented her original draft and the editing emails. “If you are a woman of color, you have to prove everything and have everything in order,” she said, calling it “a matter of being gaslit all the way.”

The precise details of what happened at The Los Angeles Review of Books, a nonprofit online publication produced by decentralized teams of scholar/editors who often work on a volunteer basis, are unclear.

Everywhere. It's almost impossible to avoid.

In an email, Boris Dralyuk, the editor in chief, said that editors in charge of different sections operate independently. And he said the other review was commissioned a week before the one by Dr. Rambaran-Olm, by a different set of editors.

“We are aware this created the impression that the published piece was a replacement” for Dr. Rambaran-Olm’s, he wrote. “This is not the case.”

On Thursday, Dr. Bond tweeted an apology to Dr. Rambaran-Olm. “In defending our editorial decision, I centered myself & showed my fragility,” she wrote. “I apologize for this great harm & do not stand w/racist attacks on her or questioning her identity.” She then deleted her account.

Reached by email, Dr. Bond said she stood by the decision to cancel the review, but reiterated the apology. Her earlier tweets, she said, “brought out allegations that I had not foreseen but which is horrendous.”

In an email on Friday, Dr. Gabriele, one of the authors of “The Bright Ages,” declined to comment on the controversy. “We welcome any and all reviews of our book,” he wrote, “and condemn harassment of any kind.”

[sorry for not editing out extraneous crap/links]

I was studying contemporary drama. The Queer Theory mob kept trying to make me write about how theatre had always discriminated against homosexuals. ("Which theatre is this??" I wanted to know.)

Anything written by a gay man had to be interpreted in light of Queer Theory. It was considered facile to suggest that he might be more interested in talking about the subject of his play, whatever it happened to be, and outrageous to say that the straight love affair depicted in the play might be devoid of homosexual implications or that the author's homosexuality was not especially relevant to the way he depicted it.

I found it totally offensive. It was as if all gay people were was gay, and all a gay writer's imagination could stretch to was autobiography.

It's not only Queer Theory. Feminist, Post-Colonial and whatever Theory they've thought up lately all make the same distortions, and incidentally transfer attention from whatever the poor author thought they were writing about to centre on the academic. The good news is that these Theories all require the use of such opaque "technical language" (ie mumbo-jumbo) that you can't understand what their adherents are saying anyway.

I don't do any academic writing any more.

What are the tenets of Queer Theory one has to adhere to?

Academics are insufferable. It's just 🐜 cs using jargon.

I'm quoting a post (not my own) from another thread on academia, but it works here too:

[quote]We are at the end of a long period of decline in everything except the sciences. Only fools in the academia dint know this. It's due for a replacement. There's a fin de siècle feeling about it, a decadence that produces despair.

R23. What does that even mean?

Replacement with what?

Well, r24, for starters, an acknowledgement that there are alternative ways of doing the humanities.

I don't feel like writing a long post, but I will say: one part of the current academy that irritates me is the expectation, in the humanities, to produce explicitly political work. Thus, the quality of one's work is seen in relation to its political expediency. But I don't think all work is inherently political, nor should it be. The problem is that political work becomes prioritized for grants, research fellowships, publications, etc.

In a sense, it's another side of the corporatization of the modern university coin. From the outside, the humanities are pressured to endow students with marketable skills rather than knowledge. From the inside, they are pressured to produce politically meaningful work.

In both cases, the message is that the humanities themselves are not inherently valuable, a view which -- as a humanist -- I strongly disagree with.

Gee, OP. You really have your finger on the pulse of a nation, don't you?

None of this is truly about critical theory and queer theory "infiltrating" the academy. Queer theory has been out of vogue for over a decade (to the point where grad students are now starting reading groups to "reclaim" it), and "critical theory" is some vague term the OP seems to be using to say "Academics are crazy cunts who cannibalize each other."

Academics are crazy cunts who cannibalize each other, but it has nothing to do with critical theory or not teaching history. It's turf war, and gatekeeping, and when you start looking at it like clubs, it makes a lot more sense.

[quote]Queer theory has been out of vogue for over a decade

That's simply untrue. Every month brings news books filtered by it.

[quote]"critical theory" is some vague term

Get up to speed, Nana. It's been as influential as Maxism in academia for at least the past five years.

Marxism.

Here's a good summary of Critical Theory for newbies from my very favorite paper of record.

Now we just need to find one for Queer Theory.

They won't stop until everything associated with white people is destroyed. All the History and Literature modules will be about people of color, across every university in the world.

Critical Race Theory is not the same as Critical Theory. One term means something and one is vague. A square is always a rhombus but a rhombus is not always a square.

Please explain the different between them Nan for all us dolts. Ta.

R33 I googled so I don't have to

[Quote]Critical Theory is a social theory that aims to critique and change society as a whole. Critical theories attempt to find the underlying assumptions in social life that keep people from fully and truly understanding how the world works.Jan 6, 2022

On a personal level, my experience is critical theory means anti-empiricism. Queer theory is actually an offshoot of critical theory, as is critical race theory. And r27 is very wrong, CT is pervasive. R28 is correct in my experience.

[quote]Get up to speed, Nana. It's been as influential as Maxism in academia for at least the past five years.

Oh, I get what this thread is about now. It's people fearmongering about "Marxism" in academia because the current attempted attack line by Tucker et al. is that everything non-MAGA is socialism and communism.

The dismay and outrage over critical theory (OMG, it sounds just like CRITICAL RACE THEORY!) and Marxism reeks of people who aren't very immersed in or conversant about actual scholarship or historical trends in academia. They expect Marxism to be a dirty slur in research and pedagogy like it is on Fox News, and the fact that it's not just breaks their limited brains.

The fact of the matter is that Marxian faculty is nowhere near the level it was even twenty years ago, and that Marxian thought, while on an upswing compared to its time in the utter wilderness during the Clinton and Bush administrations, is nowhere near as influential now as it was in the 60s and 70s. The elite universities that churn out the vast disproportion of the nation's faculty aren't conferring doctorates on thousands of doctrinaire Marxians and critical theorists. This is a right-wing fantasy.

Currents of thought pass into obscurity and experience revivals of popularity. They do this based on world events, their potential to critique dominant theories, and occasionally as a result of organized intellectual projects (e.g. Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys). If Marxism and other critical theories have gained any currency in recent years, it's because trained scholars are remembering that they actually have important things to say that people have insufficiently appreciated. This happened in the mid-2000s with realism, which came roaring back in IR and all adjacent fields due to the debacle in Iraq and the huge overreaching of liberal thought (liberalism has a distinct meaning in IR) that undergirded it.

R35 = the tiresome, middle-class white student from a posh school who thinks he's oh-so-cool and rad because he read some "critical theory" (not that he understood any of it) - as did everyone else, because it was on the reading list - and who takes up the whole of the seminar class with his windbag pontificating, refusing to let anyone else speak. Will switch to law or get a corporate or media job after graduating or, if he's really annoying, will go into "academia" and continue to pontificate shite. We've all encountered these tedious creatures.

R34. What do you mean by anti-empiricism?

Do you mean it in the classical sense, as in the necessity experimental or observed evidence as based on the importance of sensory experience?

If so, I would suggest that has fallen somewhat out of favor as of late.

R36. I'm not R35 but that sort of ad hominem attack (completely unfounded) doesn't support your argument. What's tedious is that you can't or won't refute his points so you resort to stupid and anti-intellectual character assassination.

BPD doesn't care what color you are, postdoc with the rejected review.

R37, you may not be r35 but you're almost as tiresome.

Don't link to the article or anything OP. That would just be silly.

Also, in this argument (and my experience) there are tiers of academics, and academic knowledge and vocabulary. Even "empiricism", "Marxism" and "critical" have somewhat fast food meanings for the modern anthropology/poli sci/sociology "theorists" Masters holders the Universities have been churning out every two years. Very specialized in their niche focus and not necessarily capable of having a larger epistemological conversation about the theories they expound.

Well, all the jobs in academic humanities are disappearing so the fights over the crumbs become more and more vicious.

Judith Butler is an insult to Critical Theory and the Frankfurt school of thought and an academic fraud.

r43 = Martha Nussbaum

Critical theory has its own place in philosophy. All these academics like Butler et al are post modern. Post modernism is anti marxist in nature as it refuses empirical historical materialism in lieu of experiences and points of view. That's why Butler and all post modern academics are frauds. There's a reason Butler had a PHD in literature and not philosophy or logic when she came up with her revenge against her middle school bullies.

Exactly, r45

" “If you are a woman of color, you have to prove everything and have everything in order,” she said, calling it “a matter of being gaslit all the way.”"

I thought academic research was all about proving everything and having everything in order!

And this is the picture that came up under the name Mary Rambaran Olm, and well well well. The only "color" about her is that tragic eye makeup!

I think she claims aboriginal ancestry, R47. Or something. She considers herself to be a "person of colour".

[quote]Oh, I get what this thread is about now. It's people fearmongering about "Marxism" in academia because the current attempted attack line by Tucker et al. is that everything non-MAGA is socialism and communism. The dismay and outrage over critical theory (OMG, it sounds just like CRITICAL RACE THEORY!) and Marxism reeks of people who aren't very immersed in or conversant about actual scholarship or historical trends in academia. T

Critical Theory is related to Marxism and has adopted some of its tenets although it's also a critique of it.

If anyone has children or relatives they mentor. Please tell them STEM only. And be very careful where you go. Who's willing to go into debt for this nonsense?

RR47, she looks like a woman of color. I can see Aussie Aboriginal or Indian.

Africa doesn't have all the color you know.

This is why in 2014 I left my Theater degree a year early. Even back then, it was all just annoying ‘intersectional’ horseshit I couldn’t be bothered with and every lecturer on some stupid soapbox about minutiae of ‘queer’ that sounded nothing like the actual experience of being LGB. As well as all the usual black box and leotard bollocks of student amateur drama. Embarrassed I ever attended or wasted two years of loans/fees on it, to be honest (I’m the U.K., so at least it was partially funded).

This will last as long as it’s encouraged. Universities are already reporting record lows on white male attendance. You can’t blame for people who don’t want to listen to how their race and gender is problematic and pay for the privilege.

These institutions can’t survive on financial aid for minority students alone.

R51, do you know what white people call a light-skinned, pointy-nosed, blue-eyed person who has some distant African, Aboriginal, or other non-white ancestry?

We call them "white".

I read something recently about how a university is removing sonnets from their English literature course because it's too "white".

Here's the link. Apparently sonnets are a "product of white western culture" so not appropriate to teach anymore.

Forget about the students who want to learn this stuff.

bump

academics has long analyzed gay porn... I was trying to find the video lectures on T.I.M. -- there was a time in the early 2000s, when the owner as well as several of the "stars" became academic celebrities, a novelty. And of course, the likes of other studios like dickwadd and a prolific stock video producer of non-sexual, non-nude fetish videos (like dudes in scuba suits (not even bloody fetish gear, wrestling videos, grown men tickling matches, men's ballet, etc) wallowing in mud.) that had still managed to get in legal troubles with porn laws, mostly transit, because he sold them as fetish videos, and therefore it's was declared porn -- can't for the life of me remember his name, I do recall though the more disturbing part was "naturalist" videos of kiddies had gotten a pass from both the us and uk govt but his videos of middle aged bearish men did not.

as to the queer studies... gay studies became hijacked by campus pseudo feminism, the new wave of social justice, intersectional politics 3.1 which had gone off the rails (I'd also point to influences of certain (non-american, antiwest and always advocated violence even from their earliest incarnation in 1979, though, they didn't really take off until the end of 90s) extremist student groups that helped push it way off reservation after learning to hijack every political cause, every group, every event, never taking a break as they stirred up rage which garnered them an endless supply of funding from kiddies desperate to piss off mumsy and daddikins because they only bought them a c meal plan when they deserve an A even though they were a d student at best..) -- alll these subsets of social studies, adopted a twelve steps like format and branched out from the same seed -- women studies stopped being the study of women - traditionally, a comparative history and often focused more on literature... and instead moving towards a clearly post modernist, anti-western civlization and yet broadly american-centric focus... and rather than using the format of the queer/lgbt/gay studies programs that had been established for decades, they too, were forced under this very narrow focus and directed narrative. . . similar problems befell other groups into which they moved from being legitimate studies, majors and minors towards activism.

though the more practical truth of it is far more simple... when universities and colleges began to create empty majors -- defined as little by three courses, state/national requirements and filler. . Majors became meaningless. . . in academics, it was laughable for a while but in the workplace, employers weren't making the distinction when recruiting for said majors. It utterly destroyed academic departments, too... universities couldn't hire enough administrators to hop onto this trend to produce quanitity over quality.

Anyone remember the days a uni having 20 majors was considered a lot?

fuller version.. so you don't have to hunt down clips.

(obviously, not all statements in vid supported by yadda yadda yadda)

r56 is a depressing way to start the day

As someone who works in academia, I have to say that all of this discussion only pertains to certain subjects - mostly literature, history, and sociology. Universities teach a zillion other subjects, but they don't make headlines because the faculty members teaching zoology or music theory or archaeology, or linguistics don't say controversial things that make it into a news cycle From my perspective, it's ok to have a piece of literature that's already been analyzed a thousand different ways, such as Romeo and Juliet, be analyzed from the perspective of Queer Theory. Why not? It's fine to have a course on American history of the 19th century include some chapters that include the stories of black peoplen(who made up 1/3rd of the population in many states prior to the civil war) and their contributions to the building of the country , . That's something I never was exposed to in my courses in American history back in the day. I agree that periodicals and journals that publish academic writing will favor some of these new perspectives at the moment, which means that some students specialize in them. That is all a pendulum that will swing in the other direction at some point. There is no doubt that almost all subjects taught in Western Universities have traditionally been taught in ways that obscure their non-western origins. For instance. the origin of Algebra is Babylonian, not Greek, and its greatest expansion came under Muslims (hence the name, which is from Arabic). South Indians and Chinese also contributed to the concepts we still use. Some of all of this "fuss" is merely to acknowledge that the world is the basis of knowledge, not just the Western world.