NOTES

Introduction

1.James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, “A Manifesto against the Enemies of Modernity,” Areo Magazine, August 22, 2017, areomagazine.com/2017/08/22/a-manifesto-against-the-enemies-of-modernity/

2.John Rawls, A Theory of Justice. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

3.Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110–114.

1 Postmodernism

1.Critical Theory is often attributed to the famous Frankfurt School, which arose as a vehicle for Marxist critiques of modernity. It is mostly distinct from postmodern critical theory, which is often referred to simply as “Theory” or, more specific critical Theoretic lines like “critical race Theory” or “critical dietetics.” In fact, the members of the Frankfurt School, especially Jürgen Habermas, were largely critical of postmodernism. Contemporary approaches that are typically referred to as “critical theory” tend to refer to postmodern variants because they currently hold sway over much of academia. An accessible explanation of the different meanings of “critical theory” is to be found in James Bohman, “Critical Theory,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2019 Edition), plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/critical-theory/.

From its original conception, a Critical Theory was to be set aside from a traditional theory, which seeks to understand and explain phenomena in terms of what it is and how it works, including social phenomena. A critical theory, by contrast, must satisfy all of three criteria. First, it must arise from a “normative” vision, which is to say a set of moral views about how society ought to be, and this moral vision should both inform the theory and serve as a goal for a new society. Second, it must explain what is wrong with society or its current systems, usually in terms of “problematics,” which are shortcomings in the system or ways in which it fails to accord with or generate the normative moral view of the theory. Third, it must be actionable by social activists who wish to use it to change society.

The postmodern Theorists adopted the critical method, or at least the critical mood, of the Frankfurt School and adapted it into the structuralist context, particularly its view of power. The “critical” goal remained the same, however: to make the problems inherent in “the system” more visible to the people allegedly oppressed by it—however happily they might be living their lives within it—until they come to detest it and seek a revolution against it. The Frankfurt School developed the Critical Theoretic approach specifically to expand beyond critiques of capitalism, as the Marxists had been doing, and to target the assumptions of Western civilization as a whole, particularly liberalism as a sociopolitical philosophy and Enlightenment thought in general. It was this approach to critique that the postmodernists turned upon the entire social order and its institutions, insisting that hegemonic power structures (a concept adopted from Antonio Gramsci) exist across all facets of difference and require exposing and eventually overturning.

2.We have written about the need to defend modernity against both the premodernists (those who would take us back to preindustrial and secular times) and the postmodernists in James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose. “A Manifesto against the Enemies of Modernity,” Areo Magazine, August 22, 2017, areomagazine.com/2017/08/22/a-manifesto-against-the-enemies-of-modernity/.

3.Brian McHale, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.

4.Although Jacques Lacan and French feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva were extremely influential participants in the postmodern turn, psychoanalysis will not be discussed much in this book. Their ideas are rooted in the development of the psyche, rather than in cultural constructivism, and therefore have not been as influential on current cultural studies as those of other thinkers. They have also been criticized as “essentialist” for this reason.

5.A comprehensive account of every postmodern thinker and his or her sources of inspiration is beyond the scope of this book.

6.Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991).

7.Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

8.Baudrillard takes this odd view to a macabre and nihilistic extreme, calling for drastic measures to return us to a more productive, pretechnological time. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Gran (London: SAGE Publications, 2017).

9.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert J. Hurley (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

10.Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso Books, 2019).

11.David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

12.It is unclear whether the general population shared either this perception of society or the skepticism about Enlightenment values it induced in certain thinkers, but something significant was changing, particularly within the academy.

13.Brian Duignan, “Postmodernism,” Encyclopædia Britannica, July 19, 2019, britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy (accessed August 15, 2019).

14.Paraphrased from Walter Truett Anderson, The Fontana Postmodernism Reader (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 10–11

15.Steinar Kvale, “Themes of Postmodernity,” in The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 18.

16.Kvale, “Themes,”18.

17.Ibid., 20.

18.For Richard Rorty, the crucial factor was the change from “found” to “made”—by which he meant that the truth was not out there to be discovered, but rather to be constructed by people. This clearly expresses the underlying postmodern anxiety about the artificiality of modernity (and, ironically, postmodernity) and helps us characterize it as a kind of crisis of authenticity. For Brian McHale, the most important shift was a change in philosophical focus from the epistemological to the ontological—that is, from concerns about how we produce knowledge to attempts to characterize the nature of being. Modernism, he writes, is “preoccupied with what we know and how we know it, with the accessibility and reliability of knowledge,” and, as a result, “it pursued epistemological questions.” Postmodernism “privileged questions of world-making and modes of being over questions of perception and knowing: It was ontological in its orientation” (emphasis in original). Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3; McHale, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, 14–15.

19.Steven Seidman, The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1.

20.Anderson, Reader, 2.

21.The following three thinkers, for example, view the rise of postmodernism as a result of the failures of the Enlightenment. For Walter Anderson,

The postmodern verdict on the Enlightenment project is that it was a brilliant, ambitious effort, but that its field of vision was limited. Its leaders thought the task of building a universal human culture upon a foundation of rational thought would be easier than it has turned out to be. The universe now seems, if not infinite, at least infinitely complex and mysterious. Our eternal truths now seem to be inseparable from the cultures that created them and the languages in which they are stated. (Reader, 216)

David Harvey contends that the Enlightenment thinkers

took it as axiomatic that there was only one possible answer to any question. From this it followed that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it correctly. But this presumed that there existed a single, correct mode of representation which, if we could uncover it (and this was what scientific and mathematical endeavors were all about) would provide the means to Enlightenment ends.

Harvey therefore characterises the Enlightenment as a belief in “linear progress, absolute truths, and rational planning of ideal social orders” (Condition, 27).

Steven Seidman also describes the Enlightenment in very simple, dogmatic terms,

At the heart of the modern west is the culture of the Enlightenment. Assumptions regarding the unity of humanity, the individual as the creative force of society and history, the superiority of the west, the idea of science as Truth, and the belief in social progress, have been fundamental to Europe and the United States. This culture is now is a state of crisis. (Turn, 1)

22.None of these ideas are new. In fact, as Stephen R. C. Hicks details in his book, Understanding Postmodernism:Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Tempe, AZ: Scholargy Publishing, 2004) they are a relatively recent manifestation of a continuum of anti-Enlightenment thought that stretches as far back as the Enlightenment itself. Our reliance on our faculties to mediate knowledge was a primary concern for Kant and Hegel roughly two centuries ago, for instance, and much has been written about Kantian and Hegelian philosophy in relation to postmodern thought. Of even greater and more direct significance to the development of postmodern ideas were Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s ideas about the subject and the nature of reality. For those interested in the philosophical precursors to postmodernism, both Hicks’ book and David Detmer’s earlier Challenging Postmodernism Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003) will be valuable.

23.Incidentally, this is a case in which the postmodernists have made a valid observation and used it to justify very poor philosophy. It is accurate to say that what we know about reality depends upon the models of reality that we put forward to explain it. Where the postmodern view goes wrong is assuming that this is a catastrophe for scientific knowledge production. The truth is, this fact isn’t alarming to any serious scientist or philosopher of science. Indeed, in their book The Grand Design (2012), Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow explain this way of interpreting the world, which they call “model-dependent realism” (New York: Bantam Books, 2010). In this approach, we formulate mostly linguistic constructs called models that explain phenomena, and we examine the evidence we can gather about the world to determine how consistent it is with those models. When a model has been shown to do the best currently possible job of explaining the available data and predicting new results (and, in the “hard” sciences like physics, the standards used are extremely exacting), we accept its facts as provisionally true within the context of the model. If a better model is devised, scientists can change their understanding accordingly, but this seeming flexibility is, in fact, quite rigorous and not at all like cultural constructivism. (This point was well understood by the philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn and Willard Van Orman Quine.)

24.Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3.

25.Rorty makes this case ten years earlier in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).

26.Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 168. Although at other times, Foucault seems to have accepted that there can be more than one episteme in play in society, he consistently conceived of knowledge as the product of a powerful apparatus which determined what could be known.

27.Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard and Jean Kafka (New York: Routledge, 2001); Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1975); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge: And the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972).

28.This is formally known as anti-foundationalism.

29.Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont distinguish these two types of skepticism in Fashionable Nonsense:

Specific skepticism should not be confused with radical skepticism. It is important to distinguish carefully between two different types of critiques of the sciences: those that are opposed to a particular theory and are based on specific arguments, and those that repeat in one form or another the traditional arguments of radical skepticism. The former critiques can be interesting but can also be refuted, while the latter are irrefutable but uninteresting (because of their universality)…. If one wants to contribute to science, be it natural or social, one must abandon radical doubts concerning the viability of logic or the possibility of knowing the world through observation and/or experiment. Of course, one can always have doubts about a specific theory. But general skeptical arguments put forward to support those doubts are irrelevant, precisely because of their generality.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 189.

30.Lyotard, Postmodern Condition.

31.Lyotard describes a “strict interlinkage” between the language of science and that of politics and ethics (ibid, 8).

32.Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” afterword to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

33.Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 7.

34.Specifically, Derrida rejected the idea that the “signifier” (the written or spoken word) directly refers to the “signified” (the meaning, idea, or object about which it aims to communicate) and instead saw words as relational. For instance, he argued that “house” is to be understood in relation to “hut” (smaller) and “mansion” (larger) and lacks clear meaning outside of these relations.

35.Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976).

36.Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen no. 5–6, ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html.

2 Postmodernism’s Applied Turn

1.The first rule is, above all else, never be boring.

2.One common position taken by academics today is that postmodernism is dead and that the kind of Theory we see today is not postmodernism. This argument is reliant on a purist approach, which identifies postmodernism with its high deconstructive phase and distinguishes it from the subsequent Theories that adapted its concepts. This distinction is mostly insisted upon by those who wish to defend postmodernism from the identity-based Social Justice scholarship of today or, alternatively, to defend Social Justice scholarship from the taint of postmodernism. Scholars who value postmodernism point out that identity politics, which relies on consistent identity categories and objectively real systems of power and privilege, simply doesn’t work within a postmodern conception of the world. Those who value Social Justice scholarship assert that the deconstructive aimlessness of postmodernism and the white maleness of its originators are antithetical to current Theory, which seeks to construct a better world.

In fairness to these objections, there are many misconceptions about what is and isn’t postmodernism. The most common one conflates postmodernism with Marxism, referring to “cultural Marxism” or “Postmodern Neo-Marxism.” Although there are complicated connections between Marxism and the postmodernism that deconstructed it, this claim is frequently a simplistic one that insists that “applied postmodernism” takes the Marxist ideas of oppressed and oppressor classes and applies them to other identity categories, such as race, gender, and sexuality. This is specious. As the previous chapter shows, Marxism was one of the “metanarratives” that postmodernism rejected, but the critical methods that arose in service to Marxist activism were retained and expanded. As the following chapters will show, the descendants of the Marxists—the materialist scholars—continue to work in very different ways from and are usually very critical of the descendants of the postmodernists.

See Matthew McManus, “On Marxism, Post-Modernism, and ‘Cultural Marxism,’” Merion West, May 18, 2018, merionwest.com/2018/05/18/on-marxism-post-modernism-and-cultural-marxism/.

3.See, for example, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2015).

4.Recall that Critical Theory was organized by design to explain what is wrong with (Western) society in moral terms and to enact societal change through dedicated activism. In this sense, what we see in applied postmodernism is a fusion of postmodernism with the derivatives of Critical Theory as they had come down through the decades in the forms of “New Left” activism, which, in contrast to postmodernist theorizing, was often direct and militant through the 1960s and 1970s.

5.McHale. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism, 48.

6.McHale, Introduction, 97.

7.Mark Horowitz, Anthony Haynor, and Kenneth Kickham. “Sociology’s Sacred Victims and the Politics of Knowledge: Moral Foundations Theory and Disciplinary Controversies.” The American Sociologist 49, no. 4 (2018): 459–95.

8.Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science and a New Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 5

9.Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, eds., Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2.

10.McHale, Introduction, 172.

11.René Descartes, Discourse on the Method: The Original Text with English Translation (Erebus Society, 2017).

12.Although Said later became quite critical of Foucault, his groundbreaking text, Orientalism, which draws explicitly on Foucauldian concepts of knowledge construction through discourse, remains a key text in postcolonial studies and continues to influence work in the field today.

13.Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), xiii.

14.Linda Hutcheon, “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’.” In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism,eds. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991), 171.

15.This schism is primarily between gender critical (radical) feminists and trans activist (intersectional and queer) feminists, whose theoretical disagreements are as profound as they are divisive.

16.As Poovey wrote in 1988,

To take deconstruction to its logical conclusion would be to argue that “woman” is only a social construct that has no basis in nature, that “woman,” in other words, is a term whose definition depends upon the context in which it is being discussed and not upon some set of sexual organs or social experiences. This renders the experience women have of themselves and the meaning of their social relations problematic, to say the least. It also calls into question the experiential basis upon which U.S. feminism has historically grounded its political programs. The challenge for those of us who are convinced both that real historical women do exist and share certain experiences and that deconstruction’s demystification of presence makes theoretical sense is to work out some way to think both women and “woman.” It isn’t an easy task.

Mary Poovey, “Feminism and Deconstruction,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 51.

17.Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 2006).

18.Butler defends postmodernism against its detractors in her essay titled “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’”:

I don’t know about the term “postmodern,” but if there is a point, and a fine point, to what I perhaps better understand as poststructuralism, it is that power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic; and further, that this implication of the terms of criticism in the field of power is not the advent of a nihilistic relativism incapable of furnishing norms, but, rather, the very precondition of a politically engaged critique. To establish a set of norms that are beyond power or force is itself a powerful and forceful conceptual practice that sublimates, disguises and extends its own power play through recourse to tropes of normative universality. (p. 158)

Her essay appears in The Postmodern Turn: New Perspectives on Social Theory, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

19.Seidman, Postmodern Turn, 159.

20.bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (London: Fontana Press, 1996).

21.Ibid., 117.

22.Ibid., 115

23.Ibid., 120.

24.Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991).

25.Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1244n9.

26.Intersectionality proved to be effective at providing a framework—which Crenshaw’s contemporary, Patricia Hill Collins, dubbed the “matrix of domination”—that allowed disparate minority groups to unite under a single banner. It also provided the tools for defining a hierarchical structure within this loose coalition and for bullying more recognized and effective movements, such as feminism, into taking up the charges of smaller factions under a euphemistic rubric of “allyship” and “solidarity.”

27.Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1297.

28.Ibid., 1297.

29.Ibid., 1297.

30.See, for example, Fiona Kumari Campbell, Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

31.Esther D. Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, eds., The Fat Studies Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2009)

32.One paradigmatic example of this is the critical treatment the stop-motion animated television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) has received in recent years. Despite the film’s clear portrayal of an inclusive, antibullying theme—don’t discriminate unfairly against those who are different—current theorists and activists have taken issue with the film for portraying potentially offensive language and attitudes on the part of the bullies, despite the fact that these details are crucial to the overall theme.

33.Andrew Jolivétte, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2015).

34.Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

35.Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (2014).

36.Nora Berenstain, “Epistemic Exploitation,” Ergo, an Open Access Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 22 (2016).

37.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

38.Perhaps the most egregious example of this is a case investigated by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, in which class rules required students “to acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist” and to agree to combat them and the myths and stereotypes that perpetuate them. A student objected to being told she must share her teacher’s ideological beliefs and FIRE issued an objection to this academic requirement. (As described in Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy [Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010], 103.) While prejudices do exist and countering them is a good thing, these class rules are worrying for two reasons. Firstly, it is disturbing that students were being required to subscribe to a belief and become activists in its service, and, secondly, the requirement to combat myths and stereotypes probably relies on a subjective (and ideological) definition of what is mythical and stereotypical.

39.Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, “Women’s Studies as Virus: Institutional Feminism, Affect, and the Projection of Danger,” Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies 5, no. 1 (2016).

40.Sandra J. Grey, “Activist Academics: What Future?” Policy Futures in Education 11, no. 6 (2013).

41.Laura W. Perna, Taking It to the Streets: The Role of Scholarship in Advocacy and Advocacy in Scholarship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

42.This characterization comes from evolutionary biologist Heather Heying (personal communication).

43.Sean Stevens, “The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say About Gender Differences?” Heterodox Academy, February 02, 2019, heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/.

44.Emma Powell and Patrick Grafton-Green, “Danny Baker Fired by BBC Radio 5 Live over Racist Royal Baby Tweet,” Evening Standard, May 09, 2019, www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/danny-baker-fired-broadcaster-sacked-by-bbc-radio-5-live-over-racist-tweet-a4137951.html.

3 Postcolonial Theory

1.Some postcolonial scholars are materialists (often Marxists) and look at colonialism and its aftermath in terms of economics and politics. They are often very critical of the postmodern postcolonialists. See particularly Meera Nanda, Aijaz Ahmad, Benita Parry, Neil Lazarus, and Pal Ahluwalia.

2.Decoloniality and indigeneity constitute two related but separate fields of study, which share many of the features of postcolonial Theory. They both focus on the ways in which the powerful inheritors of colonialism maintain their social and political dominance, especially by othering through language. Decoloniality focused originally on Latin America. Walter Mignolo, in particular, works on epistemology and challenges the knowledge production methods of Enlightenment thinking. However, decolonial scholars frequently reject postmodernism as a Western phenomenon. Indigenous scholars have taken a similar tack in relation to knowledge and systems of power. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, professor of indigenous education at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, is influential in this area. Her book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) describes itself as “drawing on Foucault” to argue that Western scholarship is central to the colonization of indigenous people. See Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999).

3.Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Penguin Books, 2019).

4.Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970).

5.Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).

6.Said, Orientalism.

7.Mathieu E. Courville, “Genealogies of Postcolonialism: A Slight Return from Said and Foucault Back to Fanon and Sartre,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 36, no. 2 (2007): Said’s approach was broadly Foucauldian, though he rejects some aspects of Foucault’s work in favor of Fanon’s. His approach can therefore be seen as a synthesis of the work of those two thinkers.

8.Said, Orientalism, 3.

9.Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness: and Other Stories (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2019).

10.Said, Orientalism, xviii.

11.Linda Hutcheon, “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire,’” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (London: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1991).

12.Ibid., 168.

13.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

14.Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13

15.Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 308.

16.Lecturer in Anglophone literatures and cultures, Stephen Morton describes him thus: “Bhabha’s work often exposes the ambivalence and uncertainty at the heart of seemingly robust, powerful forms of knowledge. His critique of the discourses of colonialism uncovers a perpetual process of fracturing and splitting at their heart as they anxiously seek (but always fail) to secure knowledge about the colonized.” Stephen Morton, “Poststructuralist Formulations,” in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. John Mc-Cleod (London: Routledge, 2007), 205.

17.The Bad Writing Contest, www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm (accessed August 22, 2019).

18.Homi Bhabha is best known for the idea of hybridity, introduced in his 1994 book, The Location of Culture, and for related concepts, such as mimicry, ambivalence, and third space. These pertain to notions of duality, doubling, appropriation, and ambiguity. Such terms come up frequently in postmodern Theory. These concepts are best understood as the rejection of stable categories. The terms refer to people who operate in multiple realms at the same time, while feeling part of both, but also divided, either in their own perception of themselves and their position or in someone else’s. They can feel “hybrid”—for instance, Asian-American—or they can feel that they are mimicking or conforming to a dominant culture or having theirs mimicked or appropriated by that culture. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity describes the mixing of cultures and languages to create a new form, containing elements of both. Ambivalence describes the divided individual and mimicry is a practice of communication within the (third) space where the two parts meet. However, within postcolonial Theory, this mixing of cultures is characterized by a power imbalance that results in the imposition of one culture and language over another. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

19.This method of postcolonial analysis is very much about interpreting and reinterpreting, deconstructing, and reconstructing culture, narratives, perceptions, and identity and very little about looking empirically at material reality. As Simon Gikandi, a professor of English language and literature, argues, “It was as a method of cultural analysis and as a mode of reading that poststructuralism became central to the postcolonial project” (Simon Gikandi, “Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse,” Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 113). Morton goes further, arguing that to “read” culture in this highly theoretical and removed way actually silences the colonized.

By framing political resistance in the abstract terms of signs, codes and discursive strategies, in other words, materialist critics of a postcolonial Theory informed by the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argue that postcolonial Theory—either wittingly or unwittingly—denies the agency and voice of the colonized (Morton, “Formations,” 161).

In short, the focus on language and interpretation, viewed through a narrow postcolonial lens, reduces previously colonized people to foils of the West again. They can only be understood in terms of their collective relationship with the West and are denied both individuality and universality. This politically motivated approach to “reading” through power structures that we have called applied postmodernism therefore recreates the stereotypes that it claims were created by the West, though, unlike previous Orientalists, it valorizes, rather than denigrates them.

20.Bhabha, Location, 20–21.

21.The most consistent critics of postmodern postcolonial scholars are Marxist postcolonial scholars, of whom the most prominent is arguably Vivek Chibber. Of most concern to Chibber is the essentializing nature of post-colonial studies. By this, he means that universal or shared human goals are devalued in postcolonial studies, in favor of stark cultural differences that recreate Orientalism. By making science, reason, liberalism, and the whole Enlightenment tradition Western, Chibber fears that

[t]he lasting contribution of postcolonial theory—what it will be known for, in my view, if it is remembered fifty years from now—will be its revival of cultural essentialism and its acting as an endorsement of orientalism, rather than being an antidote to it.

Vivek Chibber, “How Does the Subaltern Speak?” Interview by Jonah Birch, Jacobin, April 21, 2013, www.jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/.

22.Joseph-Ernest Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), as quoted in Ahdaf Soueif, “The Function of Narrative in the War on Terror,” in War on Terror, ed. Chris Miller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 30.

23.Mariya Hussain, “Why Is My Curriculum White?” National Union of Students, March 11, 2015, www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why-is-my-curriculum-white/; Malia Bouattia and Sorana Vieru, “#LiberateMyDegree @ NUS Connect,” NUS Connect, www.nusconnect.org.uk/campaigns/liberate-mydegree.

24.Dalia Gebrial, “Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change,” in Decolonising the University, ed. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu (London: Pluto Press, 2018).

25.Bhambra and colleagues explain it like this,

“Decolonising” involves a multitude of definitions, interpretations, aims and strategies…. First, it is a way of thinking about the world which takes colonialism, empire and racism as its empirical and discursive objects of study; it re-situates these phenomena as key shaping forces of the contemporary world, in a context where their role has been systematically effaced from view. Second, it purports to offer alternative ways of thinking about the world and alternative forms of political praxis.

Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, eds., Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 1–2.

26.We see this when Bhambra and colleagues say, “one of the key challenges that decolonising approaches have presented to Eurocentric forms of knowledge is an insistence on positionality and plurality and, perhaps more importantly, the impact that taking ‘difference’ seriously would make to standard understandings” (ibid., 2–3).

27.Ibid., 3.

28.Ibid., 2–3.

29.The idea that the Western elite effectively promotes “whiteness” over all other ways of knowing appears in the introduction to the 2018 book Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire by Kehinde Andrews, the United Kingdom’s first professor of black studies. Andrews writes, “Oxford’s prestige is founded on its elite status, which is a code word for its whiteness” (p. 1). The evidence of this is experiential: “It is easy to underestimate the symbolic violence that is committed on a daily basis in spaces like Oxford. But you only need to walk on the campus to feel the oppression in the environment.” Kehinde Andrews, “Introduction,” in Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire, ed. Roseanne Chantiluke, Brian Kwoba, and Athinangamso Nkopo (London: Zed Books, 2018), 2.

30.Bhambra et al., Decolonising, 5 .

31.Andrews, “Introduction,” 4.

32.“Our Aim.” #RHODESMUSTFALL, December 24, 2015. rmfoxford.word-press.com/about/.

33.This belief is expressed perhaps most explicitly by branding and rejecting Western concepts of knowledge as positivist. “Positivist” means that knowledge is defined as that which can be shown and seen, tested scientifically or proved mathematically. A positivist understanding of knowledge involves accepting that which is evidenced, rather than that which has only been theorized, experienced subjectively, or is a question of faith. Such an attitude, rather than being seen as rigorous, is understood within postcolonial and decolonial movements to be merely Western and colonial.

34.Gebrial, “Movements for Change,” 24.

35.Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Rafael Vizcaíno, Jasmine Wallace, and Jeong Eun Annabel, “Decolonizing Philosophy,” in Decolonising the University, eds Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 64

36.Maldonado-Torres et al., “Decolonising Philosophy,” 66.

37.Ibid., 66–67.

38.Andrew Jolivétte, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2015), 5.

39.Kagendo Mutua and Beth Blue Swadener, Decolonizing Research in Cross-cultural Contexts: Critical Personal Narratives (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011).

40.Mutua and Swadener, Cross-Cultural Contexts, p. 1.

41.Ibid., 2.

42.Meera Nanda, “We Are All Hybrids Now: The Dangerous Epistemology of Post-colonial Populism,” Journal of Peasant Studies 28, no. 2 (2001): 165.

43.Ibid., 164.

44.Nanda writes,

Postmodern/post-colonial theory’s animus against the Enlightenment values and its indulgence towards contradictions make it eminently compatible with a typically right-wing resolution of the asynchronicity (or the time-lag) between advanced technology and a backward social context that developing societies typically experience in the process of modernization. (Ibid., 165)

45.To this effect, Nanda writes,

If we grant the very foundations of objectivity to the West, are we not back to the old stereotypes of irrational emotional natives? Ironically for a intellectual genre that is founded on a denial of essential ahistorical, permanent features, these critics fail to see that these characteristically modern features are not sanctioned by Western religion and culture, but they have had to be struggled for even in the West. (Ibid., 171)

46.Carolette R. Norwood, “Decolonizing My Hair, Unshackling My Curls: An Autoethnography on What Makes My Natural Hair Journey a Black Feminist Statement,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20, no. 1 (2017).

47.Meera Sabaratnam, “Decolonising the Curriculum: What’s All the Fuss About?” SOAS Blog, June 25, 2018, www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/decolonising-curriculum-whats-the-fuss/.

48.Alan J. Bishop, “Western Mathematics: The Secret Weapon of Cultural Imperialism,” Race & Class 32, no. 2 (1990).

49.Laura E. Donaldson, “Writing the Talking Stick: Alphabetic Literacy as Colonial Technology and Postcolonial Appropriation,” American Indian Quarterly 22, no. 1/2 (1998).

50.Mutua and Swadener, Cross-Cultural Contexts.

51.Lucille Toth, “Praising Twerk: Why Aren’t We All Shaking Our Butt?” French Cultural Studies 28, no. 3 (2017).

4 Queer Theory

1.Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974).

2.There are cultures that have perceived a third sex or a multitude of genders. These largely seem to be ways to think about people who don’t fit into the expected categories of “masculine man attracted to women” and “feminine woman attracted to men,” and have generally been regarded as outliers from a prevailing norm, with roots deeply embedded in the biological realities of a sexually reproducing species.

3.The name “queer Theory” is believed to have been coined in a collection of essays edited by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991. Teresa De Lauretis, Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1991).

4.Mikael and Sune Innala, “The Effect of a Biological Explanation on Attitudes towards Homosexual Persons: A Swedish National Sample Study,” Nordic Journal of Psychiatry 56, no. 3 (2002).

5.The “Q” here seems to be co-opting the L, G, B, and T status for its own political project, to which the others may not (and often do not) subscribe.

6.Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

7.David M. Halperin, “The Normalization of Queer Theory,” Journal of Homosexuality 45, no. 2–4 (2003).

8.David M. Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62.

9.The authors hasten to note that “genderfucking” is a technical academic term in queer Theory, which means, roughly, “to fuck about with the meaning of ‘gender’ so as to queer it.”

10.Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 1. Jagose also attempts the following definition of queer Theory:

While there is no critical consensus on the definitional limits of queer—determinacy being one of its widely promoted charms—its general outlines are frequently sketched and debated. Broadly speaking, queer describes those gestures or analytical models which dramatise incoherencies in the allegedly stable relations between chromosomal sex, gender and sexual desire. Resisting that model of stability—which claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect—queer focuses on mismatches between sex, gender and desire. Institutionally, queer has been associated most prominently with lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. Whether as transvestite performance or academic deconstruction, queer locates and exploits the incoherencies in those three terms which stabilise heterosexuality. Demonstrating the impossibility of any “natural” sexuality, it calls into question even such apparently unproblematic terms as “man” and “woman.” (p. 3)

11.“Many psychological traits relevant to the public sphere, such as general intelligence, are the same on average for men and women…. [G]eneralizations about a sex will always be untrue of many individuals. And notions like ‘proper role’ and ‘natural place’ are scientifically meaningless and give no grounds for restricting freedom.” Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 2002), 340.

12.E. O. Wilson, “From Sociobiology to Sociology,” in Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 98.

13.Some trans scholars and activists have recently begun to call upon science, as neuroscience has increasingly provided evidence that trans people’s experience of their gender as different from their sex is biologically based. This has not made significant inroads into queer Theory.

14.Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, an Introduction, trans. Robert J. Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1990).

15.Ibid., 69.

16.Ibid., 54.

17.Ibid., 93.

18.Louise Amoore, The Global Resistance Reader (London: Routledge, 2005), 86.

19.Another influential and power-obsessed French sociological theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, who was strongly at odds with Foucault and the orthodox postmodern view, saw things similarly and described this using his concept of social habitus.

20.While society’s views on the moral status of various aspects of human sexuality have changed dramatically over the last fifty years—extra-marital sex and homosexual sex have increasingly been seen as morally neutral—Rubin alarmingly includes pedophilia in her list of merely socially constructed taboos, saying, “It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boy-lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation.” Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 1993), 7.

21.Ibid., 9.

22.Ibid., 10.

23.Ibid., 11.

24.Rubin explicitly describes this hierarchy:

Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotic pyramid. Clamouring below are unmarried monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals…. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism transgresses generational boundaries. (Ibid., 12)

25.Ibid., 15.

26.Ibid., 22.

27.Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), xii.

28.Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 2006), 192.

29.Ibid., 192.

30.Ibid., 192.

31.Ibid., 192–3.

32.Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (Denver, CO: Antelope Publications, 1982).

33.Butler, Gender Trouble, 169.

34.Ibid., 44.

35.Ibid., 44.

36.Ibid., 9–10.

37.Ibid., 7.

38.Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008),13.

39.Ibid., 1.

40.Ibid., 3.

41.Ibid., 9.

42.Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

43.Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

44.Butler, Gender Trouble, 4.

45.Queer Theorists might respond to this by saying that it is a radical oversimplification of their position, which they claim does not deny biological realities but merely argues that such realities are mediated through historical discourses, which in turn determine the categories in which we think. This is yet another distinction without a difference. Because of queer Theory’s moral imperative to reject, disrupt, and subvert scientific claims and “common sense” about gender, sexuality, and even sex, queer Theorists spend almost no time acknowledging that biological realities exist and almost all their time rejecting them and asserting the social construction of those categories.

5 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality

1.Michael Neill, “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1998).

2.Some third-century Han Chinese people described barbarians with blond hair and green eyes, commenting it was obvious that—unlike the Han—they had clearly descended from monkeys. Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

3.Sojourner Truth, “The Narrative of Sojourner Truth,” ed. Olive Gilbert, in A Celebration of Women Writers, www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html.

4.Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass, (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2013).

5.W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: The Unabridged Classic (New York: Clydesdale, 2019).

6.Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

7.Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2017), 3.

8.Ibid., Introduction, 26.

9.Derrick A. Bell, Race, Racism, and American Law (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1984).

10.Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

11.Ibid., 159.

12.Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93, No. 3 (1980).

13.Bell writes,

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary “peaks of progress,” short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it and move on to adopt policies based on what I call: “Racial Realism.” This mind-set or philosophy requires us to acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status. That acknowledgement enables us to avoid despair, and frees us to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph.

Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Racial Realism,” Connecticut Law Review 24, no. 2 (1992).

14.Bell, Brown v. Board, esp. pp. 530–533.

15.Alan David Freeman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” Minnesota Law Review 62, no. 1049 (1978), scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/804.

16.Mark Stern and Khuram Hussain, “On the Charter Question: Black Marxism and Black Nationalism,” Race Ethnicity and Education 18, no. 1 (2014).

17.As Delgado and Stefancic put it:

A persistent internal critique accuses the movement of straying from its materialist roots and dwelling overly on matters of concern to middle-class minorities—microaggressions, racial insults, unconscious discrimination, and affirmative action in higher education. If racial oppression has material and cultural roots, attacking only its ideational or linguistic expression is apt to do little for the underlying structures of inequality, much less the plight of the deeply poor. (Introduction,106)

18.Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

19.See “About This Book” on the page for The Alchemy of Race and Rights by Patricia J. Williams in Harvard University Press’s online catalog, www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674014718.

20.Harvard University Press, “Honoring the Work of Patricia Williams.” Harvard University Press Blog, February 2013, harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2013/02/honoring-the-work-of-patricia-williams.html.

21.Angela P. Harris, “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” Stanford Law Review 42, no. 3 (1990): 584.

22.Delgado and Stefancic, Introduction, 8–11.

23.Although critical race Theory arose in the United States in response to a very specific historical racial context, it has not remained in the United States. The British Educational Research Association has formed its own list of tenets of critical race Theory.

1.Centrality of racism

2.White supremacy

3.Voices of people of color

4.Interest convergence

5.Intersectionality

It concludes,

CRT has developed rapidly into a major branch of social theory and has been taken up beyond the United States to include work in Europe, South America, Australia and Africa. It is often denigrated by people working with alternative perspectives who view the emphasis on race and racism as misguided or even threatening. Despite such attacks, which frequently rest on a lack of understanding and oversimplification of the approach, CRT continues to grow and is becoming one of the most important perspectives on the policy and practice of race inequality in the UK.

Nicola Rollock and David Gillborn, “Critical Race Theory (CRT),” BERA, 2011, www.bera.ac.uk/publication/critical-race-theory-crt.

24.For example, Payne Hiraldo, of the University of Vermont, set out five tenets of critical race Theory for use in higher education. These are:

Counter-storytelling—“A framework that legitimizes the racial and subordinate experiences of marginalized groups.” Because society is believed to be constructed of the ideological narratives—discourses—of dominant groups, counternarratives are believed to represent the previously neglected knowledges of marginalized identity groups. This is standpoint theory, which assumes that people of certain identities have perspectives, experiences, and values in common, that these constitute alternative forms of knowledge, and that belonging to a marginalized identity group confers access to a richer knowledge set than can be accessed by members of relatively privileged groups.

The permanence of racism—The idea that racism is prevalent and pervasive in all spheres of American society: political, social, and economic. Therefore it cannot be defeated by antidiscrimination legislation, but must be detected in all kinds of systems and interactions and acted against.

Whiteness as property—A complicated argument that “whiteness”—the social constructions associated with a white identity—confers property rights, due to ingrained prejudices and assumptions with their roots in slavery. Closely akin to white privilege, it posits that covert systematic discrimination continues to uphold white people’s superiority and greater rights of access and property and that this can only be addressed by affirmative action or other equity initiatives.

Interest conversion—The belief that white people and societies that are understood to be white supremacist only allow advances in rights for people of color when it serves their own interests.

The critique of liberalism—Liberalism is criticized for universalist ideas, such as “color blindness,” equal opportunities, equal rights, and meritocracy. It is believed to overlook systemic racism by assuming an already “level playing field.”

Payne Hiraldo, “The Role of Critical Race Theory in Higher Education,” Vermont Connection 31, no. 7 (2010): Article 7, scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc/vol31/iss1/7.

Underlying all of these tenets is the postmodern conception of society as constructed by discourses into systems of power and privilege—the postmodern knowledge and political principles. These tenets also clearly advocate the application of interpretation and theoretical constructs rather than the presentation of observable evidence.

25.The Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education presents yet another variation on these core tenets but stresses the political aims of critical race Theory more strongly. Under the subheading “Centrality of Racism,” Christine E. Sleeter writes, “Critical race theorists assume that racism is not an aberration, but rather a fundamental, endemic, and normalized way of organizing society.” Christine E. Sleeter, “Critical Race Theory and Education,” in Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education, ed. James A. Banks (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012), 491.

Sleeter continues to identify the following tenets of critical race Theory:

1.Challenges to claims of neutrality, color blindness, and meritocracy;

2.Whites as beneficiaries of racial remedies (interest convergence thesis);

3.Centrality of experiential knowledge (telling counterstories; standpoint theory);

4.Commitment to working towards social justice (“Ultimately, critical race theorists are committed to working for social justice. Although some theorists see racism as intractable, most hope that deep analyses of it, coupled with the development of rich counter-stories about how people have worked against racism, will ultimately result in its elimination”).

26.Delgado and Stefancic, Introduction, 7.

27.Ibid., 7–8.

28.Ibid., 7–8.

29.Ibid., 127.

30.bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in The Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (London: Fontana Press, 1996), 117.

31.Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989), chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.

32.Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1224n9.

33.Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

34.Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1297.

35.Ibid., 1242.

36.Ibid., 1296.

37.While much critical race Theory was the work of African American scholars, the field has broadened in the last few decades, to include Latino, Asian, Muslim, and Arab branches. These groups are all seen as having different subordinated relationships to white people and even to each other. For more, see Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, “Identity Politics Does Not Continue the Work of the Civil Rights Movements,” Areo, September 26, 2018, areomagazine.com/2018/09/25/identity-politics-does-not-continue-the-work-of-the-civil-rights-movements/.

38.Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).

39.Adam Fitzgerald, “Opinion: Time for Cis-Gender White Men to Recognise Their Privilege,” news.trust.org, May 2, 2019, news.trust.org/item/20190502130719-tpcky/.

40.Jezzika Chung, “How Asian Immigrants Learn Anti-Blackness from White Culture, and How to Stop It,” Huffington Post, September 7, 2017, www.huffpost.com/entry/how-asian-americans-can-stop-contributing-to-anti-blackness_b_599f0757e4b0cb7715bfd3d4.

41.Kristel Tracey, “We Need to Talk about Light-skinned Privilege,” Media Diversified, February 07, 2019, mediadiversified.org/2018/04/26/we-need-to-talk-about-light-skinned-privilege/.

42.Damon Young, “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People,” Root, September 19, 2017, verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-the-white-people-of-black-people-1814157214.

43.Miriam J. Abelson, “Dangerous Privilege: Trans Men, Masculinities, and Changing Perceptions of Safety,” Sociological Forum 29, no. 3 (2014).

44.Sara C., “When You Say ‘I Would Never Date A Trans Person,’ It’s Transphobic. Here’s Why,” Medium, November 11, 2018, medium.com/@QSE/when-you-say-i-would-never-date-a-trans-person-its-transphobic-here-s-why-aa6fdcf59aca.

45.Iris Kuo, “The ‘Whitening’ of Asian Americans,” Atlantic, September 13, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/the-whitening-of-asian-americans/563336/; Paul Lungen, “Check Your Jewish Privilege,” Canadian Jewish News, December 21, 2018, www.cjnews.com/living-jewish/check-your-jewish-privilege.

46.Zachary Small, “Joseph Pierce on Why Academics Must Decolonize Queerness,” Hyperallergic, August 10, 2019, hyperallergic.com/512789/joseph-pierce-on-why-academics-must-decolonize-queerness/.

47.Peter Tatchell, “Tag: Stop Murder Music,” Peter Tatchell Foundation, May 13, 2016, www.petertatchellfoundation.org/tag/stop-murder-music/.

48.Arwa Mahdawi, “It’s Not a Hate Crime for a Woman to Feel Uncomfortable Waxing Male Genitalia,” Guardian, July 27, 2019, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/27/male-genitalia-week-in-patriarchy-women.

49.Pluckrose and Lindsay, “Identity Politics Does Not Continue the Work of the Civil Rights Movements.”

50.Collins and Bilge, Intersectionality, 30.

51.Rebecca Ann Lind, “A Note From the Guest Editor,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 54 (2010): 3.

52.Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall identify three overlapping “sets of engagements”: “the first consisting of applications of an intersectional framework or investigations of intersectional dynamics, the second consisting of discursive debates about the scope and content of intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological paradigm, and the third consisting of political interventions employing an intersectional lens.” Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, “Toward a Field of Intersectionality Studies: Theory, Applications, and Praxis,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (2013): 785.

53.Ange-Marie Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5.

54.Ibid., 5.

55.Ibid., 6.

56.These Hancock names as Crenshaw and Collins; “the original” is the white Frenchman Michel Foucault (Intellectual History, 9)

57.Hancock remarks,

How do intersectionality scholars find a middle ground between an impossible conceptualization of intersectionality as intellectual property, and a destructive conceptualization of intersectionality as meme, which shape-shifts so much as to no longer be recognizable as anything other than a meme gone viral? (Intellectual History, 17)

58.Crenshaw says,

Some people look to intersectionality as a grand theory of everything, but that’s not my intention. If someone is trying to think about how to explain to the courts why they should not dismiss a case made by black women, just because the employer did hire blacks who were men and women who were white, well, that’s what the tool was designed to do. If it works, great. If it doesn’t work, it’s not like you have to use this concept. The other issue is that intersectionality can get used as a blanket term to mean, “Well, it’s complicated.” Sometimes, “It’s complicated” is an excuse not to do anything.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later,” Columbia Law School, June 2017, www.law.columbia.edu/pt-br/news/2017/06/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality.

59.See Robin J. DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011) and Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (London: Allen Lane, 2019).

60.Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Books, 2019).

61.See Heather Bruce, Robin DiAngelo, Gyda Swaney (Salish), and Amie Thurber, “Between Principles and Practice: Tensions in Anti-Racist Education” (panel, 2014 Race & Pedagogy National Conference, University of Puget Sound), video posted by Collins Memorial Library, vimeo.com/116986053.

62.Bruce et al, Tensions, 2014.

63.Ibid., 2014.

64.James Lindsay, “Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice,” Areo Magazine, December 26, 2018, areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/.

65.David Rock and Heidi Grant, “Is Your Company’s Diversity Training Making You More Biased?” Psychology Today, June 7, 2017, www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/your-brain-work/201706/is-your-company-s-diversity-training-making-you-more-biased.

6 Feminisms and Gender Studies

1.Stevi Jackson, “Why a Materialist Feminism Is (Still) Possible—and Necessary,” Women’s Studies International Forum 24, no. 3–4 (2001).

2.In the United States: Barbara J. Risman, “Good News! Attitudes Moving Toward Gender Equality,” Psychology Today, December 17, 2018, www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/gender-questions/201812/good-news-attitudes-moving-toward-gender-equality; in the United Kingdom: Radhika Sanghani, “Only 7 per Cent of Britons Consider Themselves Feminists,” Telegraph, January 15, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/only-7-percent-of-britons-consider-themselves-feminists/.

3.It is virtually certain that we have left out at least one feminist camp here and equally likely that we’ll hear about it as a result.

4.To avoid drawing intersectional feminist ire ourselves—as though this is possible—here we note that many of the branches of feminism reject the “linear wave model” that sees a first-wave feminism that fought for women’s suffrage followed by a second-wave liberal model that expanded women’s rights legally, in the home, in the workplace, and in society, followed by a third wave that is intersectional (and, sometimes, a fourth wave that focuses primarily upon applying a radically expanded view of sexual assault through concepts like rape culture). The rejection of the linear wave model is especially true of many branches of black and intersectional feminist thought.

5.Paraphrased from Judith Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms and Challenging Categories,” Social Problems 53, no. 4 (2006): 448.

6.Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1974).

7.Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).

8.Kate Millett, Catharine A. MacKinnon, and Rebecca Mead, Sexual Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

9.Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Fourth Estate, 2012).

10.Lorber writes, “On the hegemony of dominant men, as an adaptation of Gramsci’s (1971) idea of dominant elites and Marxist class consciousness, it was easy to view women as a subordinated class in the domestic division of labor” (“Shifting Paradigms,” 448).

11.Ibid., 449.

12.Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan, Key Concepts in Gender Studies (Los Angeles: Sage, 2017), xiii.

13.Pilcher and Whelehan, Key Concepts.

14.Ibid., xiii.

15.In the words of Pilcher and Whelehan, gender studies “have been a key driver of the increased recognition of diversity and difference. Inequalities and differences, not just between genders but within genders, based on class, sexuality, ethnicity, age, nationality and religion, and citizenship status, for example, are now attended to” (ibid., xiii).

16.Ibid., xiii.

17.Lorber, “Shifting Paradigms,” 449.

18.Ibid., 448.

19.Ibid., 448

20.Ibid., 448

21.Ibid., 448

22.We should not misunderstand this to mean that every feminist became an applied postmodernist, intersectional feminist by the early 2000s or that every feminist is one now. In fact, it is unlikely that even a majority are—except in certain enclaves, like the academy. Feminists of dozens of stripes still exist, are active, and fight with one another, but the intersectional branch dominates both activism and scholarship.

Radical feminists, liberal feminists, and material feminists—among many other types—still exist and are quite active. Radicals and materialists are interested in the material realities of economics, law, and government and accept that objective truths exist, while the postmodernists—and their descendants, the intersectionalists—are interested in how discourses construct knowledge and enforce power (the postmodern knowledge and political principles). Both kinds of feminist ultimately believe that gender is a cultural construct, but, while the radical materialist feminists believe it has been constructed by men to oppress women (a typically Marxist understanding of power as operating from above), the intersectionalists believe that the power to enforce gender permeates all of society in the form of discourses—how we talk about things—and that liberation can only come from disrupting the stability and relevance of categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—including those relied upon by radical feminists. This puts them at considerable odds.

The most recognizable conflict between radical and intersectional feminists occurs on the incredibly hostile battleground between postmodern trans activists—who believe in self-identification of gender, which necessitates the acceptance of trans women as women, for example—and the gender-critical radical feminists (often disparagingly called Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs)—who believe that gender is an oppressive imposition and trans women are men who are complicit in that oppression. There is a similar conflict, often involving the same feminists, between those who are positive about sex work done by women and those radical feminists (often disparagingly called Sex-Worker-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or SWERFs), who believe sex work to be exploitation of women.

During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the radical and materialist feminist viewpoint held sway in the universities, but—following the turn to applied postmodernism and the creation of intersectional feminism, queer Theory, and postcolonial feminism—the intersectional feminists, queer Theorists, and trans activists have gained dominance. This has led to the deplatforming of once-popular feminist figures like Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill for their views on trans identity and sex work. Radical feminists also face fierce criticism from postcolonial and intersectional feminists because they see women as one class and are therefore frequently opposed to cultural relativism. They are critical of the oppression of women under Islam, for example, and postcolonial and intersectional scholars sometimes see this as imperialist universalizing.

23.Another example of this phenomenon can be found among those Christian sects who reinterpret Jesus’ promises to return within a generation to establish the Kingdom of God (Matthew 24:34, and elsewhere) spiritually, as having happened in various ways, such as in Heaven or through the establishment of the Christian religion itself.

24.Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956).

25.A fitting example of this new line of feminist thought is the award-winning and influential book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne, who argues that misogyny is best understood as a systemic feature of society, by which women’s inferiority is enforced socially, even if actual misogynists are rare or nonexistent. See Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

26.Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no. 2 (1987).

27.Ibid., 126.

28.Ibid., 137.

29.Ibid., 142.

30.They write, “If we do gender appropriately, we simultaneously sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional arrangements that are based on sex category. If we fail to do gender appropriately, we as individuals—not the institutional arrangements—may be called to account (for our character, motives, and predispositions)” (ibid., 146).

31.Catherine Connell, “Doing, Undoing, or Redoing Gender?” Gender & Society 24, no. 1 (2010): 31–55.

32.Pilcher and Whelehan, Key Concepts, 54.

33.Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” 1297.

34.Pilcher and Whelehan, Key Concepts, 42.

35.Ibid., 43.

36.Nancy J. Hirschmann, “Choosing Betrayal,” Perspectives on Politics 8, no. 1 (2010).

37.bell hooks, “Racism and Feminism: The Issue of Accountability,” in Making Sense of Women’s Lives: An Introduction to Women’s Studies, ed. Lauri Umansky, Paul K. Longmore, and Michele Plott (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).

38.Collins, Black Feminist Thought.

39.Patricia Hill Collins, “Toward a New Vision: Race, Class, and Gender as Categories of Analysis and Connection,” Race, Sex & Class 1, no. 1 (1993): 38–39.

40.The socialist feminist, Linda Gordon writes,

The intersectionality concept also began to focus on some social positions more than others. Of particular concern in reducing the potential of intersectionality as a concept is the neglect of class inequality. One example: a SUNY–Albany School of Social Work syllabus contains a “module” on intersectionality that lists gender, age, ethnic group or race and career identities as the influences to be considered. Neglecting class or economic inequality—and I am aware that these two are by no means identical—is a common and over-determined phenomenon. (p. 348)

She continues,

Few of the core activist/intersectionality websites that I have discovered—whether predominantly black or predominantly female or both—discuss the problems of low-income people, such as the prohibition on federal funding for abortion, the high cost of decent child care, the lack of paid family and sick leave, unemployment, prison conditions, school defunding, prescription medicine costs, low minimum wages and wage theft. (p. 353)

Linda Gordon, “‘Intersectionality,’ Socialist Feminism and Contemporary Activism: Musings by a Second-Wave Socialist Feminist,” Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016).

41.Peggy McIntosh, On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning: Selected Essays 1981–2019 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2019), 29–34.

42.See journalistic analyses: Janet Daley, “The Bourgeois Left Has Abandoned the Working Class to the Neo-fascists.” Telegraph, January 14, 2018. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/14/bourgeois-left-has-abandoned-working-class-neo-fascists/; Michael Savage, “‘Cities Are Now Labour Heartland, with Working-class Turning Away’.” Guardian. September 22, 2018. www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/22/cities-are-nowlabour-heartland-as-traditional-working-class-desert; Paul Embery, “Why Does the Left Sneer at the Traditional Working Class?” UnHerd. April 05, 2019. unherd.com/2019/04/why-does-the-left-sneer-at-the-traditional-working-class/; Sheri Berman, “Why Identity Politics Benefits the Right More than the Left.” Guardian. July 14, 2018. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/14/identity-politics-right-left-trump-racism.

43.Gordon, “Musings,” 351.

44.Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” Washington Post, June 8, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men/2018/06/08/f1a3a8e0-6451-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story. html?noredirect=on.

45.Michael S. Kimmel, The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (and the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer) (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

46.Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Vancouver: Langara College, 2018).

47.Terry A. Kupers, “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 6 (2005).

48.It should be noted that the election of Donald Trump to the office of President of the United States is treated from within Theory as the best possible confirmation of Theory’s insistences that society is secretly inherently racist, sexist, and all other manners of bigoted and that the need to expose this through more Theory is more important and pressing than ever. (See Lisa Wade, “The Big Picture: Confronting Manhood after Trump,” Public Books, January 4, 2019, www.publicbooks.org/big-picture-confronting-manhood-trump/.)

49.American Psychological Association, “APA Guidelines to Psychological Practice with Boys and Men,” 2018, www.apa.org/about/policy/boys-men-practice-guidelines.pdf.

50.Nancy E. Dowd, The Man Question: Male Subordination and Privilege (New York University Press, 2016).

51.Eric Anderson, Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2012).

52.This idea is often attributed to the feminist and postcolonial scholar Sandra Harding’s book Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). Harding was perhaps most influential for developing the idea of “strong objectivity” in standpoint theory and is perhaps most famous for referring to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual” in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, which she later claimed to have regretted writing. Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

53.Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin Books, 2019).

54.Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, “Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality,” Science 362, no. 6412 (2018): eaas9899.

7 Disability and Fat Studies

1.This strange notation is relatively common in disciplines that use postmodern methods and means. Here it means the study both of the disabled and the abled at the same time.

2.Oliver et al write,

The “individual model” of disability presupposes that the problems disabled people experience are a direct consequence of their impairment, which leads professionals to attempt to adjust the individual to their particular disabling condition. There is likely to be a programme of re-ablement designed to return the individual to as near normal a state as possible.

Michael Oliver, Bob Sapey, and Pam Thomas, Social Work with Disabled People (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 12.

3.Ibid., 16.

4.Ibid., 19.

5.Brown, in Jennifer Scuro, Addressing Ableism: Philosophical Questions via Disability Studies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 48.

6.“Crip” in “crip theory” is a contraction of “cripple.” Taking this term upon themselves and their Theory is an act of “strategic essentialism,” as described by Spivak.

7.Robert McRuer and Michael Bérubé, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York University Press, 2006), 8.

8.See the transcription of Jennifer Scuro’s conversation with Devonya N. Havis, in which Havis remarks,

I guess I come at this with a Foucauldian lens. It is not specifically disability as such but also the systemic and structural power dynamics that determine what will count as the “norm” and the processes by which those things that lie outside what is deemed “normal” will be managed and subjected to forms of “correction” designed to enforce performance of the established norms. These power dynamics and their deployment can be explored historically through institutions and in terms of conceptual battles. Crucial for Foucault is the necessity of examining the processes by which certain practices get established as rational, normal, and desirable. It is certainly the case that histories of racialization, attributions of sex and sex differences, as well as what is considered “abnormal” have such histories and relationships to deployments of power that privilege certain races, sexes, and a certain sense of what counts as able. In this respect, I think Foucault is useful in pointing out the power operative in how particular conceptions of what counts as normal have been naturalized. Foucault clearly sees the construction of the norm and those categories that fall outside of established norms as mechanisms that influence how people are categorized. He goes as far as developing a conception of “racism” against the abnormal. This, for me, has been an instructive way to interrogate categories that we often consider basic or given. Under what conditions and with whose interests in mind do such categories emerge? (Havis, in Scuro, Addressing Ableism, 72)

9.Dan Goodley, Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3.

10.Goodley writes, “Discourses, strategies and modes work on the population and the individual. Biopower has micro and macro targets” (ibid., 32).

11.Ibid., 26.

12.Ibid., 36.

13.Ibid., 35.

14.Ibid., 8.

15.Fiona Kumari Campbell, Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

16.Ibid., 5.

17.Ibid., 6.

18.Ibid., 17.

19.Ibid., 28.

20.Brown, in Scuro, Addressing Ableism, 70.

21.“It became part of my identity to be suicidal,” as documented here by Andrew Sullivan. “Andrew Sullivan: The Hard Questions about Young People and Gender Transitions,” Intelligencer, November 1, 2019, nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/andrew-sullivan-hard-questions-gender-transitions-for-young.html.

22.Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1994), 3.

23.Shapiro, No Pity, 20.

24.Brown and Scuro, in Scuro, Addressing Ableism, 92–94.

25.Sometimes hearing aids do not restore hearing straightforwardly but result in some improvement in hearing at the cost of having to endure unpleasant and intrusive noises leading deaf people to find the “cure” worse than the problem.

26.See Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

27.“Naafa—We Come in All Sizes,” National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, www.naafaonline.com/dev2/ (accessed August 21, 2019).

28.Micaela Foreman, “The Fat Underground and the Fat Liberation Manifesto,” Feminist Poetry Movement, December 20, 2018, sites.williams.edu/engl113-f18/foreman/the-fat-underground-and-the-fat-liberation-manifesto/.

29.Association for Size Diversity and Health ASDAH, www.sizediversityandhealth.org/index.asp (accessed August 21, 2019).

30.Linda Bacon, Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2010).

31.The manifesto based on Bacon’s book seems to be most in keeping with the liberal body positivity movement, which has a celebratory ethos.

Refuse to fight in an unjust war. Join the new peace movement: “Health at Every Size” (HAES). HAES acknowledges that well-being and healthy habits are more important than any number on the scale. Participating is simple:

1.Accept your size. Love and appreciate the body you have. Self-acceptance empowers you to move on and make positive changes.

2.Trust yourself. We all have internal systems designed to keep us healthy—and at a healthy weight. Support your body in naturally finding its appropriate weight by honoring its signals of hunger, fullness, and appetite.

Linda Bacon, “Health at Every Size: Excerpts and Downloads,” LindaBacon.org, n.d., lindabacon.org/health-at-every-size-book/haes-excerpts-and-downloads/.

32.See these metastudies addressing the claims of HAES: Caroline K. Kramer, Bernard Zinman, and Ravi Retnakaran, “Are Metabolically Healthy Overweight and Obesity Benign Conditions?: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Annals of Internal Medicine 159 no. 11 (December 03, 2013), annals.org/aim/article-abstract/1784291/metabolically-healthy-overweight-obesity-benign-conditions-systematic-review-meta-analysis?doi=10.7326/0003-4819-159-11-201312030-00008; Lara L. Roberson et al., “Beyond BMI: The ‘Metabolically Healthy Obese’ Phenotype and Its Association with Clinical/Subclinical Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality—A Systematic Review,” BMC Public Health 14, no. 1 (2014): article 14.

33.The ASDAH website states that its commitment to inclusion

encompasses diversity based on ethnicity, race, nationality, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, spirituality, abilities, education, economic class, social class, body shape and size, and others. Systems of oppression do not occur in isolation. Because they have a cumulative impact, we cannot dismantle weight/size oppression without addressing the intersectionality of all oppressions. Therefore, we at ASDAH believe that working in an inclusive and intersectional way is the only way to create a world where all bodies are safe and valued.

34.Fat Studies, Taylor and Francis Online.

35.Charlotte Cooper, Fat Activism: A Radical Social Movement (Bristol, England: HammerOn Press, 2016), 145. Cooper notes, “Radical lesbian feminist separatism is commonly constructed in opposition to third wave queer feminism” (p145). Recall that we have also seen this shift in gender studies in the distinction between the radical feminists considered trans-exclusionary and the intersectional feminists who are trans activists. Remember too that divides between materialists and postmodernists are prominent in both postcolonial Theory and critical race Theory.

36.This new alignment can be seen in the foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, which focuses on Theoretical developments:

Like feminist studies, queer studies, and disability studies, which consider gender, sexuality, or functional difference, fat studies can show us who we are via the lens of weight. Fat studies can offer an analysis that is in solidarity with resistance to other forms of oppression by offering a new and unique view of alienation.

Marilyn Wann, “Foreword,” in The Fat Studies Reader, ed. Esther D. Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York Unviersity Press, 2009), xxii.

It also appears in the more accessible text Fat Shame, which begins:

The way fat denigration overlaps with racial, ethnic, and national discrimination; the connections between both of these (fat and ethnic denigration) and class privilege; and, finally, the ways that all these elements (fat denigration, ethnic discrimination, and class privilege) intersect with gender and the construction of what it means to be a “popular girl,” a properly constituted gendered subject.

Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York University Press, 2011), 3. This book focuses on race and gender, claiming that “fat denigration is intricately related to gender as well as racial hierarchies, in particular the historical development of ‘whiteness’” (Farrell, Fat Shame, 5).

This intersectional approach is also taken up by the book You Have the Right to Remain Fat,

A fat woman who is cisgender is likely to be treated differently than a fat woman who is trans…. Fat trans women experience the violence that exists at the nexus of sexism, fatphobia, and transphobia. Race is another mitigating factor. The lighter you are the more culturally valued you are. So, whiteness or light skin can soften fat negative bias, whereas dark-skinned women may experience increased hostility due to the combined effects of colorism and fatphobia.

Virgie Tovar, You Have the Right to Remain Fat (New York: Feminist Press, 2018), 67–68.

37.Cooper, Fat Activism, 4.

38.Ibid., 36.

39.Ibid., 35.

40.She writes, “Michel Foucault’s work (1980) has shown us that placing bodies under the microscope of science, in the name of liberal projects of self-improvement, in fact reinscribes their deviance and increases their oppression” (in Rothblum and Solovay, Reader, 70).

41.In their essay “Disappeared Feminist Discourses on Fat in Dietetic Theory and Practice,” Lucy Aphramor and Jacqui Gringas write, “Butler reminds us that as we continue to try to change the world, we remain deeply tied to the world as it is by desire and the need for recognition. What’s more, we are not held to give an account of ourselves in our misuse and misunderstandings of power, discourse, and knowledge” (in Rothblum and Solovay, Reader, 102).

42.Cooper, Fat Activism, 24.

43.Wann, in Rothblum and Solovay, Reader, xi.

44.Tovar, Remain Fat, 371.

45.Cooper, Fat Activism, 169.

46.Ibid., 175.

47.Ibid., 175.

48.Wann, in Rothblum and Solovay, Reader, xiii.

49.Ibid., xiii.

50.LeBesco, in Rothblum and Solovay, Reader, 70.

51.Allyson Mitchell, “Sedentary Lifestyle: Fat Queer Craft,” Fat Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 11.

52.LeBesco, in Rothblum and Solovay, Reader, 83.

53.Aphramor and Gringas, in Solovay, Reader, 97.

54.Ibid., 97.

55.Ibid., 100.

56.Ibid., 100.

57.John Coveney and Sue Booth, Critical Dietetics and Critical Nutrition Studies (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 18.

58.Cooper, Fat Activism, 7.

59.Ibid., 2.

8 Social Justice Scholarship and Thought

1.Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).

2.See, for example: Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: A Critique of Biology and Its Theories on Women (New York: Pergamon Press, 1984); Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988).

3.Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence: Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011).

4.Hancock, Intersectionality, 1.

5.The “science wars” refer to a series of heated debates between natural scientists and postmodern scholars about the objective or socially constructed nature of knowledge that took place in the 1990s, primarily in the United States.

6.Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. Although the term “epistemic injustice” has been ascribed to Fricker, arguments that people can be disadvantaged in their relationship to knowledge are much older. As Amy Allen argues, “Michel Foucault could well be considered a theorist of epistemic injustice avant la lettre.” Amy Allen, “Power/Knowledge/Resistance: Foucault and Epistemic Injustice,” The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 187.

7.See, for example: Rae Langton, “Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing by Miranda Fricker,” book review, Hypatia 25 no. 2 (2010); Elizabeth Anderson, “Epistemic Justice as a Virtue of Social Institutions,” Social Epistemology 26, no. 2 (2012).

8.What is “epistemic injustice”? It is a kind of Social Justice philosophy. As Kid, Medina, and Polhaus argue, it functions

as both a phenomenon and a topic of study, [it] obviously connects to and interpenetrates with major social and intellectual movements, such as feminism, hermeneutics, critical race theory, disability studies, and decolonialising, queer, and trans epistemologies.

Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Polhaus, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 1.

9.Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression,” Social Epistemology 28, no. 2 (2014).

10.Spivak’s description of epistemic violence draws on Foucault’s thoughts about oppression under a prevailing episteme, and these parallel the concept of symbolic violence put forth in the 1970s by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, symbolic violence occurs whenever a person is led to believe that she should accept her oppression. These two similar concepts help explain why Social Justice scholarship and activism so readily identifies disagreeable speech as a form of violence.

11.Nora Berenstain, “Epistemic Exploitation,” Ergo 3, no. 22 (2016).

12.José Medina, “Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017).

13.Jeremy Wanderer, “Varieties of Testimonial Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017).

14.Susan E. Babbit, “Epistemic and Political Freedom,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017).

15.Lorraine Code, “Epistemic Responsibility,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017).

16.Heidi Grasswick argues, “Given their epistemic strength and political influence, scientific institutions and their practices need to be investigated as possible sites and sources of epistemic injustice.” Thus, simply because they have earned such a high prestige, science and reason must be suspected of having some kind of unjust epistemic advantage. Grasswick continues,

That racism and sexism, among other forms of oppression, have significantly shaped the practices and results of science is by now well documented by postcolonial science and technology studies scholars, feminist theorists and philosophers of science, and critical race theorists alike.

Heidi Grasswick, “Epistemic Injustice in Science,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 313.

17.Ibid., 313.

18.Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2012).

19.Code, “Epistemic Responsibility.”

20.Allison B. Wolf, “‘Tell Me How That Makes You Feel’: Philosophys Reason/Emotion Divide and Epistemic Pushback in Philosophy Classrooms,” Hypatia 32, no. 4 (2017): 893–910, doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12378.

21.Alexis Shotwell, “Forms of Knowing and Epistemic Resources,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 79.

22.Ibid., 81.

23.Alison Bailey, “The Unlevel Knowing Field: An Engagement with Dotson’s Third-Order Epistemic Oppression,” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 3, no. 10 (2014), ssrn.com/abstract=2798934.

24.Nancy Tuana, “Feminist Epistemology: The Subject of Knowledge,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 125.

25.José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44.

26.Feminist theorist Sandra Harding, writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, called this extra sight “strong objectivity.” Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” Centennial Review 36, no. 3 (1992).

27.Standpoint theory is most closely associated with the work of feminist scholar Sandra Harding in the 1980s, but, unlike contemporary Theorists, Harding did not think that one had to be a member of a certain group to imagine oneself in their position. Thus, her work, like Fricker’s, retains a certain confidence in people’s ability to empathize with members of other groups. Sandra Harding, Whose Science/Whose Knowledge? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Harding, The Science Question in Feminism; Harding, Feminism and Methodology; Sandra Harding, “Gender, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998).

28.Collins writes,

Identity politics and standpoint epistemology constitute two important forms of authorization for people of color, women, poor people and new immigrant populations that constitute sources of epistemic authority. Identity politics claims the authority of one’s own experiences and social location as a source of epistemic agency. Standpoint epistemology asserts the right to be an equal epistemic agent in interpreting one’s own realities within interpretive communities.

Furthermore:

Painting identity politics as an inferior form of politics and standpoint epistemology as a limited and potentially biased form of knowing illustrates this general practice of discrediting the epistemic agency of oppressed subjects.

Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality and Epistemic Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 119.

29.Dotson argues, “It is like experiencing the impossible as possible and, correspondingly, viewing the limits of one’s epistemological systems that designate the possible as impossible. Being able to make this step is difficult enough. Being able to change those limitations may be impossible for many” (“Epistemic Oppression,” 32).

30.Dotson writes, “It is imperative that those perpetrating third order epistemic oppression take a step back and become aware of their overall epistemological systems that are preserving and legitimating inadequate epistemic resources. This kind of recognition, which can be seen as akin to a broad recognition of one’s ‘cultural traditions systems,’ is extraordinarily difficult” (ibid., 32).

31.Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, 32.

32.Ibid., 30–35.

33.Georg W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

34.Charles Mills, “Ideology,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, ed. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr. (London: Routledge, 2017), 108

35.James Lindsay, “Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice,” Areo Magazine, December 26, 2018, areomagazine.com/2018/12/18/postmodern-religion-and-the-faith-of-social-justice/.

36.Barbara Applebaum, Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010), 31.

37.Ibid., 100.

38.Ibid., 99.

39.Ibid., 43.

40.Ibid., 43.

41.Ibid., 102.

42.Ibid., 108.

43.Ibid., 96.

44.Ibid., 97.

45.Ibid., 112.

46.Alison Bailey, “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes,” Hypatia 32, no. 4 (2017): 877.

47.Ibid., 877.

48.Ibid., 881.

49.Ibid., 882.

50.Of course, we cannot assume that the Hypatia editors agreed with Bailey’s argument. They could have published it in order to generate debate. However, they also published Alison Wolf’s paper drawing on it to argue against privileging reason in philosophy and they accepted our “hoax” paper drawing on it to argue that satirical criticism of Social Justice scholarship is invalid and unethical with one editor saying: “The topic is an excellent one and would make an excellent contribution to feminist philosophy and be of interest to Hypatia readers.” Wolf, “‘Tell Me How That Makes You Feel’”; James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose, “Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship,” Areo Magazine, October 2, 2018, areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/.

51.Bailey, “Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback,” 886.

52.Ibid., 878.

53.Ibid., 886.

54.Ibid., 887.

55.Ibid., 887.

56.Ibid., 887.

57.DiAngelo, Robin J. DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011).

58.Ibid., 54.

59.Ibid., 57.

60.This is not to accuse her of hypocrisy, of course. DiAngelo has been quite clear that as a result of her Theorizing, she wishes that she could be “less white.” She also points out repeatedly that she is only speaking to white people. See Michael Lee, “‘Whiteness Studies’ Professor to White People: You’re Racist If You Don’t Judge by Skin Color,” Pluralist, May 29, 2019, pluralist.com/robin-diangelo-colorblindness-dangerous/.

61.Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 142.

62.Ibid., 158.

63.Ibid., 105.

64.Ibid., 89.

65.Jonathan Church first identified DiAngelo’s concept of “white fragility” as falling prey to the fallacy of reification. Jonathan Church, “Whiteness Studies and the Theory of White Fragility Are Based on a Logical Fallacy,” Areo Magazine, April 25, 2019, areomagazine.com/2019/04/25/whiteness-studies-and-the-theory-of-white-fragility-are-based-on-a-logical-fallacy/. Church has produced an enlightening series of essays on the epistemological problems with DiAngelo’s work accessible through his website www.jonathandavidchurch.com.

66.In particular the Critical Theory of Max Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School.

67.See, in particular, Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, “Women’s Studies as Virus: Institutional Feminism, Affect, and the Projection of Danger,” Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies 5, no. 1 (2016) and John Coveney and Sue Booth, Critical Dietetics and Critical Nutrition Studies (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019).

68.Lindsay, “Postmodern Religion.”

9 Social Justice in Action

1.Hardeep Singh, “Why Was a Disabled Grandad Sacked by Asda for Sharing a Billy Connolly Clip?” Spectator, June 27, 2019, blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/06/why-was-a-disabled-grandad-sacked-by-asda-for-sharing-a-billy-connolly-clip/.

2.Sean Stevens, “The Google Memo: What Does the Research Say about Gender Differences?” Heterodox Academy, February 2, 2019, heterodoxacademy.org/the-google-memo-what-does-the-research-say-about-gender-differences/.

3.Emma Powell and Patrick Grafton-Green, “Danny Baker Fired by BBC Radio 5 Live over Racist Royal Baby Tweet,” Evening Standard, May 9, 2019, www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/danny-baker-fired-broadcaster-sacked-bybbc-radio-5-live-over-racist-tweet-a4137951.html.

4.Charlotte Zoller, “How I Found a Fat-Positive Doctor Who Didn’t Just Tell Me to Lose Weight,” Vice, August 15, 2018, www.vice.com/en_us/article/43ppwj/how-to-find-a-fat-positive-doctor.

5.Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.

6.Jonathan W. Wilson, “‘I’ve Never Had a Student Ask for a Safe Space. Here’s What They Have Asked for,’” Vox, December 12, 2018, www.vox.com/first-person/2018/12/12/18131186/college-campus-safe-spaces-trigger-warnings; Judith Shulevitz, “In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas,” New York Times. March 21, 2015.

7.Daniel Koehler, “Violence and Terrorism from the Far-Right: Policy Options to Counter an Elusive Threat,” Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies (February 2019), doi.org/10.19165/2019.2.02.

8.Julia Ebner, “The Far Right Have a Safe Haven Online. We Cannot Let Their Lies Take Root,” Guardian, November 14, 2018, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/far-right-safe-haven-online-white-supremacist-groups.

9.Natalie Gil, “‘Inside The Secret World Of Incels’—The Men Who Want to Punish Women,” BBC Three Review, July 2019, www.refinery29.com/engb/2019/07/237264/inside-the-secret-world-of-incels-bbc-three.

10.Timothy Egan, “How the Insufferably Woke Help Trump,” New York Times, November 8, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/08/opinion/warrenbiden-trump.html.

11.Andrea Vacchiano, “Colleges Pay Diversity Officers More Than Professors, Staff,” Daily Signal, July 14, 2017, www.dailysignal.com/2017/07/14/colleges-pay-diversity-officers-more-than-professors-staff/.

12.Alex_TARGETjobs, “Equality and Diversity Officer: Job Description.” TARGETjobs, July 30, 2019, targetjobs.co.uk/careers-advice/job-descriptions/278257-equality-and-diversity-officer-job-description.

13.Jeffrey Aaron Snyder and Amna Khalid, “The Rise of ‘Bias Response Teams’ on Campus,” New Republic, March 30, 2016, newrepublic.com/article/132195/rise-bias-response-teams-campus (accessed August 20, 2019).

14.Ryan Miller et al., “Bias Response Teams: Fact vs. Fiction,” Inside Higher Ed, June 17, 2019, www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/06/17/truth-about-bias-response-teams-more-complex-often-thought-opinion.

15.Snyder and Khalid, “The Rise of ‘Bias Response Teams’.”

16.Tom Slater, “No, Campus Censorship Is Not a Myth,” Spiked, April 2, 2019, www.spiked-online.com/2019/02/04/campus-censorship-is-not-a-myth/.

17.Slater, “Campus Censorship.”

18.“Hypatia Editorial Office,” archive.is, June 9, 2017, archive.is/kVrLb.

19.Jerry Coyne, “Journal Hypatia’s Editors Resign, and Directors Suspend Associate Editors over Their Apology for the ‘Transracialism’ Article,” Why Evolution Is True, July 22, 2017, whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/07/22/journal-hypatias-editors-resign-and-directors-suspend-associate-editors-over-their-apology-for-the-transracialism-article/.

20.Jesse Singal, “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like,” Intelligencer, New York Magazine, May 2, 2017, nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html.

21.Kelly Oliver, “If This Is Feminism …” Philosophical Salon, May 9, 2017, thephilosophicalsalon.com/if-this-is-feminism-its-been-hijacked-by-the-thought-police/.

22.Adam Lusher, “Professor’s ‘Bring Back Colonialism’ Call Sparks Fury and Academic Freedom Debate,” Independent, October 12, 2017, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/colonialism-academic-article-bruce-gilley-threats-violence-published-withdrawn-third-world-quarterly-a7996371.html.

23.Peter Wood, “The Article That Made 16,000 Ideologues Go Wild,” Minding the Campus, October 18, 2017, www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/10/04/the-article-that-made-16000-profs-go-wild/.

24.Ben Cohen, “The Rise of Engineering’s Social Justice Warriors,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, January 3, 2019, www.jamesgmartin.center/2018/11/the-rise-of-engineerings-social-justice-warriors/.

25.Donna Riley, Engineering and Social Justice (San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2008), 109.

26.Enrique Galindo and Jill Newton, eds. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Indianapolis, IN: Hoosier Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2017).

27.Catherine Gewertz, “Seattle Schools Lead Controversial Push to ‘Rehumanize’ Math,” Education Week, October 22, 2019, www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/10/11/seattle-schools-lead-controversial-push-to-rehumanize.html.

28.Seriously … “Seven Things You Need to Know about Antifa,” BBC Radio 4, n.d., www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/X56rQkDgd0qq-B7R68t6t7C/seven-things-you-need-to-know-about-antifa.

29.Peter Beinart, “Left Wing Protests Are Crossing the Line,” Atlantic, November 16, 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/protests-tucker-carlsons-home-crossed-line/576001/.

30.Yasmeen Serhan, “Why Protesters Keep Hurling Milkshakes at British Politicians,” Atlantic, May 21, 2019, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/05/milkshaking-britain-political-trend-right-wing/589876/.

31.Shaun O’Dwyer, “Of Kimono and Cultural Appropriation,” Japan Times, August 4, 2015, www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/08/04/commentary/japan-commentary/kimono-cultural-appropriation/#.XUdyw5NKj_Q.

32.Ade Onibada, “Macy’s Admits It ‘Missed the Mark’ for Selling a Portion-Sized Plate That Some People Online Aren’t Happy About,” BuzzFeed, July 24, 2019, www.buzzfeed.com/adeonibada/macys-pull-portion-control-plate-mom-jeans.

33.Crystal Tai, “Noodle-Maker Nissin Yanks ‘Whitewashed’ Anime of Tennis Star Naomi Osaka,” South China Morning Post, January 24, 2019, www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2183391/noodle-maker-nissin-withdraws-whitewashed-anime-ad-campaign.

34.Sarah Young, “Gucci Apologises for Selling Jumper That ‘Resembles Blackface,’” Independent, February 13, 2019, www.independent.co.uk/lifestyle/fashion/gucci-blackface-sweater-balaclava-apology-reaction-twitter-controversy-a8767101.html.

35.Ben Beaumont-Thomas, “Katy Perry Shoes Removed from Stores over Blackface Design,” Guardian, February 12, 2019, www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/12/katy-perry-shoes-removed-from-stores-over-black-face-design.

36.Julia Alexander, “The Yellow $: A Comprehensive History of Demonetization and YouTube’s War with Creators,” Polygon, May 10, 2018, www.polygon.com/2018/5/10/17268102/youtube-demonetization-pewdiepie-logan-paul-casey-neistat-philip-defranco.

37.Benjamin Goggin, “A Top Patreon Creator Deleted His Account, Accusing the Crowdfunding Membership Platform of ‘Political Bias’ after It Purged Conservative Accounts It Said Were Associated with Hate Groups,” Business Insider, December 17, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/sam-harris-deletes-patreon-account-after-platform-boots-conservatives-2018-12?r=US&IR=T.

38.Kari Paul and Jim Waterson, “Facebook Bans Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Other Far-Right Figures,” Guardian, May 2, 2019, www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/02/facebook-ban-alex-jones-miloyiannopoulos.

39.BBC News, “Twitter Bans Religious Insults Calling Groups Rats or Maggots,” BBC News, July 9, 2019, www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48922546; Julia Manchester, “Self-Described Feminist Banned from Twitter Says Platform Is Setting ‘Dangerous’ Precedent,” Hill, December 6, 2018, thehill.com/hilltv/rising/420033-self-described-feminist-banned-from-twitter-says-platform-is-setting-a.

40.Jose Paglieri, “Sexist Tweets Cost Business Insider Executive His Job,” CNN.com, September 10, 2013, money.cnn.com/2013/09/10/technology/business-insider-cto/index.html; Emily Alford, “Denise Is Fired,” Jezebel, April 1, 2019, jezebel.com/denise-is-fired-1833701621; Shamira Ibrahim, “In Defense of Cancel Culture,” Vice, April 4, 2019, www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbw9pa/what-is-cancel-culture-twitter-extremely-online.

41.Alex Culbertson, “Oscars to Have No Host after Kevin Hart Homophobic Tweets,” Sky News, January 10, 2019, news.sky.com/story/oscars-to-have-no-host-after-kevin-hart-homophobic-tweets-11603296.

42.CNN, “Ellen’s Usain Bolt Tweet Deemed Racist,” CNN.com, August 17, 2016, edition.cnn.com/2016/08/16/entertainment/ellen-degeneres-usain-bolt-tweet/index.html.

43.Hannah Jane Parkinson, “Matt Damon, Stop #Damonsplaining. You Don’t Understand Sexual Harassment,” Guardian, December 19, 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/19/matt-damon-sexual-harassment.

44.Brendan O’Neill, “Why Is Mario Lopez Apologising for Telling the Truth?” Spiked, August 1, 2019, www.spiked-online.com/2019/08/01/why-is-mario-lopez-apologising-for-telling-the-truth/.

45.Frances Perraudin, “Martina Navratilova Criticised over ‘Cheating’ Trans Women Comments,” Guardian, February 17, 2019, www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/feb/17/martina-navratilova-criticised-over-cheating-trans-women-comments.

46.“John McEnroe Says He Regrets Comments on Serena Williams and Is ‘Surprised’ by Reaction,” Telegraph, June 29, 2017, www.telegraph.co.uk/tennis/2017/06/29/johnmcenroe-says-regrets-comments-serena-williams-surprised.

47.Stefania Sarrubba, “After Trans Protests, Scarlett Johansson Still Says She Should Play Everyone,” Gay Star News, July 14, 2019, www.gaystarnews.com/article/scarlett-johansson-casting-controversy/#gs.y12axx.

48.Louis Staples, “JK Rowling’s Late Attempts to Make Harry Potter More Diverse Help No-One,” Metro, March 18, 2019, metro.co.uk/2019/03/18/jk-rowlings-late-attempts-make-harry-potter-diverse-nothing-lgbt-fans-like-8930864/.

49.Alison Flood, “JK Rowling under Fire for Writing about ‘Native American Wizards,’” Guardian, March 9, 2016, www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/09/jk-rowling-under-fire-for-appropriating-navajo-tradition-history-of-magic-in-north-america-pottermore.

50.Nadra Kareem Nittle, “Cultural Appropriation in Music: From Madonna to Miley Cyrus,” ThoughtCo, February 24, 2019, www.thoughtco.com/cultural-appropriation-in-music-2834650.

51.Nittle, “Cultural Appropriation.”

52.Helena Horton, “Beyoncé Criticised for ‘Cultural Appropriation’ in New Music Video with Coldplay and Sonam Kapoor,” Telegraph, January 29, 2016, www.telegraph.co.uk/music/news/beyonc-criticised-for-cultural-appropriation-in-new-music-video/.

53.Sam Gillette, “Dr. Seuss Books Like Horton Hears a Who! Branded Racist and Problematic in New Study,” People.com, February 28, 2019, people.com/books/dr-seuss-books-racist-problematic/.

54.“6 Racist TV Stereotypes White People Still Don’t Notice,” Digital Spy, February 16, 2019, www.digitalspy.com/tv/a863844/racism-movie-tv-stereotypes/.

55.Amber Thomas, “Women Only Said 27% of the Words in 2016’s Biggest Movies,” Developer News, January 10, 2017, www.freecodecamp.org/news/women-only-said-27-of-the-words-in-2016s-biggest-movies-955cb-480c3c4/.

56.WatchMojo, “Top 10 Needlessly Sexualized Female Movie Characters,” Viva, October 18, 2018, viva.media/top-10-needlessly-sexualized-female-movie-characters.

57.Chris Gardner, “Rose McGowan Calls Out ‘X-Men’ Billboard That Shows Mystique Being Strangled,” Hollywood Reporter, June 2, 2016, www.hollywoodreporter.com/rambling-reporter/rose-mcgowan-calls-x-men-898538.

58.Randall Colburn, “Jessica Chastain Blasts Game of Thrones: ‘Rape Is Not a Tool to Make a Character Stronger,’” AV Club, May 7, 2019, news.avclub.com/jessica-chastain-blasts-game-of-thrones-rape-is-not-a-1834581011.

59.Katherine Cross, “Doctor Who Has Given Us a Doctor without Inner Conflict,” Polygon, January 1, 2019, www.polygon.com/2019/1/1/18152028/doctor-who-whitaker-season-review.

60.Simon Baron-Cohen and Michael V. Lombardo, “Autism and Talent: The Cognitive and Neural Basis of Systemizing,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 19, no. 4 (2017).

61.Thomas Clements, “The Problem with the Neurodiversity Movement,” Quillette, October 20, 2017, quillette.com/2017/10/15/problem-neurodiversity-movement/.

62.Geoffrey Miller, “The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech,” Quillette, August 23, 2018, quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/.

63.Caroline Praderio, “Why Some People Turned Down a ‘Medical Miracle’ and Decided to Stay Deaf,” Insider, January 3, 2017, www.insider.com/why-deaf-people-turn-down-cochlear-implants-2016-12.

64.Danielle Moores, “Obesity: Causes, Complications, and Diagnosis,” Healthline, July 16, 2018, www.healthline.com/health/obesity (accessed August 25, 2019).

65.Sarah Knapton, “Cancer Research UK Accused of ‘Fat Shaming’ over Obesity Smoking Campaign,” Telegraph, July 5, 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/07/04/cancer-research-uk-accused-fat-shaming-obesity-smoking-campaign/.

66.Caroline Davies, “‘Beach Body Ready’ Tube Advert Protests Planned for Hyde Park,” Guardian, April 28, 2015, www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/27/mass-demonstration-planned-over-beach-body-ready-tube-advert.

67.“Hidden Tribes of America,” Hidden Tribes, hiddentribes.us (accessed November 7, 2019).

68.Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind.

69.Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Micro-aggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

70.See the chapter “False Accusations, Moral Panics and the Manufacture of Victimhood” in Campbell and Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture.

71.Lukianoff and Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind, 176.

72.Ibid., 24.

73.Ibid., 24.

74.Campbell and Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture, 2.

75.Mike Nayna, “PART TWO: Teaching to Transgress,” YouTube video, March 6, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0W9QbkX8Cs&t=6s.

76.Bruce, DiAngelo, Swaney, and Thurber, “Between Principles and Practice.”

77.Kathrine Jebsen Moore, “Knitting’s Infinity War, Part III: Showdown at Yarningham,” Quillette, July 28, 2019, quillette.com/2019/07/28/knittings-infinity-war-part-iii-showdown-at-yarningham/.

78.Amanda Marcotte, “Atheism’s Shocking Woman Problem: What’s behind the Misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?” Salon, October 3, 2014, www.salon.com/2014/10/03/new_atheisms_troubling_misogyny_the_pompous_sexism_of_richard_dawkins_and_sam_harris_partner/.

79.Southern Baptist Convention, “On Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality” (resolution, Southern Baptist Convention, Birmingham, AL, 2019), www.sbc.net/resolutions/2308/resolution-9--on-critical-race-theory-andintersectionality.

10 An Alternative to the Ideology of Social Justice

1.John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 21.

2.Ibid, 21.

3.Ibid, 21.

4.Ibid, 26.

5.The observation in this paragraph is taken from Jean Bricmont, La République des censeurs (Paris, L’Herne, 2014), 24n25.

6.Pinker, Enlightenment Now.

7.Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), xii–xiii.

8.Ibid., xiii.

9.Ibid., xiii.

10.Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (London: Riverrun, 2019), 24.

11.Gopnik, Thousand Small Sanities, 24.

12.Gopnik, Thousand Small Sanities, 42.

13.Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011).

14.Pinker, Enlightenment Now, 228.

15.Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 4.

16.Ibid., 38.

17.Ibid., 48–49.

18.Ibid., 48–49. Readers will notice that here Rauch is echoing the practical argument for the free exchange of ideas as posited by John Stuart Mill in 1859. See Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays.

19.Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors, 48.

20.Ibid., 49.

21.Ibid., 49.

22.Ibid., 6.

23.Ibid., 6.

24.Ibid., 6.

25.Ibid., 6.

26.Ibid., 6.

27.Ibid., 13.

28.Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).

29.Nicholas Christakis looks at the way humans from vastly different cultures and times have commonly structured their societies in his book Blueprint. He asks,

How can people be so different from—even go to war with—one another and yet also be so similar? The fundamental reason is that we each carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society. Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies. This is what we recognize when we look at people around the world. This is the source of our common humanity. (pp. xx–xxi)

Christakis identifies a “social suite” of evolved social features that humans possess and, by looking at different communities that have formed deliberately, like communes, and by accident, like shipwrecks, and their success and failure convincingly argues that no successful society can diverge too far from a structure that supports them. They are “(1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity (2) Love for partners and offspring (3) Friendship (4) Social networks (5) Cooperation (6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”) (7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism) (8) Social learning and teaching” (p. 13). Nicholas A. Christakis, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. (New York: Little, Brown, Spark, 2019).

30.Haidt, Righteous Mind.

31.Pinker, The Blank Slate.

32.Martin Luther King, Jr., “‘I Have a Dream” (address delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963), available through the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, Jkinginstitute. stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address-delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom.

33.Of note, critical race Theorists sometimes consider this quote as a cherry-picked example of King’s thought that white people use to control black people who espouse critical race Theory or who criticize “whiteness.”

34.Michael Lee, “‘Whiteness Studies’ Professor to White People: You’re Racist If You Don’t Judge by Skin Color,” Pluralist, May 29, 2019, pluralist.com/robin-diangelo-colorblindness-dangerous/.

35.“The desire for revenge is most easily modulated when the perpetrator falls within our natural circle of empathy. We are apt to forgive our kin and close friends for trespasses that would be unforgivable in others. And when our circle of empathy expands … our circle of forgivability expands with it” (Pinker, Better Angels, 541).

36.Elizabeth Redden, “Hungary Officially Ends Gender Studies Programs,” Inside Higher Ed, October 17, 2018, www.insidehighered.com/quick-takes/2018/10/17/hungary-officially-ends-gender-studies-programs.