In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.

Ok so yes it does originate in pop leftism, but its intent was to give individuals an understanding of systems of oppression. Clearly this understanding of social privileges (I'm going to insist on the term "social privileges" as opposed to "discursive privilege" in order to be precise) has been lost somewhere along the way. When I encounter these ideas it is not in reference to the system of oppression whatsoever, and instead identifies the individual as the origin of oppression, as if oppression occurs because white people elect to exercise white privilege, and racism would disappear with the opting out of whites from this system. This totally perverts the original project, and has no revolutionary character whatsoever.

Edited by babyfinland (Jan. 8, 2012 18:29:14)

discipline posted:
Let me be clear that I am not saying I have not experienced great amounts of violence because my social status. I am not saying that I do not feel personal anguish and distress about that. Of course it is a personal issue. What I am saying is that it is counterproductive personally to turn attacks on me because of misogyny into attacks on me because I am a woman. This flips the blame for the violence on me in a very convoluted way - if I were not a woman, I would not be experiencing that violence etc. I prefer to, for my own mental sanity and for the sake of my activism, blame such attacks on systemic hatred of women etc, not on who I am. Do you understand the difference here? Additionally, when I am discussing ways of combating this systemic hatred, I am not going to speak of my own experiences generally because my personal experiences - while they certainly relate to how I approach the issue - have little to do with the problem at large.

My intention here isn't to say that you have it easy, or that you just don't care about misogyny, or anything so crass. It's to highlight that different people have different reactions to a misogynistic culture and have developed strategies for navigating such that may differ from, even conflict with, your own. Here's a good example, an exchange I had with someone several months ago.

um, sort of? i don't like it when people use ideology as an excuse to be hateful generally. but more importantly i don't think the sort of feminism that explains gender oppression in terms of individual male psychologies/moralities is a good one.

this is because of your male privilege. living as a woman and a feminist you find your life is composed in large part of interactions with the individual men you know and love, or that you just met today, in which they repeatedly dehumanize you and you struggle to find a way to articulate to them both what is wrong and that you are allowed to feel there is something wrong. you don't live in a higher plane of theory, you live in individual interactions in which you need to address individuals and your activism is on an individual basis. this might be different for class or race issues, depending on context, but fighting patriarchy is often really fucking close to home and the most important battles for you are on individual, extremely painful basis. broader theory that places individuals within systematic oppression is useful b/c it allows you to shift some of the blame from the person hurting you so that you can continue to have a relationship with them, but in the end it can only do so much.

She's talking about the exact same topic as you, echos you at points, but still gives a markedly different assessment. As much as I'm resistant to the drive towards subjectivization, I'm also not content to say to a person like this, "Well, you're just wrong, it's not true to that the most important battles are your own individual battles, that's totally bourgeois, and liberalism", just as I wouldn't be content to tell you that there's no merit to your claims. Since, presumably, one of if not the primary aims we have here is to structure the discourse such that it's less hostile to female and PoC voices, I can't see how we can avoid doing otherwise, and any conflicts that come out have to worked out pragmatically rather than by appeal to a single standard.

Everyone needs to sit back and re-evaluate their goals and how they expect things to work. Like I've said before, you cannot destroy the master's house using the master's tools. If this kind of discourse is only used to assert power (the only way I've ever seen it used) then we need to be honest about that and ask ourselves how and why we got into this position to begin with. There doesn't need to be a "one or the other", we can all back the heck up and reassert or reevaluate where we're driving to instead of arguing how we're going to get there.

I wouldn't overstate this. Yes, people shouldn't be empowered to bully others, but on the other hand if there's absolutely no policing of the discourse then you have to let in the dudes who want to whine about how so-called "objectification" is just Guys Being Guys, and why can't they say the n-word if black people can, that's racist, and so on. That's no good for anyone. So basically I don't agree that asserting power is inherently 'using the master's tools', so to speak, even if it has the potential to become unhealthy. But yes, we should all be re-evaluating our goals/expectations and refining our approach, McCaine's made some good posts about this over the last few months. I don't think that's anywhere near enough on its own though, (especially since it's not even agreed upon).

babyfinland posted:
in serious works, ive only ever read about 'discursive privilege', i.e. the privileging of white perspectives, or male perspective, etc. the idea of individual social privileges -- male or white privilege etc -- seems a cheap and toothless stand-in for the sophisticated critiques of sexism and racism that we already have, and correct me if im wrong but its basically the product of pop leftism and bloggers?

Nine times out of ten when I see what I'd call a 'privilege argument', it is about discursive privilege. It's much more useful in my opinion to look at privilege as a discourse in itself, rather than simply a theory, (after all, most of the things that people are talking about here aren't even about privilege, they're about subjectivity, policing the discourse, political strategy, and the like, and I think when you look at it collectively privilege theory is more mortar than brick). To the extent that it is a theory, it's mainly a restatement of pre-existing theories with the focus shifted from the deprivation of the oppressed to the privilege of the oppressor, not a stand-in so much as an easily digestible, potentially useful, potentially problematic complement.

gyrofry posted:
here are some posts from a thread on somethingawful dot com that might be relevant for this discussion

az jan jananam posted:

Exponential Decay posted:
How is it exclusionary to attempt to protect the well-being, mentally and physically, of an oppressed class so a conversation between the oppressed people and the oppressors may occur?

Well, there are quite a few similarities I can discern.

1- Appeal to a near-mystical intellectual force that contaminates the mind. In Islam of course this is Shaytan, in leftist feminism this is "patriarchy". Both ideologies use the concept as a shorthand for "bad things people do" but then take it further into claims of definability but there end up being thousands of interpretations and stretching of what it actually means, which is why we have Egyptians claiming posting nude pictures of yourself is a manifestation of Shaytan and we have feminists here who accused others who self identify as "feminist" of misogyny for criticizing the manner of debate.

2) The idea that you can overcome said intellectual contaminant through "training", specifically through respected texts. In Islamism of course it is the Qu'ran and leftists tend to suggest a somewhat marginal corpus of academic feminist texts.

3) Antagonism towards scientific examination. Both ideologies have supporters that variously claim "bias" on the part of scientific examination of claims without positing how their methodology is superior.

4) Antagonism of the opinions of "outsiders", despite claimed inclusivity. This is variously justified through stretched and nebulous claims of oppression (imperialism, "mansplaining")

5) Universalization of a fairly narrow philosophy. Both Islamists and leftist feminists variously claim that their ideologies can describe and prescribe action on a global level despite only having appeal and relevance among a certain sector of the global population ("intersectionality", "al-ummah")

6) Attempts at excomunnication over fairly trivial differences , despite claims of inclusivity . Of course in Islam this is "ikfar", and in leftist feminism we have things like a blogger calling another anti-woman for disagreeing with flirtation etiquette.

This makes me interested if there is any formal study as to how leftist feminism borrowed from theological practice.

az jan jananam posted:
It's quite possible that despite your certitude about first principles of the debate, that the fundamental attitudes and discourse of leftist feminism are not at all authoritative as you seem to believe. Academic feminism is a constructed philosophy that allows (mainly first-world, leftist) women to frame their experiences in a way that might be useful and empowering to them personally. It is, however, full of self-reference and bias and relies on completely fluid and near-useless methods of describing reality, most obvious in the reliance on closing off the terms of debate based on indeterminate measurements of 'privilege', which is why we have posters here talking about the presence of "supposed self-identified feminist posters with internalized privileged beliefs" which seems similar to me in the same way people talk about exorcisms. Academic feminist theory is also almost completely divorced from actual global action being taken towards bettering the condition of women; there was a comparison to economics earlier, which is interesting because Feminist Theory professors are not polled or really at all consulted before enacting policy.

that dude is so obviously Hardcore Sax. I want to call out to him, i ache to tell him my love, but to do so would betray me to the wrath of warden 'Weez

tpaine posted:
fucking get fedallah here already

tpaine posted:

babyfinland posted:
i havent spoken to him since i went to jordan

his AIM is cirune, i donno if he still uses it

get him here fucknut

i havent been able to get in touch with him in over a year

BEIRUT—Iran's Revolutionary Court sentenced a 28-year-old American and former Marine to death on charges of spying for the Central Intelligence Agency, adding another point of conflict to heightened tensions between Washington and Tehran.
...
Among the charges against Mr. Hekmati was moharebe, or being an enemy of God, the highest crime in Islamic law and one that carries the death penalty in countries where Shariah law is practiced. Mr. Hekmati, who holds an Iranian passport, was tried as an Iranian citizen.

deadken posted:
someone the fuck get Two Worlds in here

Thus, just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side -- i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour -- so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilizing science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all of this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces.

But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch08.html