Another Great Moment of Academic Clarity
A reader, Vaclav Lochmann, points us to an announcement for the Meet Animal Meat international conference, organised by the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University. Here’s a taste, as it were:
Informed by feminist investigations of embodiment and bodiliness, we ask: How do we understand our bodily relationship to other animals? How do we embody animals, and how do animals embody us? How are carnal modes of incorporation, intimacy, and inhabitation kinds of contacts forged between “HumAnimals”?
How indeed.
If, as Donna Haraway writes, “animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with,” then how do embodied encounters with animal matter necessarily constitute categories of “human” and “animal”?
Wait for the clever bit.
What is the meaning of meat, and the meat of meaning?
Oh, there’s more.
Sadly, the opportunity to participate in the conference has come and gone. Readers are left to imagine the dizzying insights offered by the keynote speakers. Among them, Carol J. Adams, a “feminist-vegetarian theorist” and author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, in which she “explores a relationship between patriarchal values and meat eating by interweaving the insights of feminism, vegetarianism and literary theory.” The book has been described by the New York Times as “a bible of the vegan community,” and in it Ms Adams advances her belief that,
What, or more precisely, who, we eat is determined by the patriarchal politics of our culture. Patriarchy is a gender system that is implicit in human/animal relationships… Manhood is constructed in our culture by access to meat eating and control of other bodies.
Also sharing wisdom was Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and Gender Studies at USC and author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, in which she “proposes a conception of time and space independent of the influence of normative heterosexual/familial lifestyle.” Halberstam’s areas of, um, expertise include “examining queer temporality – queer uses of time and space that are developed in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” And one can only tremble with regret at missing Richard Twine’s pithy contribution: Embodying Posthumanist Intersectionality and Resisting Transhumanist ‘Enhancement’ Through Feminist Veganism?
Hush now, dry your tears.
“We seek proposals for papers, panels, and other public presentations connecting representation, language, embodiment, animals, consumption, power, and culture. We especially welcome interdisciplinary approaches; readings of corporeally inflected HumAnimal poetry…”
Jesus, what a racket. Sack beatings now!
I weep for each one of my tax dollars that has gone to these people. 🙁
“a conception of time and space independent of the influence of normative heterosexual/familial lifestyle.”
Wow. A new conception of time and space. She’s just like Einstein. Physicists must really hate this pretentious shit.
“Physicists must really hate this pretentious shit.”
Assuming physicists pay it any attention at all. I can’t imagine them hanging out together and trading insights over lunch.
“Embodying Posthumanist Intersectionality and Resisting Transhumanist ‘Enhancement’ Through Feminist Veganism?”
No, come on. Sokal wrote that. Right? Didn’t he?
He had to.
I can’t wait for the thesis on how trees perceive space/time independently of ferrous-based circulatory systems and ambulatoricity.
Followed up by reflections on the moral superiority of chlorophyll and transpiration, no doubt.
Now that trees have legal rights. It’s only fair that universities start a Xylem/Phloem Studies Program with an emphasis on the indigestibility of cellulose in carnivores and the psycho-sexual implications of same.
Here’s a better political position using trees.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvQ2JF-glvw
Come on David, you must think we’re stupid – you’re just making stuff up now. Right?
DiCentra,
You might also like
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=51702
White House Science Adviser Advocated ‘De-Development’ of the United States
President Obama’s top science adviser, John P. Holdren, advocated the “de-development” of the United States in books he published in the 1970s.
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” Holdren wrote in a 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”
Let’s cut Mr. Twine some slack here. Afer all, he did put a question mark at the end of his title. Doesn’t that make him a cautious traditional liberal in this world?
How do we understand our bodily relationship to other animals?
They taste good so we eat them. No reason to complicate anything. If bacon tasted like cauliflower there would be far fewer pigs. Sometime a cigar is just a cigar. I’d say a ham and cheese on rye with a dill pickle on the side is delicious and am getting hungry just writing that.
After reading this and the last post I can’t help wondering whether academic feminism shouldn’t be listed as a psychiatric disorder.
Please let me contribute this as an alternate view;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t0L8WAkfVE
Also, as a meat-eater, I get a particular kind of fuzzy and warm feeling from this validation of my world-view;
http://boingboing.net/2009/06/24/saving-the-tasty-man.html
Conservation and greenery in a way that both works and makes sense.
-S
‘De-development’? What’s wrong with that perfectly good English word, ‘regression’…?
“Carol J. Adams, a “feminist-vegetarian theorist” and author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory”
Never has the word “theory” been so cheapened.
“Embodying Posthumanist Intersectionality and Resisting Transhumanist ‘Enhancement’ Through Feminist Veganism?”
The question mark is a stroke of genius.
Carol J. Adams is perhaps the least objectionable, in that her views are for the most part merely silly and incorrigibly tendentious. As a general rule, the more opaque and ostentatious the title is, the more vacuous and conformist the contents tend to be.
It helps if you imagine a tiny creature inflating its gas bladder to intimidate passers-by.
One correction: Halberstam is a professor at Southern Cal, not Duke. She (or he or it) was a visiting scholar at Duke in 2007-2008, holding “Queer Utopias Graduate Seminars”.
Doesn’t that just make you itch to spend $38,000 or so for a year’s graduate tuition at Duke?
It makes me itch to spend $38,000 on explosives.
“It helps if you imagine a tiny creature inflating its gas bladder to intimidate passers-by.”
A prefect image.
Prefect?
Hmmm.
Rich,
Amended. Thanks.
Is it only the Anglo-Saxon world which is infested with this? Do these people exist in France, Germany, Italy, Japan?
This is a continuation of the Zombie Flesh eaters thread, right?
Amongst all this nuttiness, Jill Rowe’s paper about ‘the world of dachshund rescue’ seems positively down to earth. There’s a danger she’ll get booted out of the conference for doing something useful with her life.
(As an aside: I suppose it’s the dachshunds that get rescued rather than do the rescuing. But why not the latter too? You do hear that they’re very brave.)
Rob,
I don’t think the excesses caught on in Japan, at least not to the same, well-entrenched degree.
Rich,
“Doesn’t that just make you itch to spend $38,000 or so for a year’s graduate tuition at Duke?”
It’s easy to laugh at this stuff, what with the, um, specialised nature of the material, the question-begging and the comical reliance on obfuscation. But it’s not entirely funny. In the US in particular, there’s now a sizeable industry of subsidised incompetence. Halberstam, for instance, is effectively given license to use the classroom as a soapbox for whatever she deems pertinent. A course titled “Studies in Gender” is offered by the English department at USC with the customary guff about “challenging hetero-normativity” and “situating the study of sexuality at the intersection of questions of race, nationalism, globalisation and militarism,” etc. So basically we have an English literature graduate teaching sociology, military history, economics and geopolitics – subjects in which she has no formal qualification or apparent expertise.
I think we all owe Prof. Halberstam an unrepayable debt. Were it not for her intervening on our behalf with her secular gods, most of humanity would have already been crushed by marauding cows and robots. Such events are already commonplace, as detailed here —
http://www.halfsigma.com/2009/08/farmer-in-wales-killed-by-cow.html
I couldn’t help wondering: in the world of posthumanist feminist-vegan intersectionality, was “Plan 9 From Outer Space” a documentary?
“a conception of time and space independent of the influence of normative heterosexual/familial lifestyle.”
Well okay, here ya go:
http://nostalgia-lj.livejournal.com/1336208.html
“Well maybe I does not want timecock.” LOL.
Arf. You’d think the crushing force of hetero-normativity would put a stop to that kind of thing.
I don’t like the word HumAnimal. I think it should be AniMan and AniWoman, or if you don’t want a gender distinction, Ani(Wo)man.
What she needs is a nice game of hide the sausage.
“It helps if you imagine a tiny creature inflating its gas bladder to intimidate passers-by. ”
That one sentence made my whole day. =^D
Thanks, David.
Let’s just get it over with. If we can throw words around in such a way that we redefine their meanings via a bunch of pseudo-science babble, why don’t we just declare these people to be a different species. Then we can kill them and eat them.
Soylent Green was supposed to be a dystopian future, but I’m beginning to think of it more as a Utopia. According to Wiki, it’s only about a dozen years away now. Just can’t wait…
“It helps if you imagine a tiny creature inflating its gas bladder to intimidate passers-by. ”
That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all week!
“How do we embody animals, and how do animals embody us? How are carnal modes of incorporation, intimacy, and inhabitation kinds of contacts forged between “HumAnimals”?”
Is this a coded zoophilia thing, like NAMBLA but with cattle?
That’s the impression I got, SG.
“queer uses of time and space”
That sounds downright Lovecraftian. I wonder if the phrase “non-Euclidean” was used as well?
“Come on David, you must think we’re stupid – you’re just making stuff up now. Right?
Posted by: Paul”
I fear you’ve got this quite the wrong way around. Real feminists, sociologists and members of similar Mickey Mouse pseudo intellectual disciplines always produce far funnier, wackier and plain batshit mental material than people trying to satirise them ever could.
When its so unhinged, pretentious and out of touch with reality that you can’t believe they’re being serious, that’s when you know it’s the real thing.
this is a really stupid thread, all forms of academic disciplines contain specialisation. you wouldn’t understand the above quoted work any more than you would understand a detailed piece of molecular biology, unless! you actually took the time to explore the meaning of the contents.
Leyton,
Yes, of course. We just don’t understand. What other explanation could there possibly be? Feel free to explain to us in detail what it is we don’t grasp, and why it isn’t merely obscurantist and absurdly tendentious.