You are correct, Mandlestam. I have produced no cites or evidence. OTOH neither has ayone else.
\
Be patient, Godot is simply running late.
:smack: (1) Um, I provided some cites in the other thread. And isn’t the person making the claim the one that is suppose to produce the cites?
In the other thread, December said, "No, but isn’t one point of this thread to rank the value of women’s studies? I have just as much right as anyone else to express my ignorant opinions. 
"
Grin noted. I must add though that I at least try to withhold opinions that I cannot substantiate, at least when outside of certain drinking establishments. It’s not difficult, since ignorant opinions can easily be refashioned into pointed questions.
(1) Gratuitous emoticon. I just had to try it out.
A couple of points. First, one of the biggest problems with Women’s Studies programs today is that feminism has been so succesful. The prior generation of American women had to fight for every inch. Understandably, this radicalized many of them. Nowadays, however, most young women find this radicalism bizzare as they take equality for granted. Revolutionaries are always marginalized once the revolution succeeds.
This is not to say that everything is perfect, however, time will sort out many remaining problems as more and more women cycle through the system. IIRC, even now there are more female graduate students than male graduate students at American universities.
Given the stunning gains of traditional feminism, academic feminists found it necessary to push the envelope in order to maintain their relevancy (or, at least, their jobs). A women’s study’s professor can hardly write papers arguing that women should have the right to, say, study law. Though forty years ago in America this would have been a truly radical notion.
Academics dealt with this in two ways. Some became more ever more radical. These are the feminists that American conservatives love to hate. I suspect, by the way, that many of these love to be hated. I can’t help but think there is a certain amount of posturing in some of the more extreme positions taken by some feminists. Whether you want to be a famous academic, author or both, it doesn’t really matter what they say about you so long as they spell your name right.
The other way to address this problem is to become ever more obscure and incomprehensible. The more turgid your prose and impenetrable your theories, the more difficult it is for outsiders to discover that you really haven’t all that much interesting to say.
This seems to be the attitude that even sven is referring to. The problem with her science analogy is that any scientist can explain to a layman the significance of their branch of science even though a layman probably can’t understand the details of the process. I have no clue as to how to generate a human DNA sequence. I can, however, easily appreciate the significance of knowing such a sequence.
Cultural studies ought to be able to do the same thing. When someone says, “You couldn’t possibly understand feminist theory without years of study. It’s simply beyond the unitiated so I won’t waste my time explaining it,” my bullshit meter pegs.
The sad fact is that far too much of cultural studies scholarship is incomprehensible hand-waving and says something either banal or ridiculous. In some cases, it says nothing at all.
You may recall the infamous and hilarious Sokol incident of a few years ago. Sokol, an NYU physicist, wrote an intentionally meaningless paper incorporating various feminist and post-modern “theories” entitled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. The paper was duly published in “Social Text,” a respected cultural studies journal, despite the fact that the paper literally made no sense whatsoever.
No doubt there is some useful work being done in Women’s Studies departments. But there is also a very great deal of intellectually embarrassing crap being produced as well. I think advocates of Women’s Studies programs ought to answer Tranquilis’ questions, with a special emphasis on their relevance today.
Bravo, Truth Seeker! An excellent recap of the situation, in my ever-so-humble opinion.
I’m normally not one to offer “me-too” posts, but this one deserved it.
- Rick
OK, I assert that a key feminist academic tool is choosing one’s beliefs for political purposes, with less regard for factual accuracy than would be appropriate in a traditional academic setting.
Exhibit A is Recovered Memory of Childhood Sexual Abuse. This doctirine has been denounced by the American Medical Association. This doctrine has caused untold harm to innocent individuals. It led to something like a series of modern-day witch trials.
http://www.rickross.com/reference/false_memories/fsm1.html
Specific allegation. Two cites.
Over to you, defenders of academic feminism…
Sorry, Maeglin - had to get there sometime:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=120208
Of course, your “cite” provides no support for the statements that recovered memories are supported by this “unwritten law” or that challenging them is verboten in “mainstream feminist circles.” Just tosses them out there and expects them to stick. Much like you do. What a surprise.
And who is this “Rick Ross” who proves to be such an expert on “mainstream feminist circles”? Why, he’s a speaker on cults, whose only claims to education in his CV are:
1969 Attended Camden Military Academy, Camden, South Carolina
1970 Graduated from Phoenix Union High School, Phoenix Arizona
And his professional experience?
1983 Professional Staff of Jewish Family & Children’s Service
1984 Coordinator for Jewish Prisoner Program and Resource person regarding destructive cults, potentially unsafe and controversial groups
1986 Private Consultant, Lecturer and Intervention Specialist
1987 Regarding destructive cults, radical, controversial and potentially unsafe groups
Yeah, he’s got really deep roots in “mainstream feminist circles,” obviously. About 70% of his CV is taken up with what radio and television stations he’s appeared on.
Why do you make it so easy, december?
It’s pretty easy to say, “Your cite isn’t perfect.”
I made several specific assertions, pl. Please tell me which ones you disagree with, and I promise to look for better cites and more evidence.
Because, december, we are trying to spare ourselves the frustration of debating with you with nebulous criteria. Well all know how you argue. Kimstu has very eloquently described it as “anti-debating.”
And I’ll be damned if I am going to let you get away with it this time. I have my books piled right here, december, just waiting to be opened. But I am certainly not going to indulge you until you set the terms of your objections.
Or, better yet, you could be a real class act and just admit that you don’t really have an idea what human progress is, and that you don’t really know what feminist intellectual tools are, but somehow in your mind of minds they undermine progress. You could ask that those who do know a little educate you.
What are the odds on that, phil? 70:1?
OK. I assert that
[ul][li]Feminist academics have chosen their beliefs with less regard for factual accuracy than would be appropriate in a traditional academic setting. []Sometimes their beliefs were chosen for political purposes.[]Recovered memory of Sexual Abuse has been debunked.[]Belief in the doctrine RMOSA has done a great deal of harm to innocent people. []Many feminist academics have supported RMOSA without proper evidnece.Some of them have contined to support this doctrine, even after it had been refuted.[/ul][/li]I provided two cites supporting the above assertions.
These points should be specific enough for a debate, Maeglin.
No, december, knock it off. Go back and read the OP.
Remember this? It was only yesterday. This is the claim you made. We are still waiting for you to illuminate us on what steps forward and backward mean. You evaded the question once, were called on it, and we await your refinement.
As for your assertions.
This makes feminists different exactly how from any other career-oriented academic? Please. I am sure you have a good study that will shed some light on this.
And what is factual accuracy in literary criticism, for example? Are you accusing feminists of misquoting texts?
Shocker. Show me one branch of academia that does not kowtow to reality every now and again. And don’t even think about offering up the hard sciences.
And so has Aristotle’s theory of the five elements, which people believed for centuries. Was Aristotle a feminist? If not, then what exactly is your point?
And so has the “patriarchy.” What’s your point?
Proper? What does “proper” mean in this context?
And there are many scientists who still maintain scientific beliefs even after they have supposedly been refuted.
What, december, is your point?
Still patiently awaiting your definitions,
MR
Oh, december, it’s just so damned funny. I mean, you don’t even know what “feminist academic tools” means, and it’s screamingly obvious, so why not just admit it? Do you know what feminist film criticism is, for example, and what differentiates it from other film theories? You don’t, and it’s obvious you don’t, so stop pretending you do.
And you need to learn what a “cite” is. If you’re asserting that modern mainstream feminist thought includes wide support for recovered memories of sexual abuse, you do not link to a website where some self-styled “cult expert” with no education, experience or links to feminism states: “modern mainstream feminist thought includes wide support for recovered memories of sexual abuse.” That isn’t a cite–it’s a restatement of the assertion. A cite would be something from NOW, or FFL, or some other feminist organization, or from a respected gender theorist like Camille Paglia, or something of that nature, that documents such support.
Truth Seeker:
*"Nowadays, however, most young women find this radicalism bizzare as they take equality for granted. Revolutionaries are always marginalized once the revolution succeeds.
This is not to say that everything is perfect, however, time will sort out many remaining problems as more and more women cycle through the system. IIRC, even now there are more female graduate students than male graduate students at American universities."*
First, in my experience most young women who find feminism (radical or otherwise) bizarre do say at least partly b/c they are not conscious of needing it. In a sense that’s what you’re saying but I do want to point out that older women–the kind who sometimes return to college classrooms after raising children–are much more able to see how much of a double standard remains. Most people in their early 20s, men as well as women, believe that they will be young forever. I was no different ;).
Second, you mistakenly assume here that “remaining problems” will sort themselves out as a function of women “cycling” through “the system” (whatever that means). What proof do you have for that? In fact there has been serious backlash against women’s gains in many areas and unless concerned men and women pay attention to this backlash and its effects it’s every bit as likely that the situation will get worse rather than better. (I would add that I strongly believe that inequality between the sexes harms men just as much as it does women, though not always in a material sense.)
“Given the stunning gains of traditional feminism, academic feminists found it necessary to push the envelope in order to maintain their relevancy (or, at least, their jobs). A women’s study’s professor can hardly write papers arguing that women should have the right to, say, study law. Though forty years ago in America this would have been a truly radical notion.”
This claim is based on the mistaken notion that women studies professors write papers on basic women’s rights. That is not in the least true and shows very little familiarity with women studies and academic feminism more generally. In fact academic feminism (as I point out in the linked thread) is very diverse and crosses many disciplines. The work of arguing that women should be lawyers on paper, I should add, was mostlly done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was hardly “truly radical” forty years ago (c. 1963) for women to have the “right” to study law. Many law schools have been admitting women for more than a hundred years–albeit typically in small numbers. Certainly by 1963 a woman’s “right” to study law was not questioned in the United States and any scholar trying to break new ground by making that claim would have been deemed rather clueless.
Equal access is, of course, a different issue as is equal pay, equal promotion etc. These more complex areas, I think you’ll agree, are among those “remaining problems” that you seem to think will just whither away in the fullness of time.
" I can’t help but think there is a certain amount of posturing in some of the more extreme positions taken by some feminists. Whether you want to be a famous academic, author or both, it doesn’t really matter what they say about you so long as they spell your name right."
Well apart from the infamous Dworkin and MacKinnon (whose legacies have been debated here too often, and whose positions hardly speak for “feminism” writ large) is there any particular feminist scholar that you’d care to attach this rather abstract statement?
“The other way to address this problem is to become ever more obscure and incomprehensible. The more turgid your prose and impenetrable your theories, the more difficult it is for outsiders to discover that you really haven’t all that much interesting to say.”
Once again, whom precisely do you mean? Otherwise your very much at risk of saying “I assume that work that is too difficult for me to read is actually not that interesting.”
Oh and Sokol. What does that really prove? Sokol’s paper was published by the editors of Social Text as an act of good faith. In hindsight they should have made certain that a physicist or two read the paper from that perspective. The essay’s basic questioning of empirical reality, on the other hand, is not so much meaningless as it is banal: that is, philosophy has always been in the business of questioning the priority of physical reality. Basically what Sokol did was the to write the kind of paper that a physicist turned poststructuralist philosopher might write and then say “Oh, I didn’t mean it; I actually think postructrualism is a lot of hooey and what I said makes no sense if, like me, you’re not at all interested in questioning reality in a philosophical way.”
" I have no clue as to how to generate a human DNA sequence. I can, however, easily appreciate the significance of knowing such a sequence. "
What you’re pointing to is a basic question of the utility of the humanities vs. the so-called “hard” sciences. The latter have have a certain potential for practical benefit (to cure a disease, for example). But the claim of inutility is not exclusive to feminism in the least. Do you appreciate the significance of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, or of studying medieval poetry? If you do then your job is to explain why these things are somehow more valuable than their analogues in a women studies curriculum. If you don’t then your basic point is just that the utility of humanities is harder to establish than that of study that leads health-realted (or more usually these days) economic gain. That’s hardly an original point (and it’s a philistine argument to boot 
)
I should add that, contrary to what most people assume, a great deal of study in the “hard” sciences is of only theoretical benefit; a pursuit of knowledge very unlikely to lead to any economic or health-realted gain.
“Cultural studies ought to be able to do the same thing. When someone says, “You couldn’t possibly understand feminist theory without years of study. It’s simply beyond the unitiated so I won’t waste my time explaining it,” my bullshit meter pegs.”
Well, with all due respect to your bullshit meter, has anyone actually said this?
“The sad fact is that far too much of cultural studies scholarship is incomprehensible hand-waving and says something either banal or ridiculous. In some cases, it says nothing at all.”
I’m sorry, but you’ve offered no evidence whatsoever for this “sad fact.” Sokol included. For even if it’s the case that the editors of Social Text had no business publishing a paper by a physicist on good faith alone that doesn’t mean that the cultural studies work published by established scholars is “hand-waving,” banal or ridiculous. I’m not even sure what you mean when you say “cultural studies.”
Let me just name off the top of my head a number of studies that I totally commend.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture, the Meaning of Style, a famous 1979 study of punk subculture. Very readible and fascinating.
Susan Willis, A Primer for Every Day Life. I mention this one because it’s feminist as well as Marxist in its critical orientation and has a very good discussion of the process through which young children our gendered in American culture. Smart undergraduates can read this book with ease. Willis is, I think, in a literature department.
Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History. Scott is one of the most influential feminist historians. I particularly recommend the chapter on “Women in The Making of the English Working Class” where she very intelligently and sensitively describes what attention to gender would have added to EP Thompson’s groundbreaking (and awesome) history of that name.
Naila Kabeer, Reversed Realities: Gender HIerarchies in Development Thought. Kabeer is writing about how women and women’s issues have been handled (and mishandled) within policies of third-world development. She is part of a Development Studies program in Britain.
All of this work could be called “cultural studies” and any of these scholars (with the possible exception of Hebdige who isn’t first and foremost interested in gender) would be a plausible addition to a good Women Studies department.
Ding ding!
Since we’re not in the pit, I will respond in the manner of Miss Manners. Gentle Maeglin. Your statement would be quite offensive to my wife and her colleagues at the New Jersey Medical School – people who are working hard to do medical research and to find cures for diseases. In her setting, a lack of respect for factual accuracy would not be helpful to one’s career.
I will be happy to debate dishonest literary criticism after we finish recovered memory. Are you willing to agree with my six assertions?
Did you mean, “that does not kowtow to unreality every now and again”?
pldennison – I understand that you are critical of my cite. But, do you dispute what it said? I posted a list of specific assertions. Which ones do you agree with and which ones do you disagree with?
I have taken a position. If you would care to do the same, then we can have a debate.
So are you trying to tell me that no drugs have ever been rushed to the market before adequate testing, that no treatments have ever been somewhat suspect or wholly ineffective, and that there simply are no medical researchers who prioritize their careers over “factual accuracy”?
This has nothing to do with your wife.
With all due respect, gentle december, I remain unconvinced that you know the first thing about literary criticism. I wouldn’t go head to head with you about actuary science, and I would ask the same courtesy from you, namely, to admit that you have more to learn than to argue.
As for your assertions, they are completely and totally irrelevant, for two reasons, really.
First, there is no logical connection whatsoever between your assertions and feminism as a social or intellectual movement.
Second, they have, as Miss Manners might say, fuck-all to do with the topic at hand. By way of a reminder:
Whereupon, to repeat once again, you must reveal to the masses what your ideas of progress and regress are.
december, I do not do this often, but here is an ultimatum. If you can’t answer this simple question for the purposes of clarification, I am going to ask the mods to close this thread. We know that you would probably be quite pleased, thinking that you have “won by default”.
But the rest of us know better.
Example 1
Homer: What really burns me up is they didn’t give us one word of warning.
Carl: What do you mean? They ran those TV commercials about it, and that big radio campaign.
Lenny: Don’t forget the leaflets they dropped from the Space
Shuttle, and the two weeks we all spent at area code camp.
Homer: Not a single word of warning.
Example 2
Lisa: I’ll stop buying Malibu Stacey clothing.
Bart: And I’ll take up smoking and give that up.
Homer: Good for you, son. Giving up smoking is one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. Have a dollar.
[gives a dollar bill to Bart]
Lisa: But he didn’t do anything!
Homer: Didn’t he, Lisa? Didn’t he?
Bart: The Junior Campers are having a father-son rafting trip.
Homer: Heh heh. You don’t have a son.
december, before you conclude that you’ve scored big-time on “recovered memory,” please provide any evidence whatsoever that recovered memory is a major issue for faculty in Women Studies.
The more you post the more it becomes clear that your familiarity with the history and practice of women studies is negligible. You somehow expect convincingly to hold women studies accountable for every feminist or quasi-feminist position under the sun and, to that enterprise, you bring substantive knowledge of precisely no women studies scholarship.
Here once more is one of your central claims:
" Feminist academics have chosen their beliefs with less regard for factual accuracy than would be appropriate in a traditional academic setting. "
Now, to curb the tendency to “anti-debate” ;), let’s define a few of your terms. Define “feminist academics.” In doing so, please including the following: what academic disciplines you mean, what your exposure to these disciplines and these scholars consists in, and, wherever possible, specific names and examples of the group thus defined.
Second, define “traditional academic setting” and, once again, please explain what your authority is over this matter.
Please note: while anecdotal evidence derived from your marriage is, as ever, marginally entertaining, it is of limited value here. The main reason is that your wife is on a medical school faculty; women studies is generally located either in the humanities or the social sciences. Medical school faculties are, for very good reasons, quite distinct from those in the latter areas: to wit, it’s apples and oranges.
Now for your claim, “chosen their beliefs with less regard for factual accuracy…”
On what basis do you ground this supposition?
Let us assume for the purposes of argument that a given scholar choses her “beliefs” on the basis of empirical facts. There are, at present, volumes of statistical and other empirical evidence for persistent inequalities between men and women, in the Western world and, even more so, elsewhere.
Let us assume for the purposes of argument that women studies scholars “believe” that their work is devoted to studying sexual inequality and helping to mitigate it.
Given those assumptions I conclude that women studies scholars found their beliefs about inequality on a very high regard for factual accuracy.