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metamatar · 2 years

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Broader cultural norms – the sort set in motion by prefacing statements with “As a Black man…” – cued up a set of standpoint-respecting practices that many of us know consciously or unconsciously by rote. However, the forms of deference that often follow are ultimately self-undermining and only reliably serve “elite capture”: the control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people. If we want to use standpoint epistemology to challenge unjust power arrangements, it’s hard to imagine how we could do worse.

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Doing better than the epistemic norms we’ve inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid is an awfully low bar to set. The facts that explain who ends up in which room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it into the rooms. And when the conversation is about social justice, the mechanisms of the social system that determine who gets into which room often just are the parts of society we aim to address.

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Elites from marginalized groups can benefit from this arrangement in ways that are compatible with social progress. But treating group elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford. Such treatment of elite interests functions as a racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.

Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture. Then, after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside.

But probably not.

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How would a constructive approach to putting standpoint epistemology into practice differ from a deferential approach? A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding “complicity” in injustice or adhering to moral principles. It would be concerned primarily with building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering rather than helping. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the task of redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals cashed out in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and between them – it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.

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The constructive approach to standpoint epistemology is demanding. It asks that we swim upstream: to be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, to build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us. But this weighty demand is par for the course when it comes to the politics of knowledge: the American philosopher Sandra Harding famously pointed out that standpoint epistemology, properly understood, demands more rigour from science and knowledge production processes generally, not less.

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference

#standpoint epistemology #thanks to gothhabiba for sharing this #i have been reading a bit about caste this year esp in colonial india #and its been sobering to realise the extent to which imperial motivations often began with what you could charitably call #epistemic deference by the british academics and then vacillate between that and contempt based on whatever was more useful #for the company/empire #identity politics

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star-anise · 5 years

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I have a favor to ask. In the post about femme bi women you mentioned that you've read the relevant "tedious histories". I was hoping you'd share those and any other queer history/ theory book recs you can think of. It seems that most of what I find is about gay men, and I'm looking for something more diverse or inclusive.

The truly tedious post I was referencing was by gothhabiba, about the history of lesbian bar cultures, with frequent asides about how butch/femme only belongs to lesbians and anyway bisexual women had nothing to do with that history and lesbians have never been mean to bisexual women either.

It was tedious mostly because it was like.. fascinating history, slightly inaccurate fascinating history, BI WOMEN SUCK, weird historical analysis that downplayed something’s coolness, BI WOMEN SUCK, fascinating history.

But there’s some really cool stuff out there!

Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel - The strip that named the Bechdel Test, by the author of Fun Home - a reflection of lesbian life since the late 1980s, and a cornerstone of every alternative weekly newspaper of North America during the 90s. Some strips available online; others through anthology

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is a semi-autobiographical novel that’s available online. It was published in 1993, just as queer women were getting louder about reclaiming the words “butch” and “femme”, which had been declared Problematic and Cancelled by radical feminist lesbian separatists for decades previous. The novel is available for free at that link. A lot of the people who say “butch/femme are lesbian-exclusive” pass around that link and say they’re honouring the lesbian bar culture that book depicts--but they’ve clearly never read the book, because it’s got trans people and he/him lesbians and the author uses neopronouns and it’s SO OBVIOUS that queer history is SO MUCH MORE DIVERSE than cis lesbians who have cut all social ties with men.

It HAS got a fair bit of rape, trauma, and queer-bashing, though, so warning for that.

There are a lot of other books from the 1990s that Tumblr lesbian exclusionists love to cite that I haven’t gotten my hands on yet (partly because something’s up with my brain’s ability to process longform text, so it takes me months to read a single book these days and they aren’t available in audio) but I suspect reading the whole thing, instead of a few carefully-chosen passages, might yield up a more complicated history:

The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle - a collection of essays, poems, and stories by a broad collection of people about their experiences of butch/femme relationships, largely WLW-centred

Boots Of Leather, Slippers Of Gold, edited by Elizabeth Kennedy - a collection of oral histories of the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York from 1930-1960

Queerer stuff!

PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality - Edited by Carol Queen and Lawrence Schmiel, Preface by Kate Bornstein - Another book I haven’t read in its entirety, but sometimes my girlfriend reads me bits of this one over the phone and I weep and gnash my teeth over not being able to consume the whole thing at a gulp. It’s from 1997, and went, “Well, now you know gay people exist. But what if we told you... that was only the beginning of the rainbow?”

Public Sex: The Culture Of Radical Sex - by Pat Califia - Thank fuckin’ god, one of these books got recorded to audio. I ended up typing up an excerpt here. It’s a collection of Califia’s public writing from the early 1970s to the height of the AIDS crisis. The bit I excerpted is about the friction between official “lesbian feminist” academic thought and the sex practices of actual lesbians (pornography, butches, and dildos, oh my!) but there’s a lot more--Califia pushes for sexual freedoms that make me clutch pearls I didn’t even know I had sometimes, but at the same time, these are questions that need to be asked.

This is just a quick overview, and sadly, it isn’t all widely-available. If anyone else has any more suggestions, just sing out!

#lgbt discourse #staranise original #queering lgbt #sunshinemeansmylove

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