Via Jane Clare Jones, a truly fancy piece of academic thinkery.
The Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness
The essay thinks radically differently about the concepts of black and trans*. Trans* and black thus denote poetic, para-ontological forces that are only tangentially, and ultimately arbitrarily, related to bodies said to be black or transgender. That is to say, they are differently inflected names for an an original lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology. Manifesting in the modern world differently as race and gender fugitivity, black and trans*, though pointed at by bodies that identify as black or trans*, precede and provide the foundational condition for those fugitive identificatory demarcations. The author seeks to demonstrate the ways in which trans* is black and black is trans*. In what ways, and to what extent, is there a “blackness” present within “trans*-ness,” and vice versa? What is the effect of these analytics? This essay hopes to address these questions but also leave them suspended in black/trans* liminality.
Para-ontological, you see – that means no one can say it’s bullshit, or wrong, or badly argued, or evidence-free, or a joke. It’s para-ontological, you unsophisticated fools.
These here “poetic, para-ontological forces” are only tangentially and arbitrarily related to bodies said to be black or transgender, which also means that no one can say this is a crock of shit. This is how you do scholarship: you say it’s nonsense right at the outset but you say it in pseudo-academic language, and if the journal is fatuous enough to take that at face value, hey presto! You can just blather for 20 pages and the job is done.
… they are differently inflected names for an an original lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology.
We’ve got lawlessness here! We’re escaping confinement! We’re settling down beside ontology.
I especially love the final sentence.
This essay hopes to address these questions but also leave them suspended in black/trans* liminality.
Aw yeah don’t we all. This piece of writing hopes to say something true and interesting, but in case it fails, it also wants to dangle over an abyss of whatwhatwhatwhat?
Comments
22 responses to “The thisness of thatness, the thatness of thisness”
A trigger warning would have been nice:
“Do not read this post if you are under the influence of anything. It doesn’t make sense to sober people either.”
Wellllll to be fair the whole post is pretty much a trigger warning wouldn’t you say?
Bodies identifying as black? I’m sure the police are in the habit of asking their murder victims how they identify before going ahead…
Well, they have already been conflating “gender-critical” and “white” for quite a while, so I guess it was only a matter of time before someone literally decided that “trans* is black and black is trans*”. I guess trans* is black in the sense that it allows white men who call themselves women to claim the whole history of anti-black oppression as transphobia, and black is trans* in the sense that it allows white men who call themselves women to speak on behalf of all blacks.
I’m not going to suggest that this is a Sokal-style hoax. What I will say is that if someone did decide to pull such a hoax (and I hope they do) there’s no way it wouldn’t work.
I propose this modest amendment. This piece stands as a great demonstration of the drift of some social sciences into utter nonsense.
So let me get this right – Tucker Carlson is (presumably) wrong in seeing black people as criminals but only because he’s not smart enough to understand that they’re para-ontological criminals.
(Strikes me that The Para-Ontologist would make a great Batman villain.)
Someone call Rebecca Tuvel and let her know she’s been un-canceled!
This is by one of the dudes who just did that Stanford seminar on the ‘TERF Industrial Complex’:
https://gender.stanford.edu/events/terf-industrial-complex-transphobia-feminism-and-race
I read a few livetweets/reportbacks yesterday and apparently it was an entire hour of meaningless sounds. I believe someone said at some point that the title was ‘just a joke’–though they did apparently talk about TERF money laundering at one point.
Is it bad that I read and understood all that and how it’s situated within the discourses of Race and Gender studies?
It’s probably bad.
I’m gonna go reread the Principia to reset my brain.
And that’s only the abstract. I wonder how much coffee and Advil I would need for the rest (moot).
@10 Which Principia does that? I have an old dictionary that reminds me that words mean things, but beyond that it’s a tangle.
Principia Mathematica, by Whitehead and Russell. If describe, but this will do better than I could in a comment.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/principia-mathematica/
tl;dr: an important work that derives mathematics from pure logic, establishing that math is a subset of logic. I dare say this seems an obvious conclusion to most computer scientists, but mathematicians aren’t fond of it.
I read some of that, having read a lot of Russell’s work, but I didn’t get far enough into it for a reset. ;) I was hoping that’s the one you meant.
Reading the PM for fun was not fun, I read and translated enough of the equations to get a feel for how symbolic logic works, but since it wasn’t assigned to me I lost interest after a handful of translations. It must have been excruciating to write as much of it as they did and not have any stopping point. I suppose Newton’s Principia (physics) could give you a reset of sorts, but Moore’s (ethics) would be problematic for that objective.
I figured the pure abstraction and absolute clarity would help after the tortured nonsense. It doesn’t hurt that Russell’s one of my favorite figured in philosophy.
And yeah, it’s difficult to keep going with such things outside of a group.
Mine too, anything by Russell points me in the direction of sanity, even if I disagree with him.
There have been so many times this year I’ve wished I could do some magic and summon his ghost to lay the rhetorical smackdown on people. Then I realize that I would need the summoning circle that contains all summoning circles, and I can’t figure out whether it would contain itself.
I was thinking the same thing, and with his science-centric attitude and extraordinary reasoning skills he’d be a force in today’s world. There are a few good philosophers still alive, but none with his combination of acumen and accessibility. Some of his later works were a bit agenda driven and self serving, but they were always well reasoned. One of the greats in the English language for sure. What would he think about the trans-cult? I’m not sure, but I’m sure it would scientific and logical.
@Holms Perfect word, wankery. Sadly underused here in the US. When I came here I had to stop using it because so many people didn’t know the word or its derivation.
Ignoring the trans part for a moment, as a health disparities and global health researcher I am horrified by this statement. Whenever the word transracial was used, people were castigated as racist for making the comparison with transgender because race is innate and you can’t change your race. But now it’s OK to describe people as having a body that identifies as black? WTF?
And here’s the thing – race is a social construct and ancestry is a spectrum (well, it’s more complicated than that but let’s go with it).
Bodies can’t identify as anything they are not. Sex, “race”, height, etc are all innate. I can’t be trans-statured – even if I am desperate to be taller. I know you all know this. I wonder what the author understands about it.
I’d love to ask the author of that piece of drivel: What is a black person? If they find it an offensive question, then they’re even more insincere than I thought. If the answer is anyone who identifies as black, well, there’s the rub.
I think what irritates me most about this sort of thing is its utter triviality and vacuousness. Are there not important things to study and to teach and to learn? Political thought, for instance (especially at a time like this) – and by political thought, I mean serious political thought, not this mere frivolousness.
With me it’s the pretension. It is also the absurd waste of academic resources that could be spent on scholarships for instance, but even more it’s the smug preening knowing self-glamorization via utter bullshit.
With me, it’s the waste of human opportunity. It’s an anchor dragging behind us, just like homeopathy, religion, and psychic p0\/\/3rZ. Every resource spent on it, every moment, is a waste of something that could have been used to advance humanity.
This sort of thing—along with social and economic policies—is why I don’t have the flying car I was promised as a kid.