Worse again
It started from Sally Hines ranting at Rebecca R-C on Twitter and led to a lot of eye-popping stuff I hadn’t seen before.
I’ve got his LSE page open and it’s true: first thing it says after his name, job, and department, is the sabbatical announcement.
For greater ease of reading, his wildly pretentious account of his “research”:
My primary area of research is on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them. Specifically, this work interrogates and thinks with Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements. My monograph on this research, titled Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child was published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. It brings together critical race, trans, feminist, queer, critical migration, and psychoanalytic theories to explore the role of childhood in shaping and challenging the disposability of young black life, the steadfastness of the gender binary, the queer life of children’s desires, and the precarious status of migrants. Through an engagement with “the psychic life of the child” it combines theoretical discussions of childhood, blackness, transfeminism, and deportability with critical readings of films, narrative, images, and social justice movements. Beyond Ambivalent Childhoods, my research in this area is published with Feminist Theory (forthcoming), American Quarterly (2019), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017).
One thing that emerges from that as clear as ice is that women are of no interest whatever to cutting edge geniuses now. That feminism is as dead as spats or monocles or tight lacing. The hippest researchers are into sexed-up children and deportations.
What the everloving fuck, you might wonder, do anti-deportation movements have to do with queer youth activism? What does it mean to “interrogate and think with”? What is “critical migration theory”? What is “the queer life of children’s desires” and what does it have to do with “the precarious status of migrants”? Let me guess: desires are hindered by wicked boundaries and so are migrants. Yeah? So children want to “transgress” those boundaries, and so do migrants, and bang there’s your research. I’m sure migrants languishing in filthy pens on the Texas border are just thrilled to have Jacob Bresslow interrogating and thinking with them.
It’s hideous preening self-admiring appropriation of real misery and injustice for the sake of baroque academic posturing. There are few things I despise more.
His work seems rich in jargon, very poor in insight, and bankrupt of any empathy.
His profile reads like a stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent academic sounds like. Or a Sokal/Boghossian-style hoax.
Use enough academese and the right kind of political buzzwords, and you too can be a Mermaids trustee.
All questions of child safeguarding aside, it drives me absolutely looney-toons, cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs BONKERS that academics continue to allow this kind of masturbatory charlatanry to hollow out the already-embattled humanities.
SAME.
Martha Nussbaum or Kathleen Stock are worth 200 of these Butlerian charlatans.
Mostly Cloudy, I don’t know. If you multiply 0 by 200, you still get 0. And it looks like his philosophy skills are really not worth anything.
By research I assume he means writing essays, reading the output of trendy authors, and a fair amount of navel gazing.
Do people really get to call that research now? Isn’t research supposed to mean primary sources, not secondary? Or have we “queered” that too?
Ophelia, my experience is that it depends on who your advisor is. My advisors insisted I do my own research, and cite appropriate and up-to-date sources. They would not accept anything from inside my navel. But I am aware that a lot of advisors (lot being nebulous; it may be a few, but because I hear of them more, they seem like a lot) are allowing a lot of garbage through – without primary sources. In some cases, without even a good thesis statement or research aim.
Academia has drunk way too much Kool-Aid. Yeah, we’re “queered” education, but there are still a number of us, and not just oldsters like me, holding the line against the rising seas of nonsense.
There are some things that shouldn’t be “queered”…
” If you multiply 0 by 200, you still get 0. And it looks like his philosophy skills are really not worth anything.”
Yeah, Jacob Breslow is a philsophical and moral nullity.
I’ve just discovered this. Sophie Lewis, the pseudo-leftist who wrote “Abolish the Family” and attacks feminists she disagrees with as “TERFs” and “SWERFs”, is running a “Kib’s Lib” seminar at the Brooklyn Institute.
One of the books on Lewis’ seminar is the Jacob Breslow book “Ambivalent Childhoods”.
The same book where Breslow talks about his “desire” for a 12 year old boy (UGH!)
https://twitter.com/kosh_1/status/1577806345759244290
I think it has to do with interrogation/deconstruction of the hegemonic power structures that shape and control the artificially restrictive range of pathways and destinations “chosen” by migrating geese.
Hahahahaha