What do we call mandatory sex?

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

This clip is an oldy, but it’s still interesting.

https://twitter.com/sappholives83/status/1884140889322447035
Is he really a professor?

Yes.

Michael Ann Devito is an Assistant Professor in Khoury College of Computer Sciences, with a joint appointment in the Department of Communication Studies. She works in the areas of AI & Social Justice and Extraordinary HCI. Dr. Michael Ann DeVito (she/her) is a qualitative, interdisciplinary researcher and designer. She studies how users and communities understand and adapt to the challenges of AI and machine learning-driven sociotechnical environments…

Michael Ann most often acts as a member-researcher, employing her own positionality as a neurodivergent, transgender lesbian as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach.

Such as sharing clips of himself warbling that if you don’t “date” trans folks you’re a transphobe.

Comments

8 responses to “What do we call mandatory sex?”

  1. Harald Hanche-Olsen Avatar
    Harald Hanche-Olsen

    Positionality? Is that a word? Really? Miy dictionary says no, but maybe it’s not really into such positionalitorious excesses of language.

    I now let y’all return to the discussion of rape, if that is what the post title suggests.

  2. Ophelia Benson Avatar
    Ophelia Benson

    Oh that’s what the hipster academics do, make new words by adding “ality” to the end. It’s “Theory” you see; all the best people buy it.

  3. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    Positionality. This is related to standpoint epistemology, where people are understood to have certain social statuses related to their identity. These are arranged hierarchically in society, and this affects the knowledge individuals have of the world and the things they have authority to speak about. That is, they have a position of privilege or marginalization because of an aspect of their identity and should bring this to bear on what they speak about and how. For example, I am oppressed because I am disabled, fat, and a woman but privileged because I am white and cisgender. Therefore, I can speak to ableism, fatphobia, and misogyny from my lived experience but must defer to people of color and trans people about racism and transphobia while also addressing my own racism (see Racism and Fragility) and transphobia.

    (From The Counterweight Handbook by Helen Pluckrose)

  4. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    On the same note:

    When someone has intersecting elements of marginalized identity, they are believed to be able to see much more of society. For example, a fat, black, disabled, trans woman would have multiple forms of knowledge created by being fat, black, disabled, trans, and a woman, while also having to navigate a society set up for thin, white, able-bodied, cisgendered men. This is understood to produce different levels of consciousness and is often referred to as “double consciousness” or even “kaleidoscopic consciousness.”27 This belief that the marginalized have access to multiple forms of knowledge that the privileged do not have underlie the concept of “positionality.” This means that people see things from their own position and that they are seriously limited in seeing things from any other position.

  5. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    (In other words, when it says that ” Michael Ann most often acts as a member-researcher, employing her own positionality as a neurodivergent, transgender lesbian as a key tool in her grounded theory-based approach”, it means he gets to tell the rest of us what to think, and we’re not qualified to do anything but agree. Ok, I’ll stop.)

  6. Harald Hanche-Olsen Avatar
    Harald Hanche-Olsen

    Bjarte: Thanks for your explanation, and for adding yet another possible addition to my already crushing tsundoku. I might prefer to stick with Ophelia’s shorter explanation, all the same.

  7. Tim Harris Avatar
    Tim Harris

    Helen Pluckrose’s books are excellent. Thank you Bjarte!

  8. Bjarte Foshaug Avatar
    Bjarte Foshaug

    I agree. As I keep saying, I don’t think it’s possible to truly understand how we ended up in this mess without a basic understanding of the larger world of ideas from which gender ideology arose, and nobody I am aware of has done a better job at providing such an understanding than Pluckrose. I still think she seriously underestimates the degree to which sexism and misogyny remain a serious problem in the Western world*, and I wish she would drop the ”LGBT…” language, but apart from that most of her arguments strike me as spot on. Although she doesn’t peronally identify as ”gender critical”, she has been very clear that being gender critical is a legitimate position that a person is entitled to hold and express without censored, disciplined, or fired, that biological sex is real and that it sometimes matters, that it’s perfectly valid to think you don’t have a ”gender identity” etc.

    It’s probably a mistake to judge Pluckrose’s views by association with James Lindsay (just like it would be a mistake to judge Ophelia’s views by association with Jeremy Stangroom). Indeed, I seem to remember Pluckrose mentioning in some interview that she and Lindsay did have some major differences. Even Lindsay isn’t wrong about everything but that’s about as charitable as I’m able to be.

    * Depending on one’s definition it might be legitimate to reject the idea that we’re literally living in a ”patriarchy”.

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