Commenter helterskelter alerted us to a Facebook post by Zoé Samudzi on April 28 vehemently dispraising Rebecca Tuvel’s Hypatia article and suggesting a letter.
It turns out it’s a public post, so we can all read it.
who’s on the editorial board over at hypatia? i honestly want to talk about this absolutely disgusting and harmful legitimization of “transracial” identity beyond adoption. what kind of garbage de-raced and probably trans-exclusionary gender studies professor wants to pretend that socially constructed identities use the same logics and are interchangeable? is gender suddenly inheritable the same way race is?
who wanna put together some kind of letter because i refuse to allow this garbage to gain traction. if anyone has institutional access and wouldn’t mind sending me copy so i can read it and properly put forth a response, i’d deeply appreciate it.
The first comment is
Lol author’s name is Becky!
But they soon get down to business.
Alexis Shotwell It’s really messed up. I’m on the editorial board of Hypatia, and surprised that this one didn’t come to me for review, given my work. I’m working up a response/intervention with a few folks now, too.
Like · 11 · April 28 at 3:02pmMimi Thi Nguyen Alexis, I’m also part of a loose group –including Aren (a mutual FB friend!)– writing a response. Should we coordinate? Ideas for best strategies?
Like · 1 · April 30 at 1:03pm · EditedZoé Samudzi i’m not a part of anything, but would love to be 👀
Like · 3 · April 30 at 1:14pmAlexis Shotwell I think the letter we’ve been working on is about to be done! I’ll post it here when I get the okay from the others
Like · 5 · April 30 at 2:47pm
Someone else offers to connect Samudzi – or everyone reading, it’s not clear which – with people at the university where Tuvel teaches.
Tallyn Owens If you want to get in touch with anyone at Rhodes, shoot me a message and I’ll be happy to help.
Like · April 28 at 12:45pm
Then someone posts what is apparently a list of her courses:
There’s a lot more ugliness after that. A colleague at Rhodes chimes in. Someone suggests a demand that she pay reparations.
The final comment is “can we get this person fired” [sic]
So that, I think, clarified Samudzi’s role in all this. She was part of the inspiration for the open letter, and she did her bit to work people into a rage at Rebecca Tuvel the person. (She told me on Twitter that her “critique” of the article wasn’t personal at all. I think this pretty effectively demolishes that claim.)
Comments
30 responses to “can we get this person fired”
I guess I must just be too old-fashioned to acknowledge a string of adjectives and random questions as a ‘critique’.
How oppressive of you.
Reparations? For writing a piece some people find objectionable?
Yes. Someone really said that.
This attitude seriously worries me. It’s not confined to trans* politics but seems to be gaining traction all across left leaning activism – that we must limit what we discuss, that a disagreement is an attack, that public words can be violence in and of themselves, as opposed to being an incitement to actual interpersonal violence.
It’s official. I’m an old fart. So many of the women I came up with in feminism and left politics seem to be eagerly drinking the koolaid. It all seems tied together – the increasing idiocy of left political discourse rendering the left irrelevant to the people who need it the most and the Overton Window’s sudden, almost overnight lurch to the right. I’m honestly getting too tired of it all to want to remain involved.
But that’s what they want, isn’t it?
It’s not confined to trans politics but trans politics is peculiarly susceptible to it, for reasons that should be obvious except that we’re not supposed to say them.
I added a screengrab of the reparations suggestion. It could be a troll for all I know, it’s so absurd.
‘a disagreement is an attack’–this attitude seems to be endemic, not just in leftist/progressive circles. I recently chided someone at a work meeting for adopting this attitude, and I’m certain that my expressions of disagreement in professional contexts have been taken as attacks.
Note:
Samudzi had not yet read the paper.
Samudzi, on Facebook, May 6:
“…it’s blatantly obvious that NO ONE presently defending her has read her work because NO ONE is engaging its supposed merits…”
Well she read the abstract! And saw the photo of Tuvel! That’s good enough, surely.
‘Samudzi had not yet read the paper.’ Holy shit. I am embarrassed that I did not even read carefully enough to spot that.
Also if she’s a PhD student why doesn’t she have access?
I just downloaded the article myself, for the hell of it (it’s definitely readily available to anyone associated with an academic institution); if anyone doesn’t have access and wants it let me know.
Disagreement is an attack, different nomenclature is transmisogynistic oppression, gender scepticism is identity erasure… this is pure victim complex.
Thanks for posting these. Another important issue that these posts display is that from its very conception, the “open letter” was devised, first and foremost, as a personal attack on Dr. Tuvel: contacting people at her institution, posting a list of classes she teaches and the -apparently serious- suggestion that she pays reparations. It wasn’t Hypatia’s editorial policy they were primarily interested in. Rather, it was suppressing Dr Tuvel and making an example out of her in a transparent attempt to shut down a particular line of debate that could have come out of her work.
If I’m Dr Tuvel, I can’t see how I would be able to attend an academic conference again, given that she faced a an online mob who personally attacked her, sent her hate mail and suggested that she engaged in “violence.”
Yes. The treatment of Rebecca Tuvel was even more disgusting than it was reported as being last week. It’s just horrifying.
Ophelia@15:
Reminds me of the treatment of a certain former FtB blogger who got piled on and relentlessly harassed until she left the network for good! But Samudzi assures us that it’s not “about” Tuvel.
Illuminating! But I don’t see where somebody asked if they could get her fired… did I miss it?
James – Yeah she said that directly to me on Twitter yesterday. It was already bullshit, but once you see that Facebook post and the comments on it, it becomes LAUGHABLE bullshit.
Hans – I didn’t do a screengrab of that but the post is public so you can see it. It’s currently the last comment.
It’s “not about Tuvel” in the same sense that Michael Corleone said “it’s not personal, it’s just business.” You start letting one academic get away with writing what they want, next thing you know, others will get ideas, too.
…..or understand the basics of grammar? Or is she using transgrammar which we’re not allowed to mention because bargle gurgle blah?
The grammar is a deliberate style thing. Lots of activists on social media use this register, for a variety of reasons.
AoS, I have heard pretty much exactly that – correcting the grammar / spelling of a black person is a racist microagression and is the product of your white privileged education, as if black people are somehow unable to develop a liking for books I guess.
This caught my eye. If this person is really on the editorial board of Hypatia, it might explain the rapid response letter denouncing Professor Tuvel. At least one editorial board member on the attack team? That’s what’s really messed up.
This business breaks my fucking heart. In our racist world, particularly the racist world of academia, we need smart well-prepared PhDs of color – in all fields. White privilege has certainly stacked the deck against that. Someone like Zoe – who has potential and is young – makes me so sad b/c her own actions/tweets/FBposts will work against her if her wish to take tenure decisions to social media is realized . . it would have been so much better to express her views 1) after reading the article 2) w/in a disciplinary framework that made reference to feminist philosophy (or some discipline) and 3) raising questions and making cogent arguments about the usefulness of lining up transgender and transracist moves in society. If it’s a useless exercise, then explain why. It is not obvious. If there are objections to be made, then make them. But pretending that “live tweeting” a read of the article is making a cogent argument or critique. . . it’s just so naive and so ridiculous. She is in a PhD program at the goddamn University of California – a premier public university on a global level. I spent my graduate school years and loads of borrowed money to earn a PhD and I spent much of my professional career at UC campuses (Berkeley and San Diego). What the hell are people supposed to think when a UC doctoral student is so publicly unacademic and displays such poor thinking?
What are people supposed to think? That she’s unsuited to the career path she’s chosen and needs to either shape up or ship out. If her social media shitstorm comes back to haunt her future prospects in her field, good. Actions have consequences, and if a PhD student, no matter how promising and irrespective of gender, race, or colour doesn’t have the intelligence to realise that one simple fact then that student is definitely in the wrong field.
Claire@24:
Exactly. Young academics need to understand that their tenure review boards are going to be looking at their temperament in addition to their scholarly work. Nobody wants a potentially unstable, and demonstrably intellectually dishonest person in a tenured position. The 2005-ish Ward Churchill debacle at the University of Colorado at Boulder springs immediately to mind.
I realize that this is so tangential as to be near-off-topic, but I just can’t get over this “gender is not heritable” BS. I must have misunderstood the functions of X and Y chromosomes during all my years as a biologist. And since the chromosomes are meaningless, I’ve obviously also missed the special sauce they must give babies that “grow” them into various genders? And of course there are no longstanding cultural traditions associated with sex like there are with race, right?
Who are these bozos? How did they get so addled? They must stay up nights, studying for maximum confusion. You couldn’t get that divorced from reality without working at it.
Doesn’t your mama give you one of your x chromosomes and doesn’t your papa give you either an x or a y chromosome? Seems pretty heritable to me.
@Steamshovelmama
‘It all seems tied together – the increasing idiocy of left political discourse rendering the left irrelevant to the people who need it the most and the Overton Window’s sudden, almost overnight lurch to the right. I’m honestly getting too tired of it all to want to remain involved.’
Yes, it is tied together. The sudden lurch didn’t happen overnight, online (which as a platform, itself seems to lead to increasing polarisation, and less nuance) it’s been going on noticeably for years, perhaps especially where younger people hangout (personally I’d been watching with concern). The liberal crackdown I think was actually in part a justifiable response – there’s no point debating an Alt-righter on ‘racialism’, and permitting that debate at all moves the Overton window further right (adopting outrageous far right positions has been used by them as a strategy to do this). But predictably, this refusal to debate then gets misapplied.
Re: the discussion above about suitability. Yes, the less generous-spirited side of me is really rather irritated that my disability (despite that there ought to be technological ways round it if they’d only use them) seems to be considered to make me less employable in academia, which is what I’d wanted to do, than, well, this. There’s really not much critical thinking ability, maturity, or professionalism, evident here from them. But, hey, bitter, which isn’t professional either, I know, but then, that just makes it even more obvious to me how personal this was.
Reparations! Demanded pretty much with menaces (‘escalate if she says no’?) at that. These oppression olympics games, ridiculous. One thing the right are not wrong about is that there will be people prepared to exploit it for gain – it doesn’t require systematic oppression not exist, it does, only that there’s a suitably clueless liberal minority within the system.