The Great Effeminization of the Academy

An expected and obvious consequence of the Great Effeminization of the Academy is that a great deal of academic output is now about the feelings of academics.

From the peer-reviewed paper “What’s Racial About Matter? A Conversation on Race and ‘New’ Materialism Past, Present, and Future” in Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience“. (They mean matter in the same sense as a physicist, only they are much vaguer.) My emphasis:

What follows is an informal, at times undisciplined, conversation about Asian American racial matters between interlocutors who have been in generative dialogue for several years now. This roundtable is the constellation of many other discussions from conference panels to shared meals, reflecting the relational nature of our inquiry. We hope this roundtable can open entry points for those exploring intersections of feminist new materialisms, STS, and studies of race—from its genealogies to its animating new directions. How did we get here, and where do we go from here?

The text itself reads like it was produced by one of those postmodern text generators that were passed around as jokes in the late 1990s.

From the Abstract of “After Hybridity: The Biological Life of the Mixed Race Child” (same journal):

I argue that renderings of the mixed race child as a metaphor for assimilation and multicultural progress obscure how racial science continues to shape the very definition of mixed raceness. Instead, I frame the mixed race Asian American child as hybrid matter to explore the slippages between their figuration and other abnormally reproduced objects: the genetically modified food organism and cancer.

From the Abstract of “Racial Atmospherics: Greenhouses, Terrariums, and Empire’s Pneumatics” (same journal):

What happens when we understand air as racial matter? This paper takes up this question by tracking the political, architectural, and artistic genealogies of Cold War phytotrons, or computer-controlled climatic laboratories.

From the Abstract of “Disrupting the Whitened Lemur: Reading Black Trans* Considerations in Feminist Primatology” (same journal):

In this article, I trace the evolution of female dominance studies in lemurs to explore how logics of cis-heterosexuality and whiteness are embedded in the study of the nonhuman…Following recent theories of trans* and the nonhuman, this essay argues that such critiques illustrate the trans* potential of the nonhuman, which was prefigured by decades of critique in feminist primatology. However, by engaging with recent Black trans scholarship, this essay suggests that such trans* critiques of the nonhuman have stopped short by ignoring the racialized nature of the dyad as a social unit. I thus propose a feminist science studies that attends to Black trans* theory to work against colonial taxonomies and the forced assimilation of the nonhuman world into rigid ontologies for material gain—or what I refer to as whitening processes.   

The punchline is that not only are these all from the same journal, but they are all from the same issue of that organ. And that this is only one of many such diaries (the proper word)—funded largely by you via our great benevolent government.

The last author (if we may abuse the word), the one whitening lemurs or whatever it was he or she was doing, was from Rice. The others, too, are well ensconced at what were once considered major universities. These are therefore prime examples of what has happened to the academy.

A lady rejoicing in the name of N’Dea Irvin-Choy tweeted “Myself and 23 other Black women PhDs and PhD candidates have published a memoir to share our experiences in a PhD program.” The book is Our Doctoral Journey: A Collection of Black Women’s Experiences.

And then Springer, a top publisher, brings us “Black authors share their life stories in academia. Dr. Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards,Professor at Duke University, whose interdisciplinary research focuses on how racism, gender and culture influence health and educational outcomes, shares her story”. For a reason that evades me, the work is titled “Amplifying black voices: The third black president of the United States: A story of black women in academia.”

I could go on all week like this, all year, presenting these things, and with no comment, because, as is obvious, they don’t need it. These are all clear instances where thought has gone wrong, where feelings have replaced reason. And where feelings are being rewarded.

Think of these like the leeches and crustaceans that attach themselves to whales, weighing them down. They slowly drain the life from the great beast, inexorably consuming its entire surface. They could be scraped off and save the whale, but nobody has the courage.

BONUS

I ought to leave off but cannot help but bring you titles from two other papers in a different issue of the same journal:

“Feminisms, Fuzzy Sciences, and Interspecies Intersectionalities: The Promises and Perils of Contemporary Dog Training”,

“Those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure”.

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