From the Halls of Academia!

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metalman

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LOSING STEAM AFTER MARX AND FREUD
on entropy as the horizon of the community to come

Karyn Ball, University of Alberta

"This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint of the “human motor”: a trope that presupposes a thermodynamic psychophysiology distended between energy conservation and entropy. In the course of reanimating thermodynamic motifs in Marx's labor power metabolics and Freud's trauma energetics, the essay broaches entropics as a poetics of depletion that offsets affect theories promoting open-system metaphors. Open-system affect theory sometimes amalgamates emancipatory post-humanist gestures inherited from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with neuroscientific terms. In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter's degeneration over time. An “entropical” perspective also challenges Antonio Negri's Spinozaist affect conceived as a capacitating power that encounters obstacles but never limits. Both “liberation scientism” and “capacitation rhetoric” mimic capital's abstraction in infinitely expanding its potential to extract surplus value from finitely embodied labor. With enervation and deterioration at its crux, entropics illuminates how people might feel individuated by their respective struggles to safeguard scarce energy and forestall “heat death” while navigating simultaneous demands. The question is whether or not open-system motifs in affect theory can effectively register the political force of this struggle with depletion and present or imminent debilitation as its common ground."


In summary:
dS = ∭
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Halls of academia maybe... but not the halls of science. The author works for the English department of her university, afterall.
 
In this study, I place toilets and toilet practices center stage. Each chapter begins with and is compelled by a performance event in which a toilet plays a central role, such as the display of toilets in museum settings, a festival celebrating the building of public toilet blocks, and a Big Squat event, in which people gather en masse to squat collectively for one minute in recognition of the millions that lack access to toilets. By means of performance, the toilet is transferred from the backstage to center stage. Out of place, the toilet defamiliarizes and refunctions the body’s techniques, proprieties, and ceremonies of the body. I explore the body at the level of its practices and move from “body to self to society” (Frank 47), thus understanding the body as a bearer of social patterns and structures. By focusing on the performance of toilets, I associate the toilet with the artistic and generative possibilities of culture-making, aiming to refunction the toilet as an object that encourages productive communication rather than a taboo object that silences and represses interaction. Broadly, I am interested in how performing toilets might serve to counter disabling disciplinary norms, encourage collective action, and bring about generative change for people who desire it



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Fascinating insights from the dissertation.

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The goal of women's studies is to train students to become human viruses that infect and disrupt other fields

pdf download

Abstract
Because women’s studies radically challenges social hierarchies and lacks a unified
identity and canon of thought, it often negotiates a precarious position within the
modern corporatized university. At the same time, women’s studies offers—by
virtue of its interdisciplinary, critical, and “infectious” structure—cutting-edge
perspectives and goals that set it apart from more traditional fields. This paper
theorizes that one future pedagogical priority of women’s studies is to train students
not only to master a body of knowledge but also to serve as symbolic “viruses” that
infect, unsettle, and disrupt traditional and entrenched fields. In this essay, we first
posit how the metaphor of the virus in part exemplifies an ideal feminist pedagogy,
and we then investigate how both women’s studies and the spread of actual viruses
(e.g., Ebola, HIV) produce similar kinds of emotional responses in others. By
looking at triviality, mockery, panic, and anger that women’s studies as a field
elicits, we conclude by outlining the stakes of framing women’s studies as an
infectious, insurrectional, and potentially dangerous, field of study. In doing so, we
frame two new priorities for women’s studies—training male students as viruses and
embracing “negative” stereotypes of feminist professors—as important future
directions for the potentially liberatory aspects of the field.

Keywords: women’s studies, virus, feminism, pedagogy, moral panics
 
Mathematical Inqu[ee]ry: beyond ‘Add-Queers-and-Stir’ elementary mathematics education


Abstract
While elementary educators have developed queer pedagogies and perspectives in many subjects from reading to music, science to English as a second language, queer perspectives on elementary mathematics education are remarkably absent. This article differentiates between two common uses of the term ‘queer’ and delineates two sets of approaches based upon them: approaches shaped by ‘queer liberalism’ with a focus on inclusion, which result in what might be called ‘Add-Queers-and-Stir’ elementary mathematics education; and ‘Mathematical Inqu[ee]ry’, a queer theoretical approach, in which students and teachers might queer ‘family,’ ‘rhetoric,’ and ‘time’ in an elementary classroom. Mathematical Inqu[ee]ry goes beyond mere inclusion of queer students and issues into extant frameworks and allows elementary teachers and students to deconstruct and disrupt educational norms as well as imagine new possibilities in mathematics and in the world.


Math is clearly oppressive and divisive by insisting on only one valid solution. In SJW math all solutions should be considered equal to promote diversity and mathematical justice.
Example:
1+1=2 // Wrong. Respondent clearly expresses his supremacy by claiming to know "the only right" solution.
1+1=3 // Much better. Makes math accessible to unprivileged and mentally disabled.
 
A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies:


The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.pdf
Abstract:
Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.

Subjects: Gender Studies - Soc Sci; Postmodernism of Cultural Theory; Feminism
Keywords: penis; feminism; machismo braggadocio; masculinity; climate change




3. Conclusions
We conclude that penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, or as a male reproductive organ, but instead as an enacted social construct that is both damaging and problematic for society and future generations. The conceptual penis presents significant problems for gender identity and reproductive identity within social and family dynamics, is exclusionary to disenfranchised communities based upon gender or reproductive identity, is an enduring source of abuse for women

 
Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability

Górska, Magdalena
Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för tema, Tema Genus. Linköpings universitet, Filosofiska fakulteten.ORCID-id: 0000-0002-8710-5491
2016 (Engelska)Doktorsavhandling, monografi (Övrigt vetenskapligt)Alternativ titel


Abstract [en]

Breathing is not a common subject in feminist studies. Breathing Matters introduces this phenomenon as a forceful potentiality for feminist intersectional theories, politics, and social and environmental justice. By analyzing the material and discursive as well as the natural and cultural enactments of breath in black lung disease, phone sex work, and anxieties and panic attacks, Breathing Matters proposes a nonuniversalizing and politicized understanding of embodiment. In this approach, human bodies are onceptualized as agential actors of intersectional politics. Magdalena Górska argues that struggles for breath and for breathable lives are matters of differential forms of political practices in which vulnerable and quotidian corpomaterial and corpo-affective actions are constitutive of politics. Set in the context of feminist poststructuralist and new materialist and postconstructionist debates, Breathing Matters offers a discussion of human embodiment and agency reconfigured in a posthumanist manner. Its interdisciplinary analytical practice demonstrates that breathing is a phenomenon that is important to study from scientific, medical, political, environmental and social perspectives.
 
Vaginal Aesthetics

Authors
  • Joanna Frueh

Abstract
Based on the premise that ugliness looms large in both cultural and women's consciousness of vaginas, I create a representation of the vagina's beauty as rich and sweet. Smell, taste, and touch play predominant roles as I use scholarly analysis and my own autobiographical narratives and poems and poetic language in order to redress the vagina's culturally inherited ugliness.
 
American University professors have announced plans to "decolonize" the school's curriculum with social justice. [/URL]

American University Faculty Pens Letter in Support of Black Women Students

Faculty members of AU's Races, Empires, Diasporas (R.E.D.) faculty working group—one of the several faculty work groups on campus dedicated to the decolonization of the academic world and broader race-class ordered society —recently got together to pen a letter of support for Black women students on AU campus. Often working behind closed door, Black women, women of color, and the allies in those work groups, have collectively struggled for change on a number of fronts. It is time that students know that these faculty members exist and are working for a more progressive AU.
 
Physical space and learning in fat college women

Interviews with 13 undergraduate women suggest that fat college women students experience the interactions of their fat bodies with the physical learning environment negatively. Classroom design and furniture contribute to fat women learners experiencing themselves as judged, devalued bodies and incapable learners.


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