We need to insure that inclusivity does not become male dominance by any other name. Jane Clare Jones delineates between helpful and harmful inclusion:
“I’ve been meaning to write, and will write soon, something on how the left’s current obsession with ‘inclusion’ and ‘openness’ and ‘smashing boundaries’ and ‘deterritorialization’ makes sense only as a critique of the psychic structure of dominance (like, go and tell it to Donald Trump and leave us the fuck alone). It is entirely, gratuitously, inappropriate, when turned against the boundaries of the violated, of those who are raised in a society which leads them to understand – when they are grabbed or catcalled or made to feel like meat – that that is where they are positioned. It is no wonder that a woman who cannot even bear to think about this fact, who prefers to deny the power that frames it, who prefers to think it could all be rewritten by playing games with superficial scripts, would, when addressing the mess that she has made, avert her eyes so resolutely from what this is actually about. Women’s psyches are far far more than ‘scenes of violation,’ but there can be no feminism which refuses its reality, which recoils from recognising that ‘smashing boundaries,’ when used against women as a class, is the absolute axiom of male power, and, at its core, everything happening here is as it ever was.”
The answer for many people, including myself would be: Not Soon Enough!
The usual regrets aside, my descent into critical thinking, strangely enough, started after University as it was only then that I had enough time to really start powering through the books that I had been accumulating while working on my degree. All that stuff that I was ‘responsible’ for learning was still there, but my curiosity led me down the path toward a greater understanding of the mechanics of how our society works. I owe a great deal to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ronald Wright for fuelling my intellectual growth and move toward a more nuanced understanding of how history and society works and access to a larger context background that helped(s) make sense of world events as they unfolded.
The difference in taking courses before and after my degree was quite startling as learning because you ‘have to’ versus because you ‘want to’.
The challenge now is to continue the journey and start reading again seriously. With the rise of the siren song of social media and video games maintaining an intellectual focus is quite challenging. Getting back into the reading for comprehension and understanding groove is quite difficult. I’m thinking that hitting the University for some courses may be the tonic to this particular problem.
We’ll have to see what’s in the cards and hope to heck there is something interesting to take this upcoming spring/summer. :)
This isn’t a general essay, more the upshot of the ongoing intra-philosophical spats, so it might not be of interest to all of you.. So, anyway, someone calling themselves Dr Specious (ho ho), possibly one of our philosophical colleagues in disguise, turned up and pass-agg pointed me and Kathleen and Holly at this paper, which […]
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