“The author’s claim that individuals are the ultimate units of moral concern must be rejected, as the occurrence of the word ‘individual’ makes it of course equivalent to methodological individualism, which of course invariably and in any possible context serves to perpetuate the individualist ideology of capitalism”
In a pique of indignation, the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a “Bad Writing Contest” from 1995 to 1998 to highlight jargony excess among the professoriate. Inaugurated during the seventh inning of the Theory Wars, Philosophy and Literature placed themselves firmly amongst the classicists, despairing at the influence of various critical “isms.” For the final year that the contest ran, the “winner” was Judith Butler, then a Berkeley philosophy professor and author of the classic work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. The selection which caused such tsuris was from the journal Diacritics, a labyrinthine sentence where Butler opines that the “move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brough the question of temporality into the thinking of structure,” and so on. If the editors’ purpose was to mock Latinate diction, then the “Bad Writing Contest” successfully made Butler the target of sarcastic opprobrium, with editorial pages using the incident as another volley against “fashionable nonsense” (as Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont called it) supposedly reigning ascendant from Berkeley to Cambridge.
Here’s the list I’ve compiled from my research and y’all’s suggestions…
THEORY Volatile Bodies - Elizabeth Grosz Unbearable Weight - Susan Bordo The Body in Pain - Elaine Scarry The Queer Art of Failure - Judith Halberstam The Monstrous-Feminine - Barbara Creed The Dread of Difference - Barry Keith Grant Men, Women, and Chain Saws - Carol J Clover Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters - Judith Halberstam Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film - Harry M. Benshoff The Medusa Reader - Marjorie Garber/Nancy J. Vickers Coming to Writing & Laugh of the Medusa- Helene Cixous Accursed Share - Georges Bataille Death and Sensuality - Georges Bataille Intercourse - Andrea Dworkin History of Shit - Dominique Laporte History of Sexuality Vol 1 - Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish - Michel Foucault Gender Trouble - Judith Butler Bodies That Matter - Judith Butler Powers of Horror - Julia Kristeva Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine - Barbara Creed Horror and Male Masochism - Barbara Creed Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors - Susan Sontag Phallic Titty Manifesto & The Skin-Cloth - Jackie Wang Technologies of the Gendered Body - Anne Balsamo Caliban and the Witch - Silvia Federici The Thirst for Annihilation - Nick Land Against Sex Positivity - negationparty Dictatorship of Postfeminist Imagination My Words to Victor Frankenstein - Susan Styker To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body - Felix Guattari Assuming a Body - Gayle Salamon The Absent Body - Drew Leder
LITERATURE Dracula - Bram Stoker Frankenstein - Mary Shelley Written on the Body - Jeanette Winterson Aliens & Anorexia & I Love Dick - Chris Kraus The Thief’s Journal - Jean Genet Blood and Guts in High School & Hannibal Lecter My Father - Kathy Acker
ART/MUSIC My Body & Stitch Bitch & Patchwork Girl - Shelley Jackson Diamanda Galas interview in Re/Search Rhythm 10, Rest Energy, Breathing In/Breathing Out - Maria Abramovic Interior Scroll - Carolee Schneemann The Litanies of Satan - Diamanda Galas
I will do this with you or anyone. Lez talk.
I need a word that describes the feeling of urgency/excitement/overwhelm over already having piles of books to read and then having to add on to the lists of books you want to find. I’ve only read a handful of these and I read some others + articles that deal with the history of monstrosity and sexuality for a paper I did last semester. Why can’t I learn to not sleep ever
To keep Tumblr the constructive, empowering place it should be
It was a little more than 10 years ago that we introduced the humble reblog, not knowing how much it would change the growing Tumblr community. The ability to take one person’s idea, build on it, and share it as something new transformed Tumblr from a simple blogging site into a place where people were talking, exploring, learning, and growing through reblog chains.
We’ve been thinking about that a lot recently—the kind of place we want Tumblr to be, and our responsibility to you here and out in the world.
At its core, Tumblr is a place to express yourself and connect with others who share your interests. Over time a knot of diverse, kinetic, passionate communities sprang up. You can jump from things you love into things you didn’t even know existed. And it’s on all of us to create a safe, constructive, and empowering environment where you can continue to do that.
Our Community Guidelines need to reflect the reality of the internet and social media today and acknowledge that the things people post and share online influence the way others think and behave.
The following updates will go into effect on September 10, 2018 and can reviewed here.
We won’t tolerate hate speech
We believe in a free and open internet but we can’t ignore that the internet is being exploited by hate groups to organize, recruit, and radicalize with horrifying efficiency. Updating our Community Guidelines and internal procedures is necessary to address a very real threat to members of the Tumblr community.
When it comes to hate speech, we’re redrawing the line between what’s uncomfortable and what’s unacceptable, and have struck 41 words of gray area from this section in the Community Guidelines. It now reads:
Hate Speech: Don’t encourage violence or hatred. Don’t post content for the purpose of promoting or inciting the hatred of, or dehumanizing, individuals or groups based on race, ethnic or national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, age, veteran status, sexual orientation, disability or disease. If you encounter content that violates our hate speech policies, please report it.
[DELETED: If you encounter negative speech that doesn’t rise to the level of violence or threats of violence, we encourage you to dismantle negative speech through argument rather than censorship. That said, if you encounter anything especially heinous, tell us about it.]
Keep in mind that a post might be mean, tasteless, or offensive without necessarily encouraging violence or hatred. In cases like that, you can always block the person who made the post—or, if you’re up for it, you can express your concerns to them directly, or use Tumblr to speak up, challenge ideas, raise awareness or generate discussion and debate.
While the deleted language was well-intentioned (and we still need your help reporting hate speech) a post shouldn’t have to be “especially heinous” to merit reporting.
We’re also banning the glorification of violence and its perpetrators
Not all violence is motivated by racial or ethnic hatred, but the glorification of mass murders like Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland could inspire copycat violence. With that in mind, we’re revising the Community Guidelines on violent content by adding new language to specifically ban the glorification of violent acts or the perpetrators of those acts:
Violent Content and Threats, Gore, Mutilation: Don’t post content that includes violent threats toward individuals or groups—this includes threats of theft, property damage, or financial harm. Don’t post violent content or gore just to be shocking. Don’t showcase the mutilation or torture of human beings, animals (including bestiality), or their remains. Don’t post content that encourages or incites violence, or glorifies acts of violence or the perpetrators.
Lastly, we’re eliminating any ambiguity in our zero-tolerance policy on non-consensual sexual images
We’re adding a very simple statement (in bold below) to our existing policy on harassment to remove any uncertainty:
Harassment. Don’t engage in targeted abuse or harassment. Don’t engage in the unwanted sexualization or sexual harassment of others.
Posting sexually explicit photos of people without their consent was never allowed on Tumblr, but with the invention of deepfakes and the proliferation of non-consensual creepshots, we are updating our Community Guidelines to more clearly address new technologies that can be used to humiliate and threaten other people.
So what can you expect going forward?
The new Community Guidelines will go into effect on September 10, 2018. After that, if we determine a post or blog is promoting hatred, glorifying violence, or is engaging in the unwanted sexualization of another person, it will be taken down. This includes (for example) posting Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, or anti-LGBTQ+ content to promote or incite violence or hatred; using symbols of hate movements to intimidate or harass others; and the glorification of mass murderers.
Of course, context is everything. Posts and blogs that generate open, constructive debate are always welcome here. A heated conversation about race or gender identity in media is not hate speech, nor is a factual, educational history of Jim Crow.
An overwhelming amount of care and nuance is needed to evaluate reports fairly and accurately, so we’ve increased the size of our team to review the reports we receive.
What should you do if you see content that violates the CGs?
Report it. We’ve added hate speech reporting to the mobile apps. Just tap the airplane icon on any post to open this menu — then tap Report (flag button) > Something else > Hate speech.
One last note
We are fierce defenders of free expression. We want Tumblr to be a place where people come to be themselves and engage diverse points of view through constructive dialogue. The lines we’re drawing today around hate speech, violence, and non-consensual sexual content are designed to protect that vision.
We’ll continue to review and revise our Community Guidelines to make sure they remain an accurate reflection of our community and its values. And as part of our commitment to transparency, we’ll always make sure previous versions are available on our public GitHub repo.
You’re going to have opinions on these changes and what more we can do. We encourage you to share your thoughts (especially constructive feedback) in the notes. And if you feel that Tumblr is no longer for you, there’s a whole world of internet out there.
❤️ Be kind to each other, Tumblr.
Watch them do nothing to protect Christians and Conservatives who get harassed by the hateful people of this website.
@staff You can’t even delete porn bots on this website but you’re gonna be out “enforcing” your community guidelines, huh?
I guess the best I can hope for is some TERFs and actual NeoNazis get shut down in the process of this clusterfuck, but that’s asking way too much.
On the day of Adorno’s birthday and along the lines of the thought of Marx, we are remembering the tragedy that enlightenment turned into barbarity; now we are witnessing thefarce that enlightenment turned into stupidity and ressentiment.
We are against any kind of censorship, we want to experience human thought in all its representations - we resist.
In this era of increased reliance on algorithmic systems that we can’t see and don’t control, how do we shift the power back to the citizen?
By knowing where, how, and to which effects algorithmic systems influence our lives – we can start finding ways to reconfigure our relationships with the systems pervading our digitizing public sphere. By interrogating and critically examining the underpinnings of these systems, from our unique perspectives, we can shift the power from the pervading technocracies back to the citizens.
Caitlin Wood’s 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people’s perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is “a daring space,” designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there’s no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations.
The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers’ first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.
Caitlin Wood’s 2014 edited volume Criptiques consists of 25 articles, essays, poems, songs, or stories, primarily in the first person, all of which are written from disabled people’s perspectives. Both the titles and the content are meant to be provocative and challenging to the reader, and especially if that reader is not, themselves, disabled. As editor Caitlin Wood puts it in the introduction, Criptiques is “a daring space,” designed to allow disabled people to create and inhabit their own feelings and expressions of their lived experiences. As such, there’s no single methodology or style, here, and many of the perspectives contrast or even conflict with each other in their intentions and recommendations.
The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers’ first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.
One of the things I’m did this past spring was an independent study—a vehicle by which to move through my dissertation’s tentative bibliography, at a pace of around two books at time, every two weeks, and to write short comparative analyses of the texts. These books covered intersections of philosophy, psychology, theology, machine consciousness, and Afro-Atlantic magico-religious traditions, I thought my reviews might be of interest, here.
My first two books in this process were Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and David J. Gunkel’s The Machine Question, and while I didn’t initially have plans for the texts to thematically link, the first foray made it pretty clear that patterns would emerge whether I consciously intended or not.
[Image of a careworn copy of Frantz Fanon’s BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, showing a full-on image of a Black man’s face wearing a white anonymizing eye-mask.]
In choosing both Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Gunkel’s The Machine Question, I was initially worried that they would have very little to say to each other; however, on reading the texts, I instead found myself struck by how firmly the notions of otherness and alterity were entrenched throughout both. Each author, for very different reasons and from within very different contexts, explores the preconditions, the ethical implications, and a course of necessary actions to rectify the coming to be of otherness…
