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Thanks for the quick responses! Now I have some reading material.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:52
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VanSandman posted:Haha fair point but I already know about O'keefe. I said art illiterate not art ignorant. Those were flowers? Man I misinterpreted those paintings.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:54
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http://www.cbc.ca/m/touch/news/story/1.1868791 The Bill Reid gallery in Vancouver is doing an exhibition on First Nations erotic art. One of them shown in the clip is a fur covered bentwood box that's pink on the inside. Not exactly subtle.
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Sep 26, 2013 19:57
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Maria Mitchell certainly belongs in lists of awesome lady scientists. And on the topic of art with fur...
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Sep 26, 2013 19:58
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Stormageddon posted:Good thing we talk about Watson instead of the fact that she was the one who discovered the proper structure of DNA, and her contribution to the structure of viral life that may very well one day find a way to combat them beyond even the efficiency of vaccination, marking her as the pioneer of a higher order than even those who made the single most important discovery in medicine and biology to date. There is zero question that Franklin was hosed out of credit, but it's misleading to claim she discovered the structure of DNA. She generated the critical diffraction data, Francis and Crick came up with a model with that data in mind, and Wilkins was put on the manuscript because they were only willing to gently caress over the subordinate female scientist. Franklin is getting the credit she deserves after the fact (unfortunate that it has to be that way) but we should still be talking about Watson and Crick, because they came up with a compelling model and took a leap of faith that turned out to be correct.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:16
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I guess every year or two I should contribute, here's a cool lady: Judith Blum  Born on October 21, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, Judith Blum went to law school where she was the only woman in a class of 126, graduating in 1965. She married and became Judith Levy, having two children. She was hired as a corporate lawyer for a cosmetics company, but left shortly after to raise her two children. She divorced and became a prosecutor in New York City family court, prosecuting child abuse cases, domestic violence, and juvenile crime. After a decade of prosecuting grisly crimes against children, she was appointed as a judge in criminal court then promoted to supervising judge in the Manhattan division of the family court. She earned a reputation as a "tough" judge known for her fast decision-making and acerbic wit. In 1977 she remarried and became Judith Sheindlin, and then divorced again in 1990.  In 1993, she was featured in a full segment on CBS's 60 Minutes on a series about court dysfunction. She was held up as the solution. Still just 51, she retired as a family court judge after hearing over 20,000 cases. Not long after her retirement, she was approached about possibly starring in a new reality courtroom series, featuring "real cases with real rulings." She accepted the offer. Her show, called "Judge Judy", debuted on September 16, 1996. Since it's debut, it has been the number-one rated show in it's slot and category. Regularly averaging 9 to 10 million viewers daily, it became the first day-time television show to get higher ratings than the Oprah Winfrey Show. Coming into 2013, it remains the highest rated daytime TV show. Her contract runs through 2017, and she has said she has no plans to retire. Her current estimated salary is $60 million per year. To compare: Jay Leno's "Tonight Show" is the highest rated late-night show getting 3.5 million viewers, with an estimated salary of $15 million per year. Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" gets about 2 million viewers, with an estimated salary of $25 million. Judith Sheindlin averages 9 million viewers, with an estimated salary of $60 million. She remains unmarried since 1990, so her entire TV fortune is hers. She is currently the highest paid person in all of television on the planet. Judith Sheindlin posted:I think that the American viewing audience can tell when somebody's not being honest—when somebody's peeing on their leg and telling them it's raining. I think part of the reason I was selected to do this job was because I don't filter myself very well. But I was never a great filter of myself even when I sat on the bench in New York. Now sometimes that got you into a little bit of hot water; here they seem to like it. Fortunately for me, I don't have to act. This is it. And if you annoy me, or if you lie to me, or if I feel as if you're trying to obfuscate the truth, you're going to get on my bad side. And that's a side that you don't want to be on.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:26
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Nor am I suggesting their contribution be ignored, but the behavior they exhibited from granting proper credit should absolutely sour contribution they made out of fear or ego. It's not fair to Franklin to associate Watson's words about her when you bring her up. Those words should be Watson's legacy, not Rosalind's. Because it is important to let it be known to women what they're capable of and disk that interest, not start the story at the end without acknowledging what she did that was important. Shame the dudes. Let them be the examples of what it does to a legacy. It's the least we can do to make sure Franklin gets credit before we tell how she got there. But that's just me. Don't open with the bad news  It's like with Turing, it's more important to remember him for what he did, and the Government for what they did to him. Absolutely make sure it's never forgotten, but bringing up Franklin and letting Watson 'Hugo' the conversation before stating her importance burns my biscuits.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:26
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woozle wuzzle posted:I guess every year or two I should contribute, here's a cool lady: Judge Judy v. Judy Blume. Who ya got?
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Sep 26, 2013 20:50
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Sometimes you gotta bury the lead.
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Sep 26, 2013 20:54
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Inge Lehmann was the first to discover that the Earth's inner core is solid and is separate from the liquid outer core. She did this by analyzing patterns of compressional and shear seismic waves, which travel differently through liquid and solid materials. The separation between the liquid and solid cores is sometimes called the Lehmann discontinuity, although that's kind of confusing since that's also the name of a different zone she discovered of high velocity compressional and shear waves that's at a depth of around 220 km.
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Sep 26, 2013 21:21
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I've been doing a little research on my family history, and just discovered a massive amount of my great-grandmother's personal papers and correspondence on file in the University of Iowa. Papers we thought were lost forever. This is important because my great-grandmother was an early and very active member of fandom. She started attending cons in the late 40s and was the editor of several fanzines on and and off for a period of about 20 years, and corresponded with a number of authors such as Marion Zimmer Bradley. This is important to the history of fandom because so often early fandom is viewed as a male-dominated sphere, and any women involved surely must be involved because of their husbands (my step-great-grandfather was utterly uninterested in fandom, science fiction, and all things related to them). In fact there were a number of high-profile female fans like my great-grandmother who were heavily involved with fandom independent of their spouse's interest. Anyway, it's been an amazing find and I can't wait to get copies of her correspondence and the fanzines she edited. That said, my great-grandmother was also extremely conservative and supposedly a member of the John Birch Society as well 
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Sep 26, 2013 22:47
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Sorry, I know I'm a bit late, but I thought after tyrants and scientists we could go back to some women who were just "normal" heros. Like Eleonore Prochaska for example. Her story: She was the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Prussian Guard. (Wikipedia misidentifies her father as an officer, by the way. That is wrong. Her father really was just a non-com and military musician without much of an income.) Her father came back disabled in 1792 and by 1794 her mother had gotten too ill to take care of her four kids, so nine-year old Eleonore ended up in the great military orphanage of Potsdam. After Prussia got slapped silly by Napoleon in 1806 she started working as a scullery-maid and a housekeeper. During her working career she got to hear lots of stories of brave women in Spain and Tirol, fighting side by side with their men against evil emperor Napoleon. Which kind of impressed her. In 1813, everything looked great for the final liberation of Prussia, but then message after message arrived of Napoleon stomping on some Prussians, so it looked bad again. By August 1813 Eleonore finally snapped and decided to do something about Prussian freedom: She cut her hair, bought man clothes, a gun and a bayonet. Then she went and joined the 1st Jägerbataillon of the Lützowschen Freikorps. The Freikorps were partially a private organization with no medical examinations, so no-one had any suspicions about the new soldier "August Renz". Especially since "he" was a really good shot. If someone asked why the 28-year-old "man" had such a high, effiminate voice, she explained it away with claiming she had been a tailor. Everyone knew tailors were effiminate pseudo-men, so she got accepted as a fellow soldier. A few skirmishes later, the drummer of her battalion got shot in his arm and a new drummer was needed. Elated by surviving several small-scale battles and thanks to having learned how to drum by her father, she easily replaced him on the 15th September. Exactly one day later the battalion was caught up in combat close to Lüneburg, at the forest of Göhrde. During the engagement Eleonore, like many other common soldiers in history, got hit by shrapnel. The shrapnel completely shattered her left leg, a deadly wound at this time. Just before a military doctor could examine her on the battlefield, she confesses: "Herr Leutnant, I'm a girl." She was brought immediately into the military hospital of Dannenberg, were she died on the 5th October 1813. Her comrades-in-arms then bury her with full military honors. A Prussian minister and the commander of the Jägertruppen, Colonel Graf Kielmansegg (Graf is a title, just in case you don't know) are present at her funeral. As a last farewell three volleys are fired: A final salute to a fine soldier.  Just a normal woman, who did what she had to do. Rest in peace, Eleonore Prochaska. Another last thing -Prussian women joining the army to help out their men in defending the country was happening all the time during Napoleonic times. I can't cite any sources, thanks to my shaky memory, but there is a history paper somewhere counting about 200 cases of women joining up in the German military. That we know of, there were probably a lot more. Especially since no-one seemed to notice all those tailors suddenly joining the army. Two other examples I can think of: -17-year-old Anna Lühring, daughter of a carpenter in Bremen. She joined up in February 1814, again with the Lützowschen Freikorps. She fights in several actions, like the siege of Jülich. (Sorry, couldn't find an English source.) In 1815 "Eduard Kruse" goes back to her parents without any trouble and unharmed. -The actual tailor Friederike Krüger, a 23-year-old woman from Brandenburg, decided one day in 1813 she couldn't take the evils of France anymore and made her own uniform. Then she joined up with the 1st company of the infantry regiment Kolberg, were she could honestly say her effiminate voice was due to being a tailor. She took the name August Lübeck and fought valiantly. Valiantly enough that after her true identity was revealed at the battle of Großbeeren, the Prussian King Frederick William III. personally allowed her to continue fighting. At the battle of Dennewitz she was wounded and promoted to non-commissioned officer. The same battle earned her the distinction of being the only woman until 1941 who ever earned the Iron Cross. As I said, just a few women who did what they had to do. Like many soldiers before and after. Something about military ranks: After looking it up, the best translation of "Unteroffizier" would be "corporal", not non-commissioned officer. That was me just being careful. Those non-coms I mentioned above? Just think of them as corporals with a little bit of extra power, somewhere between common soldier and sergeant.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:09
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platedlizard posted:I've been doing a little research on my family history, and just discovered a massive amount of my great-grandmother's personal papers and correspondence on file in the University of Iowa. Papers we thought were lost forever. This is important because my great-grandmother was an early and very active member of fandom. She started attending cons in the late 40s and was the editor of several fanzines on and and off for a period of about 20 years, and corresponded with a number of authors such as Marion Zimmer Bradley. This is important to the history of fandom becau
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Sep 26, 2013 23:12
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Some of the men back during the napoleonic wars were remarkably stupid. This is anecdotal and I can't remember where I read it, but a captain in the British navy is on record as saying a sailor under his command had 'remarkably developed breasts for a man.' I choose to ignore the possibility of gynocomastia.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:20
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Foomin posted:Congratulations, you're a Legacy Goon You have no idea how true that is. 
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Sep 26, 2013 23:20
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I'm uncomfortable with four generations of goony people in the same family.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:29
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VanSandman posted:Some of the men back during the napoleonic wars were remarkably stupid. This is anecdotal and I can't remember where I read it, but a captain in the British navy is on record as saying a sailor under his command had 'remarkably developed breasts for a man.' Yeah, I'm re-reading a book about the 1812 campaign in Russia right now and all those generals and many other officers down to the common soldiers are sometimes at least reliable, but most of the time just stupid sacks of poo poo. Sometimes it looked like Tsar Alexander defended Russia with the help of his personal drunk clown, leading a pack of displaced German generals and crazy bastards against another bunch of crazy bastards. Even Napoleon himself felt kind of under the weather during the entire mess. Armies with swarms of deserters around them! Cannibalism and starvation! Poor planning! The war in Russia had all this and much more.  But for some reason all the women involved were a lot smarter then the men, like on a completely different level. I think the smart men were all among the peasants hiding in the woods, bandits, or got shot dead at some point. (Mother Russia executed militia men who fought too good, for example.)
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Sep 26, 2013 23:31
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VanSandman posted:I'm uncomfortable with four generations of goony people in the same family. At least we're not boring mundanes.  Content, someone wanted that super-condescending ad about women programmers. I couldn't find it, but I found these. Enjoy! (or not)    e. the last one's not condescending, but I thought it made a nice contrast.
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Sep 26, 2013 23:49
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I'm reading the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy about feminist epistemology and stuff, and I'm confused about intersectionality. Why is it considered surprising or interesting that things besides your gender affect the way you experience the world? I think I am misunderstanding, so I'd appreciate it if someone could give me some info on this subject: op posted:Intersectionality describes how various biological, social and cultural categories intersect simultaneously and contribute to the oppression of women with different degrees of severity. Specifically, this theory stands in opposition to an either/or line of thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_theory posted:White women wanted women of color and working-class women to become a part of the women’s movement over struggling with their men (working-class, poor, and men of color) against class oppression and racism in the Civil Rights Movement. This was a conflict for women of color and working-class women who had to decide whether to fight against racism or classism versus sexism—or prioritize and participate in the hierarchy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersectionality posted:A standard textbook example of intersectionality theory might be "the view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity" I am interpreting this as meaning that: 1) There are actual proponents of the either/or line of thought described in the first quote, and they have actually put these ideas into practice and alienated people. 2) A common formulation of the theory of intersectionality (as in the third quote) asserts the not-so-remarkable fact that individual women will experience the world differently, but at once does not account for the experiences of people who aren't women. The reason why I'm dumbfounded by this is because the fact that individuals experience the world differently is a central, basic tenet of the overwhelming majority of epistemic systems proposed by philosophers for millennia. It seems totally unremarkable to me. Not only that, the ways I've seen the theory be described are actually totally inadequate for describing how much people's experiences will differ from one another. For example, as I said before, the 3rd example does not account for the fact that people who aren't women will have varying experiences. It seems to me that proponents of the theory of intersectionality are trying to make the refutation of an untenable, totally absurd notion seem somehow profound but they manage to fail at refuting that notion in the first place.
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Sep 27, 2013 00:49
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Dog Jones posted:I am interpreting this as meaning that: Let me give you a really basic example of an intersectionalist critique of a strand of feminism. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was, for many women a powerful statement about how women in the US had been culturally restricted to a "housewife" role. But, for women who didn't share Friedan's demographic as a white, middle-class, college-educated woman, the book was perceived as irrelevant at best, injurious at worst. bell hooks's critique of the book's argument is discussed and quoted here. Also, "tenets" and "millennia".
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Sep 27, 2013 01:05
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Dog Jones posted:This isn't what I'm talking about. quote:2) Having admitted that there are other factors which determine the way a person experiences the world besides whether or not they are a man or a woman, why is the field of view only widened enough to include other genders, race, class, and sexual orientation?
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Sep 27, 2013 01:59
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AlbieQuirky posted:Let me give you a really basic example of an intersectionalist critique of a strand of feminism. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique was, for many women a powerful statement about how women in the US had been culturally restricted to a "housewife" role. This isn't what I'm talking about. To be specific (and hopefully more clear), this is what I am asking: 1) In constructing an epistemic system, why would anyone presume that different people's experiences are unified, rather than disjointed? Isn't that totally absurd? 2) Having admitted that there are other factors which determine the way a person experiences the world besides whether or not they are a man or a woman, why is the field of view only widened enough to include other genders, race, class, and sexual orientation? 3) Why is it considered profound that things besides gender (or the other conditions mentioned in #2) will affect the way a person experiences the world given the absurdity of assuming the opposite? I am talking about intersectionality specifically in relation to the construction of a feminist epistemology. Providing a specific example of people employing this theory of knowledge (which seems bizarre and flawed to me), has nothing to do with what I'm asking. Thanks though, and I have corrected the typos you pointed out.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:10
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McNerd posted:My perception has been that "intersectionality theory" as such isn't any more controversial (among people who properly understand the term) than the "theory of gravity." There's a lot to study about the details of the interplay of gender/race/class/etc., and "intersectionality theory" is basically the name for that field of study, but the overall idea that black women have some different problems from both black men and white women, and whatever, shouldn't be surprising. It isn't obvious to everyone, which is why you have to read about Intersectionality 101, but it should seem obvious in hindsight. I mean, this is what I would imagine too -- that it isn't controversial. Yet in my original post, the second quote is an example people who apparently had no understanding of this theory. How did Betty Friedan miss Intersectionality 101 (apparently), and yet go on to become an influential feminist if she had such large gaps in her understanding? (disclaimer: I've never actually read her, just going by what AlbieQuirky posted) McNerd posted:Ultimately of course everybody is always using a model that's simplified to some degree; even in the deepest bowels of academia nobody is doing 1024-point case-by-case analyses of how a given policy impacts every possible permutation of able/disabled upperclass/lowerclass neurotypical/aneurotypical cis/trans man/women, let alone in an Internet thread. Right, and here is perhaps my fundamental problem: Why, when building a theory of knowledge, would we focus on trying to enumerate all the different possible ways peoples' experiences could diverge? We already know that peoples' experiences diverge, that's why we need to go through the trouble of showing how we can know things in the first place. How does providing a more or less (depending upon how robust we need to be, like you said) inadequate picture of all the different ways our experiences differ help us to understand how we can have knowledge? edit: This could be confusing now since you edited your post.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:29
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Intersectionality is important when Professor Feminism is picked for a job over other women, Prof goes ape poo poo, and nobody who hired him learns a drat thing. As far as I can tell.
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Sep 27, 2013 02:56
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Dog Jones posted:I mean, this is what I would imagine too -- that it isn't controversial. Yet in my original post, the second quote is an example people who apparently had no understanding of this theory. How did Betty Friedan miss Intersectionality 101 (apparently), and yet go on to become an influential feminist if she had such large gaps in her understanding? (disclaimer: I've never actually read her, just going by what AlbieQuirky posted) Is it really surprising that a white, upper class woman would not have considered the view point of poor, non/white women, whose experience she knew nothing about? This is not new. Why did doctors in the 1940-1950s not think about including women in clinical studies or clinical trials? Why did they just assume they would react the same way to medication or present similar warning signs for certain conditions (e.g. heart attack)? Why did they not see anything wrong with all-mall, all-white study groups? Humans are nearsighted. It's like we don't have object permanence on a cognitive level. Dog Jones posted:Right, and here is perhaps my fundamental problem: Last time I checked, feminism isn't about building a theory of knowledge, but rather about deconstructing patriarchal norms, ideas, and values (embodied in media, social practices and policies) to bring women up to an equal level to men. Intersectionality, in this context, is just a way to describe all the different ways an individual can get hosed over (gender, race, class, orientation, etc.) and how these different factor interact with each other. This is useful for the activist side of feminism, to ensure that any project/policy/intervention designed for the advancement of women actually does that without either a) completely forgetting about a subset of women or b) loving them over even more.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:09
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Dog Jones posted:This isn't what I'm talking about. Ah, I didn't understand that you were talking about feminist epistemology as a scholarly discipline, rather than feminism as a political movement. My apologies. My understanding (and this isn't my field, so hoping HEGEL KILLS THESES and other philosophy folks will have more/smarter things to say) is that much of feminist epistemology as a field is critique of existing epistemologies from a feminist perspective, just as Marxist epistemology tends toward critique of existing epistemology from a Marxist perspective. It sounds like you might have objections to the idea of epistemology itself? Or maybe that you're not familiar with debates about how epistemologies reflect the sociocultural position of their creators? If, say, you move from something cut and dry like Gettier's famous thing about Smith and Brown and the coins, or even Hilary Putnam's "tWater" to epistemological discussion of more specific life situations, there's more and more room for unexamined preconceptions to creep in. Donna Haraway's work on the discourse of science (to cite the feminist epistemologist whose work I know best) calls into question the use of terms like "objectivity" and "evidence" entirely. Then there's the standpoint theory of writers like Sandra Harding (here's an influential piece of hers). So then you get from feminist epistemology, which looks at how knowledge is socially constructed and identifies places where it is taking a male perspective for granted, to intersectional epistemology, which looks at how knowledge is socially constructed and identifies places where it is taking a the perspective of a particular gender and/or race or ethnicity and/or cultural background and/or current level of physical or mental ability and/or sexual orientation, etc., for granted. Epistemology as a discipline seems to me to be more about analyzing explicit and implicit cultural constructions of knowledge, rather than about "creating an epistemic system". The very distinguished feminist epistemologist Linda Martin Alcoff addresses this quite directly in her work.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:21
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Bloody Mayhem posted:Is it really surprising that a white, upper class woman would not have considered the view point of poor, non/white women, whose experience she knew nothing about? I don't know. I think we should ignore her all-together, and just look at her work itself. So rather than asking why she had such large gaps in her knowledge, the real question is "Why is a work which is so obviously and deeply flawed as to presume that all women will have the same experiences as a white so-and-so held in any regard, or why do people even bother to criticize it?" Like if I was a mathematician, and I published a paper about some proof that I came up with, but you could tell from the paper that I actually didn't know how to add, people wouldn't really be debating and discussing my paper 50 years from now. Bloody Mayhem posted:Last time I checked, feminism isn't about building a theory of knowledge, but rather about deconstructing patriarchal norms, ideas, and values (embodied in media, social practices and policies) to bring women up to an equal level to men. Like I said, I'm talking specifically about feminist epistemology.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:29
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Why do we still learn about phlogiston in science classes? A theory can be imperfect while still having a major impact on society and generally being on the right track.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:40
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i like nice words
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Dog Jones posted:I don't know. I think we should ignore her all-together Feminist epistemologists would argue that that wasn't possible, and would critique the idea that it was. quote:and just look at her work itself. So rather than asking why she had such large gaps in her knowledge, the real question is "Why is a work which is so obviously and deeply flawed as to presume that all women will have the same experiences as a white so-and-so held in any regard, or why do people even bother to criticize it?" But TFM wasn't a work of formal philosophy; it was a cross between lay sociology and political manifesto. Some of its conclusions seemed accurate to women who read it, particularly those who shared Friedan's cultural background and socioeconomic position, and it inspired them to action. Nobody holds it in high regard as a work of sociology today, for the reasons discussed in the article I linked. But it has historical significance nonetheless. Why do people read and criticize Freud? Why do people read and criticize Newton?
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Sep 27, 2013 03:40
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This isn't specific to feminist epistemology; it's endemic throughout sociology. Whenever you're trying to convert raw data into something meaningful you have to organize it in some fashion or you'll never be able to make comparisons. However, when you organize it in a certain way some of the resolution, if you will, of the data is lost. Intersectionality attempts to address the data loss from this restricted view. In practical terms, this means focusing more narrowly on the relatively few people who are excluded from an analysis of a more generalized group. Sure, women have difficulties in the workplace, and people with disabilities have difficulties in the workplace, but women with disabilities might have difficulties that either don't exist or occur at much different rates then either of the more general categories.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:41
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Added Space posted:This isn't specific to feminist epistemology; it's endemic throughout sociology. Epistemology is a discipline of philosophy, not sociology, so I don't follow you here.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:45
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AlbieQuirky posted:Ah, I didn't understand that you were talking about feminist epistemology as a scholarly discipline, rather than feminism as a political movement. My apologies. My friend wrote a paper about feminist standpoint epistemology, and I've been talking to him. This post and what he's been saying seem to illustrate to me that my primary misunderstanding was about the SCOPE of their arguments: I guess feminist standpoint epistemology is more about the philosophy of science than theory of knowledge? You and I seem to have really different ideas about what epistemology is: I don't have any objections to the idea of epistemology itself, and I don't even know what that could mean. In my mind, saying that epistemology is primarily about analyzing explicit and implicit cultural constructions of knowledge kind of assumes a lot of things about what knowledge can be, and how we can know things in the first place. I probably just don't understand what you mean -- it seems to me that it would be a long time before we understand each other! Thanks though, I'll definitely check out those links you posted as I (hopefully) start to get a better picture here.
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Sep 27, 2013 03:57
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Anne Whateley posted:Why do we still learn about phlogiston in science classes? A theory can be imperfect while still having a major impact on society and generally being on the right track. The impression I was getting, which was the source of my confusion, was that this was still a point of contention (even in academic circles) to this day. This is what I was trying to express when I said dog jones posted:I am interpreting this as meaning that: AlbieQuirky posted:Feminist epistemologists would argue that that wasn't possible, and would critique the idea that it was. Right, right. I have objections to this, but at least I understand what they are saying.
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Sep 27, 2013 04:08
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Dog Jones posted:3) Why is it considered profound that things besides gender (or the other conditions mentioned in #2) will affect the way a person experiences the world given the absurdity of assuming the opposite? I get rather impatient with more thorough philosophical discussion (no insult to the discipline, just my personal limitations), so I'm not going to pretend that I'm prepared to engage in an in depth analysis, but it seems to me that the core of your question/dissatisfaction is a failure to appreciate the difference between surface knowledge and true understanding. It's sort of stunning to me, the older I get, things I thought I understood, things that seemed really DUH obvious, how much life experience enriches my understanding and makes my previous level of comprehension look not entirely incorrect but very narrow. It's easy enough to say "people experience the world differently." It's not so easy to internalize that truth and adopt a mental habit of humility that allows you to better process the experiences of people who are different from you. Intersectionality is about building that mental habit.
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Sep 27, 2013 04:18
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Dog Jones posted:2) A common formulation of the theory of intersectionality (as in the third quote) asserts the not-so-remarkable fact that individual women will experience the world differently, but at once does not account for the experiences of people who aren't women. I just want to point out that your third quote is explicitly only one example of intersectionality. To claim that quote suggests that intersectionality 'does not account for the experiences of people who aren't women' suggests to me that you're failing to understand the quote properly - did you perhaps misread it as "a standard textbook definition of intersectionality is..."? Feminist works tend to focus on feminist perspectives, and thus tend to focus on the implications of theories for women. Arguing that this undermines the value of feminism is basically coming in and going "but why don't you just call yourself humanists?".
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Sep 27, 2013 04:25
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Dog Jones posted:I'm reading the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy about feminist epistemology and stuff, and I'm confused about intersectionality. Why is it considered surprising or interesting that things besides your gender affect the way you experience the world? Intersectionality is more about the composition of effects being nonlinear than about there being more effects than one. So, here's a thought I had: of course cognitive parsimony is necessary at some level, since we think with three-pound meat computers, but at the specific level of conceptual resolution of early feminists (there's a female experience and a male experience and I'm a woman so my experience is the female experience), that parsimony is especially marginalizing for women who aren't rich and white. So we can look at that, and as an individual case, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that we need more resolution than the concepts "male experience" and "female experience" can provide us with. What about our concepts now? Is there a way to test them from the inside, as it were? We have more of them, but still far fewer of them than the number of individuals, so we are necessarily eliding some details about those individuals. If we can't understand the stuff we don't have concepts for, how can we judge if it's sufficiently trivial that it's safe not to have concepts for it?
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Sep 27, 2013 04:28
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AlbieQuirky posted:Epistemology is a discipline of philosophy, not sociology, so I don't follow you here. I hate to be agreeing with Added Space, but epistemology is hugely dependent on the social elements if you are talking about the scope of the knowledge. Otherwise you have large sections of people who are excluded from mainstream dialog like transwomen, sex workers, and WoC, which hurts them but not mainstream feminism, while intersectional feminism is better all around. It's not about simply acknowledging it, anyone can do that. It's about including it.
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Sep 27, 2013 04:41
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Stormageddon posted:I hate to be agreeing with Added Space, but epistemology is hugely dependent on the social elements if you are talking about the scope of the knowledge. It's knowledge of social phenomena that is dependent on the social elements, not epistemology itself.
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Sep 27, 2013 04:47
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Stormageddon posted:I hate to be agreeing with Added Space, but epistemology is hugely dependent on the social elements if you are talking about the scope of the knowledge. Yes, but epistemology is in no way about the drawing of conclusions from a researched data set, so I didn't see how Added Space's comment was at all relevant. Feminist and intersectional epistemology builds on the work of sociologists (and anthropologists), but it's not the same kind of work that sociologists are doing, at least not in regard to data collection and analysis. "Dog Jones posted:You and I seem to have really different ideas about what epistemology is I only know what I think people who identify themselves as epistemologists think it is. The most recent epistemologist that I'm aware of who was actually trying to construct a unified theory of knowledge was Quine; in the current world of philosophy (at least in English and French, which are the only languages I read well enough to read scholarly works in) epistemologists generally focus on sociocultural constructions of knowledge, rather than the more abstract, almost mathematical attempts to analyze knowledge as a phenomenon outside of cultural context Are there particular epistemologists whose work concerns basic theories of knowledge that you think I'm leaving out of the equation? I guess there are the "evolutionary epistemologists"; I'm not that familiar with that field, but as I understand it the work being done there is still a "critique of existing models," this time drawing on data from the physical sciences. I guess what I meant by "issue with the idea of epistemology" was something more like "issue with current practice and focus in the field of epistemology." My apologies for being unclear. It felt to me like you were faulting feminist and intersectional epistemology in particular for being concerned with cultural contexts of the idea of knowledge, rather than attempting to create a "pure" theory of knowledge, but I would argue that the latter project isn't central to epistemologists of any school in 2013. This essay by Charles Taylor talks about the shift in the field's approach.
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Sep 27, 2013 05:13
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AlbieQuirky posted:It felt to me like you were faulting feminist and intersectional epistemology in particular for being concerned with cultural contexts of the idea of knowledge, rather than attempting to create a "pure" theory of knowledge, but I would argue that the latter project isn't central to epistemologists of any school in 2013. This is exactly what I was doing, because I simply didn't understand the "scope" of what they were claiming. Like I said, I disagree with this for the reason I mentioned before, but I understand what they are saying now, and it doesn't seem totally absurd to me. edit: Of course, my objection is based on an extremely limited understanding of these ideas since I'm just starting to read about them, so its not really worth mentioning.
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Sep 27, 2013 05:47
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