@empathywarrior's Threads
1. A Twitter essay, entitled: "things I have been thinking about regarding the politics of citation, or; why I made pretty notes after Katherine McKittrick's talk yesterday."
2. I don't usually stop to re-take my notes. (I take very few notes these days as it is.) I don't mean just to re-read, I mean to refashion, to do more work within the citational politics I am embedded in when I am taking notes.
3. Taking notes is difficult. As @demonicground said yesterday, "referencing is hard." The etymology of the word: from the Latin referre: to bring back, to bear. Referencing as relation. The OED even suggests that it can be "to pay as a due." But can also mean to revive (life!)
Listening to the #MeToo special on @TheCurrentCBC and I have some QUESTIONS about Neil Boyd's analysis on the "well, aren't we conflating some bad behaviour things with sexual assault?" (Aziz Ansari was the example used).
The problem isn't that people don't know how to distinguish between different kinds of behaviours across the wide spectrum of what we might call sexual misconduct. The problem is that the mechanisms we have to deal with violence themselves do a poor job of addressing nuance.
We want people to make use of the criminal justice system because we consider it the "correct" way to address sexual violence, but then the same people get mad about the fact that the broadest category in the Canadian Criminal Code includes both groping and rape, for instance.
[TW: sexual violence, harassment, perpetrators]
I've been thinking about the "emergent" genre of perpetrator narratives in the wake of #MeToo. When I first proposed a postdoc on this topic (way back in 2015), it was a niche area of study, with few examples/texts.
I've been thinking about the "emergent" genre of perpetrator narratives in the wake of #MeToo. When I first proposed a postdoc on this topic (way back in 2015), it was a niche area of study, with few examples/texts.
With the recent surge of narratives, from Louis C.K's "apology" to Jian Ghomeshi's recent piece in the #NYRB, my initial research questions feel a little more pressing. Why do these narratives exist? What allows them such a vast reach? And what do we DO with these texts?
One of the things that I find so hard about #MeToo (and the history of hashtags around sexualized and gendered violence) is that while technological shifts have created new spaces for survivors to speak, so too has it created spaces for those who have used violence to speak.
I was talking to some fellow PhD graduates the other day, and we were talking about the relief of deciding not to apply for TT jobs anymore, because we don't....actually....really....want those jobs. I really don't think I want to be a professor. A scholar, yes. Professor, no.
Aside from the fact that my body literally cannot handle the stress of it - I barely survived the PhD, and a TT position as a young racialized woman sounds like a quick slide into the emergency room for me - I just want a quieter, simpler life.
I was watching Chef's Table and crying my eyes out over the words of Jeong Kwan, a Buddhist nun and chef who spoke some truth into my dang soul today. I felt the same way listening to Sister Noella Marcellino, the "cheese nun." I need time for things, ideas, love, to ferment.
