Meaningless academia and helpless victimhood
There are a great many social movements and groups on college campuses these days, but among them there is perhaps none more enervating and exhausting than campus feminism. “Feminism” itself has become a kind of tiresome buzzword within the wider pop culture landscape, a way for celebrities and other public figures to kowtow to liberal activists without actually doing anything, but it is on college campuses that feminism—modern feminism, shot through with the worst elements of historical progressivism and neurotic social preoccupations—really comes into its own. And that is a problem for colleges.
Case in point: the recent story about a “feminist researcher” who “supports ‘combining intersectionality and quantum physics’.” It might surprise you to learn that quantum physics can be “combined” with anything; most people reasonably assume that bosons, quarks, wave functions and other elemental functions of the universe were Sui generis and thus not subject to “combinations” of any kind. But campus feminism cannot help itself: it has to put a feminist spin on every academic field possible. So you have an academic—a real person employed by a real person paid for with real tax dollars—making arguments along these lines:
Stark identifies “classical Newtonian physics” as one of the guiding sciences at the heights of Western imperialism, “which identifies separated beings and absolute differences between particles and waves, space and time.”
“This structural thinking of individualized separatism with binary and absolute differences as the basis for how the universe works… is embedded in many structures of classification,” according to Stark.
These structures of classification, which separate humans, include gender (such as male or female) and national borders, according to Stark.
Stark goes on to argue that “the arbitrary exceptionalism or fetishizing understanding of (human) bodies as segmented integrities … is part of the apparatus that enables oppression.
“This is biopolitical.”
If you’re lucky, all of this impenetrable jargon simply went over your head. If you’re unfortunate enough to decode what’s being argued here, however, then you’ll recognize the howling ridiculousness of the researcher’s argument: she appears to be claiming, for instance, that Newtonian physics have somehow given rise to oppressive systems such as “national borders.” (Someone should gently inform her that the concept of nations predates Newton by several thousand years.) Your guess here is as good as ours. Ultimately this is the purview of academic feminism: not rigorous, thoughtful, practically useful scholarship, but silly meaningless nonsense that addresses no real problems, doesn’t actually explain anything, and is ultimately useless (except for generating a paycheck for the feminists themselves).
Campus feminism has a host of other problems, chief among them that campus feminists generally embody the worst stereotypes they claim to be trying to eradicate. Consider a recent lawsuit filed against the University of Mary Washington. A campus feminist group had been on the receiving end of numerous crude, mean and unpleasant anti-feminist Internet messages, and they expected the university to “protect [them] from the effects” of these messages. Because the university didn’t offer such “protection,” the feminists have mounted a Title IX lawsuit. Stipulating that several of the Internet messages in question were irritating and offensive, it is nonetheless perplexing that these feminists are apparently incapable of shaking off some vulgar juvenile behavior and going on with their lives. Where feminists once sought to prove that women are as capable as men in wrangling the everyday difficulties of non-domestic and professional life, today’s feminists seem determined to prove exactly the opposite: protect us from some tasteless instant messages, or we’ll sue you!
The fault for all of this, of course, lies in the general campus climate that has arisen over the last few decades. Campus feminism is a direct outgrowth of the pervasive liberal orthodoxy that blankets most public and private universities in the United States today. Rolling back the deleterious effects of such feminism can only be accomplished by effecting a philosophical and political shift on our campuses altogether—a daunting task, to be sure, but one worth attempting. And don’t worry: surely somewhere, someone will continue to publish feminist exposés on the cruel patriarchal systems inherent in microbiology and criminal forensics.
MORE: Feminism’s new motto is ‘I’m down in the dirt – help me get up,’ says ex-feminist writer
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