Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

Principled Opposition: Example 3 We affirm that discrimination and bigotry against sexual minorities remains a problem in society and requires addressing. We deny that this problem can be solved by queer Theory, which attempts to render all categories relevant to sex, gender, and sexuality meaningless. We contend that homophobia and transphobia are

Instead, in her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler claims that gender roles are taught and learned—often unwittingly, through socialization—as sets of actions, behaviors, manners, and expectations, and people perform those roles accordingly. Gender, for Butler, is a set of things a person doe

Power and knowledge are seen as inextricably entwined—most explicitly in Foucault’s work, which refers to knowledge as “power-knowledge.”

For cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, it is vital that we appreciate how much progress we have made in liberal democracies—and that we owe that progress to Enlightenment humanism—if we wish it to continue: A liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it’s better to solve those problem

While liberal feminists had wanted the freedom to reject gender roles and access the same opportunities as men, and radical feminists had wanted to dismantle gender entirely as an oppressive social construct, intersectional feminists saw gender as both culturally constructed and as something that people could experience as real and expect to have a

Throughout even the most recent applications of Theory, then, we see radical skepticism that knowledge can be objectively, universally, or neutrally true. This leads to a belief that rigor and completeness come not from good methodology, skepticism, and evidence, but from identity-based “standpoints” and multiple “ways of knowing.”

These ideas are fairly typical of disability studies. Lydia X. Y. Brown, for example, also depicts disability as a performance and having a disability as an identity to be celebrated. This is apparent in this account of a discussion with a Muslim convert friend, who explains why she wears hijab, although she does not believe in the modesty concept

Liberalism, despite its shortcomings, is simply better for humans. As Pinker argues in Enlightenment Now, “The data show that more liberal countries are also, on average, better educated, more urban, less fecund, less inbred (with fewer marriages among cousins), more peaceful, more democratic, less corrupt, and less crime-and coup-ridden.

Despite postmodernists treating it as though it is novel and profound, this divide between facts and experience is not particularly mysterious to philosophers outside of postmodernism: it is the difference between knowing that and knowing how. “Knowing that” is propositional knowledge, while “knowing how” is experiential knowledge.