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

Thus, it is an act of oppression not to make an effort to understand a marginalized knower on her own terms, and it is an act of exploitation (read: oppression) to ask a marginalized knower to explain her knowledge on her own terms.

Finally, the attempt to make all analyses of gender intersectional, to focus relentlessly on a simplistic concept of societal privilege, rooted overwhelmingly in identity (and not in economics) and to incorporate elements of critical race Theory and queer Theory, results in a highly muddled, Theoretical, and abstract analysis that makes it difficul

Social Justice approaches that focus solely on group identity and neglect individuality and universality are doomed to fail for the simple reasons that people are individuals and share a common human nature.

Theory, then, is a conspiracy theory with no conspirators in particular.

At the opposite end of this spectrum is the concept of hermeneutical privacy, which describes the right not to be understandable at all.12 So, marginalized people can be oppressed to the point of psychic death by not being understood, but their right to be completely incomprehensible should also be respected. Negotiating this minefield must be very

If disagreeing, remaining silent, and going away are all evidence of fragility—mere “defensive moves”—the only way one can avoid being “fragile” is to remain put, show no negative emotions, and agree with The Truth—after which one must actively participate in discovering the Truth, that is, learning how to deconstruct whiteness and white privilege,

The notion of discursive construction—the idea that the way a particular society talks about things legitimizes them, making them seem self-evidently true—is therefore key to understanding queer Theory because it is through discursive construction that these roles and expectations are created and perpetuated.

Gucci apologized and withdrew a sweater that some people believed produced the effect of “blackface.”34 The same accusation was levelled at some shoes produced by Katy Perry, now withdrawn.

Postmodernism is difficult to define, perhaps by design. It represents a set of ideas and modes of thought that came together in response to specific historical conditions, including the cultural impact of the World Wars and how these ended, widespread disillusionment with Marxism, the waning credibility of religious worldviews in post-industrial s