Ridiculosity. Critical Theory. Poor Life Choices.

“Also, having grown up in the developing world, my parents wouldn’t have gone to Guatemala, Zimbabwe, or Borobudur if someone paid them; they took us to Europe instead, which has governments.”

CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT THE INHERENT CLASSISM AND SOMEWHAT RACISM THAT EXISTS IN THIS SIMPLE STATEMENT!?

If [Spivak’s] critique…has not been widely taken up by U.S. historians and feminists, it is perhaps because this is a potentially devastating critique of a great deal of the academic work of the ‘new’ social history and of feminist and ethnic studies scholarship in general. We have come to rely rather extensively on the axiomatic belief that ‘recovering lost voices’ or ‘women’s experience’ is always possible and self-evidently liberatory. To call this into question is to break faith, despite the evidence that leftists and feminists head academic departments, edit scholarly series, and get tenure, and that the power of labor, the independence of Third World nations, racial justice movements, and the ability to combat the gender segregation of labor markets are on the decline. In other words, since at least 1980, the economic and cultural power of academic leftists and feminists and those they purport to defend have had radically different careers. While this is not necessarily the fault of intellectuals, it does suggest that we ought to withhold confidence about the success of our strategies and be willing to revise them.