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In which I am femsplained* to
Jan. 26th, 2012 19:01*If this is actually a thing; it may well not be. Read my story, and decide!
I'm crawling my way back onto the posting bandwagon. Welcome, new readers, by the way! I'm not usually this content-free. Also, as an aside, LJ doesn't like my mail provider, so you really should use the email address in my profile to get a hold of me rather than messages.
This past Friday and Saturday I was at a grad student conference which was very loosely themed around the concept of identity--the keynote was entitled, "Who cares about identity?" and in the Q&A afterwards this one very comp lit-looking person (they tend to dress way less conservative and more arty than us history folk) stood up and told us all that if we really cared about identity we should look into child psychology for reasons that I no longer recall, but basically boil down to every discipline but child psychology is wrong about identity formation. Okay, fine. A few minutes later I put up my hand and said that it sounded like a lot of people could benefit from reading Lydia Liu's new book The Freudian Robot, which deals with questions of machine cognition and how to model what goes on inside the "black box" that is our skulls, among other things. So afterward when we are all nomming on delicious food this woman comes up to me and says, "I'm sorry, but I heard you mention Freud--" and I'm like, "Well, yes, in the title of this book by someone else--" and she launches into a very condescending diatribe about well, Freud was wrong, and also sexist, and I'm just like, "Yes, I'm well aware that Freudian psychoanalysis reinscribes partiarchical whatnot into patients, and yes, a lot of Freudian theory has been superseded--" and she would not shut up and it was someone else's book title! Just the title! And I'm sorry, but you're going to tell me that Freud is problematic and wrong? ALSO THE SKY IS BLUE, WATER IS WET, JFC, of all the history people in this department, I am not the one you need to be explaining that to!
That is my story. I'm sorry, lady, but you'll have to find someone else's hide to polish your feminist credentials on.
I'm crawling my way back onto the posting bandwagon. Welcome, new readers, by the way! I'm not usually this content-free. Also, as an aside, LJ doesn't like my mail provider, so you really should use the email address in my profile to get a hold of me rather than messages.
This past Friday and Saturday I was at a grad student conference which was very loosely themed around the concept of identity--the keynote was entitled, "Who cares about identity?" and in the Q&A afterwards this one very comp lit-looking person (they tend to dress way less conservative and more arty than us history folk) stood up and told us all that if we really cared about identity we should look into child psychology for reasons that I no longer recall, but basically boil down to every discipline but child psychology is wrong about identity formation. Okay, fine. A few minutes later I put up my hand and said that it sounded like a lot of people could benefit from reading Lydia Liu's new book The Freudian Robot, which deals with questions of machine cognition and how to model what goes on inside the "black box" that is our skulls, among other things. So afterward when we are all nomming on delicious food this woman comes up to me and says, "I'm sorry, but I heard you mention Freud--" and I'm like, "Well, yes, in the title of this book by someone else--" and she launches into a very condescending diatribe about well, Freud was wrong, and also sexist, and I'm just like, "Yes, I'm well aware that Freudian psychoanalysis reinscribes partiarchical whatnot into patients, and yes, a lot of Freudian theory has been superseded--" and she would not shut up and it was someone else's book title! Just the title! And I'm sorry, but you're going to tell me that Freud is problematic and wrong? ALSO THE SKY IS BLUE, WATER IS WET, JFC, of all the history people in this department, I am not the one you need to be explaining that to!
That is my story. I'm sorry, lady, but you'll have to find someone else's hide to polish your feminist credentials on.