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> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Are you posting from the ARPAnet? I ask because as a take this is 40 years out

> It's sad to see this Critical Theory nonsense trickling into real disciplines. Are you posting from the ARPAnet? I ask because as a take this is 40 years out of date. Feminist analysis as applied to archaeology has a pretty solid history : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_archaeology The thing about archaeology is the objects of its study are things made by people who happened to be living in a society (ok sometimes they study actual human remains, but I have to point out that those too were made with untrained labor). If you want to use the things to understand the people--and if you don't, why are you doing archaeology in the first place?--it's important to use what we know about people and societies in general to guide your analysis. What are some important facts about people and societies? Well, people are generally bilateral bipedal, have a mineralized internal skeleton, like to wear clothes and get out of the rain, and so on. In particular, people tend to be weakly sexually dimorphic (with substantial overlap and exceptions), and societies tend to divide among that line with varying intensities (again with overlap and exceptions). So if we want to study the people of the past, one of the things we need to understand is how that division tends to manifest and be maintained, and one way to do that is to understand how it manifests and is maintained in observable, i.e. modern, societies. And once you start looking at things from a "how" perspective it's not too hard to start noticing that one mechanism is giving children toys that encourage play in ways that reinforce the ways in which they will be expected to act in the side of that subdivision they were assigned at birth. (This isn't necessarily a comfortable thought! All of us on this forum were young children at one point in our lives, and with probably some rare exceptions would have been soaking in this boy-side or girl-side split the whole way through. I know I certainly was!) Anyway, this is getting kind of long. To sum up, understanding how people on both sides of that division lived and how their society maintained that division is necessary to understanding their society as a whole, and if 'acknowledging that women are people and an honest examination of how they are treated by society' isn't feminism, I don't know what is.

cambalache 6y ago
Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. I suppose I dont belong to the enlightened crowd when I dont understand quotes like these: > “Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”
- chc 6y ago
  I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).
  - cambalache 6y ago
    You are either a very ignorant person(and in full demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect) or a disingenuous and dishonest troll. " L’équation E=MC2 est-elle une équation sexuée ? Peut-être que oui. Faisons l'hypothèse que oui, dans la mesure où elle privilégie la vitesse de la lumière par rapport à d’autres vitesses dont nous avons vitalement besoin. Ce qui me semble une possibilité de la signature sexuée de l'équation, ce n'est pas directement ses utilisations par les armements nucléaires, c'est d'avoir privilégié ce qui va le plus vite " Irigaray, Luce. 1987b. “Sujet de la science, sujet sexué?” In : Sens et place des connaissances dans la société, pp. 95-121. Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.Vol 3. You can see here the page, https://imgur.com/a/kJg67dl https://imgur.com/a/kJg67dl Here it is the link to the book in Gallica https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3347401c.texteImage https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3347401c.texteImage
    - chc 6y ago
      Thank you — I've never been able to find any actual references to the page, and have found a lot of other people who found the book Sokal and Bricmont cited without being able to turn up the actual quote. I'm not sure your hostility is called for. At any rate, that quote seems to be something of a weak-man argument that doesn't give us much insight into the question you meant to be addressing. You don't find insight in an odd passage by one particular author in an obscure French publication from 1987 that seems to have mainly been cited by way of disagreement, therefore an entire field of modern scholarship is useless?
      - 6y ago
jariel 6y ago
This is a misrepresentation. 1) Critical Race Theory as a mainstay of scholarship is relatively new it it's broad intervention into all disciplines. 2) The 'big misrepresentaion' in your thesis is that you're alluding to some of the material value in the CRT lens (a kernel of truth) to posit it as the lens through which we should be understanding everything (the article used only CRT language to describe the dolls - nothing else). 3) By your own assertion, we're having to make some very broad assumptions about culture in order to draw conclusions, but in reality there isn't enough information to draw upon. The assertion made in the article that 'Dolls are used to reinforce genders stereotypes' is a secondary artifact of the dolls, and frankly it's an insult to scholarship because it has little to do with the dolls directly. Dolls were toys, used for a variety of reasons, the fact that those activities possibly reinforced gender roles is a secondary artifact. To represent that as 'the first truth' of the dolls is the giant CRT lie. A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful. What we could infer from these dolls from antiquity is possibly how little has changed. The dolls, more than anything are probably just a reflection of society as a whole - like everything. By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty' The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity' Yes - there are elements of validity in CRT, but as soon as you start with that hammer, everything crumbles into nonsense. The article, as it stands, is rubbish, it has no intellectual value other than to give us a few nice photos to glean our own understanding.
- bigbillheck 6y ago
  I don't have any idea why you're bringing "Critical Race Theory" into this? I didn't think there was any analysis of race in the article, only gender? Critical Race Theory is not some kind of boogeyman that encompasses everything you don't like. > A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful. I don't know what you consider "reinforcing gender stereotypes" means, but to me that's fitting the bill pretty solidly! The mother (presumably) acts in the way that her society expects of a woman, and in playing with the doll to mimic her mother the child is more deeply internalizing those ways. > By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty' OK, yeah, I'll bite: Da Vinci was comissioned by Francesco del Giocondo to paint a portrait of his wife Lisa del Giocondo. The thing about painting for patrons is you're supposed to make them look good. If you try to make Lisa dG look good, you're going to be relying on "gender stereotypes of feminine beauty". > The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity' David (in the "vs Goliath" version) is a young fit man armed with a sling. Furthermore, that David was often a symbol of Florence, and if Michelangelo (a Florentine) hadn't made him so youthful, fit, and masculine there might have been trouble. If you look at other depictions of David from that time, they're all stereotypically youthful, fit, and masculine (and sometimes horned up as in Donatello's second take). Michelangelo (and contemporaries) had similar ideas of what a young, fit, masculine person should look like and that's what they sculpted.
tjs8rj 6y ago
My qualm with this is thinking is that it supposes the gender role binary is created then reinforced, rather than emergent and reinforced. The key difference being the conclusion: is the gender role binary reinforced by oppressing individuals or is it reinforced by indulging individuals? My opinion and probably the most popular side across all cultures and all time: human gender role binaries are emergent behavior, and we indulge that emergent behavior. If humanity restarted from day 0, on day 1 girls would be playing with dolls far more frequently than boys, and boys would be playing with trucks far more than girls. On day 2, parents would buy their girl a new doll she wants and buy their boy a new truck he wants. The gendered behavior emerged without social construction of any kind, but because parents love their kids they indulge that behavior, thus reinforcing it. In your view, if humans began at day 0, what would happen on day 1? Would boys and girls play with trucks and dolls evenly? Is it only on day 2 that parents start reinforcing gendered behavior? Now obviously there’s a discontinuity here because there was never a day 0 for humans, but the fact that practically every culture across space and time no matter how separated, including all the way back to chimps, shows girls playing with dolls and boys playing with objects suggests that this isn’t some societal cram down, it’s an emergent phenomenon from biology, or group behavior (one sex is larger, one is smaller) that causes this to appear almost always.

cambalache 6y ago

Nothing of value has been added by having a "feminist" point of view. People (men and women) have been doing archeology for a long time, and the experience of girls and women have been studied (You could argue the extent of course) by countless scholars. I suppose I dont belong to the enlightened crowd when I dont understand quotes like these: > “Is e=mc2 a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest.”

chc 6y ago
I don't think you're supposed to understand that quote. While the quote was attributed by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont to a feminist writer, nobody seems to be able to find an actual appearance of the quote before Sokal and Bricmont's usage, so it seems most likely that the quote was fabricated by one of those authors (perhaps as a placeholder that they forgot to replace with an actual quote — who knows?).
- cambalache 6y ago
  You are either a very ignorant person(and in full demonstration of the Dunning-Kruger effect) or a disingenuous and dishonest troll. " L’équation E=MC2 est-elle une équation sexuée ? Peut-être que oui. Faisons l'hypothèse que oui, dans la mesure où elle privilégie la vitesse de la lumière par rapport à d’autres vitesses dont nous avons vitalement besoin. Ce qui me semble une possibilité de la signature sexuée de l'équation, ce n'est pas directement ses utilisations par les armements nucléaires, c'est d'avoir privilégié ce qui va le plus vite " Irigaray, Luce. 1987b. “Sujet de la science, sujet sexué?” In : Sens et place des connaissances dans la société, pp. 95-121. Paris: Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.Vol 3. You can see here the page, https://imgur.com/a/kJg67dl https://imgur.com/a/kJg67dl Here it is the link to the book in Gallica https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3347401c.texteImage https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3347401c.texteImage
  - chc 6y ago
    Thank you — I've never been able to find any actual references to the page, and have found a lot of other people who found the book Sokal and Bricmont cited without being able to turn up the actual quote. I'm not sure your hostility is called for. At any rate, that quote seems to be something of a weak-man argument that doesn't give us much insight into the question you meant to be addressing. You don't find insight in an odd passage by one particular author in an obscure French publication from 1987 that seems to have mainly been cited by way of disagreement, therefore an entire field of modern scholarship is useless?
    - 6y ago

jariel 6y ago

This is a misrepresentation. 1) Critical Race Theory as a mainstay of scholarship is relatively new it it's broad intervention into all disciplines. 2) The 'big misrepresentaion' in your thesis is that you're alluding to some of the material value in the CRT lens (a kernel of truth) to posit it as the lens through which we should be understanding everything (the article used only CRT language to describe the dolls - nothing else). 3) By your own assertion, we're having to make some very broad assumptions about culture in order to draw conclusions, but in reality there isn't enough information to draw upon. The assertion made in the article that 'Dolls are used to reinforce genders stereotypes' is a secondary artifact of the dolls, and frankly it's an insult to scholarship because it has little to do with the dolls directly. Dolls were toys, used for a variety of reasons, the fact that those activities possibly reinforced gender roles is a secondary artifact. To represent that as 'the first truth' of the dolls is the giant CRT lie. A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful. What we could infer from these dolls from antiquity is possibly how little has changed. The dolls, more than anything are probably just a reflection of society as a whole - like everything. By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty' The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity' Yes - there are elements of validity in CRT, but as soon as you start with that hammer, everything crumbles into nonsense. The article, as it stands, is rubbish, it has no intellectual value other than to give us a few nice photos to glean our own understanding.

bigbillheck 6y ago
I don't have any idea why you're bringing "Critical Race Theory" into this? I didn't think there was any analysis of race in the article, only gender? Critical Race Theory is not some kind of boogeyman that encompasses everything you don't like. > A female commenter here on the board gave some insight when she indicated: "She used the dolls to mimic her mother" - which is something I never would have thought of. Now that's thoughtful. I don't know what you consider "reinforcing gender stereotypes" means, but to me that's fitting the bill pretty solidly! The mother (presumably) acts in the way that her society expects of a woman, and in playing with the doll to mimic her mother the child is more deeply internalizing those ways. > By CRT logic, the first thing we should say about 'The Mona Lisa' is that Da Vinci was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Feminine Beauty' OK, yeah, I'll bite: Da Vinci was comissioned by Francesco del Giocondo to paint a portrait of his wife Lisa del Giocondo. The thing about painting for patrons is you're supposed to make them look good. If you try to make Lisa dG look good, you're going to be relying on "gender stereotypes of feminine beauty". > The Statue of David? Michelangelo was 'Reinforcing Gender Stereotypes of Youthful Masculinity' David (in the "vs Goliath" version) is a young fit man armed with a sling. Furthermore, that David was often a symbol of Florence, and if Michelangelo (a Florentine) hadn't made him so youthful, fit, and masculine there might have been trouble. If you look at other depictions of David from that time, they're all stereotypically youthful, fit, and masculine (and sometimes horned up as in Donatello's second take). Michelangelo (and contemporaries) had similar ideas of what a young, fit, masculine person should look like and that's what they sculpted.

tjs8rj 6y ago

My qualm with this is thinking is that it supposes the gender role binary is created then reinforced, rather than emergent and reinforced. The key difference being the conclusion: is the gender role binary reinforced by oppressing individuals or is it reinforced by indulging individuals? My opinion and probably the most popular side across all cultures and all time: human gender role binaries are emergent behavior, and we indulge that emergent behavior. If humanity restarted from day 0, on day 1 girls would be playing with dolls far more frequently than boys, and boys would be playing with trucks far more than girls. On day 2, parents would buy their girl a new doll she wants and buy their boy a new truck he wants. The gendered behavior emerged without social construction of any kind, but because parents love their kids they indulge that behavior, thus reinforcing it. In your view, if humans began at day 0, what would happen on day 1? Would boys and girls play with trucks and dolls evenly? Is it only on day 2 that parents start reinforcing gendered behavior? Now obviously there’s a discontinuity here because there was never a day 0 for humans, but the fact that practically every culture across space and time no matter how separated, including all the way back to chimps, shows girls playing with dolls and boys playing with objects suggests that this isn’t some societal cram down, it’s an emergent phenomenon from biology, or group behavior (one sex is larger, one is smaller) that causes this to appear almost always.