Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom by Scott Joan Wallach.;

Author:Scott, Joan Wallach.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

That words wound seems incontestably true, and that hateful, racist, misogynist homophobic speech should be vehemently countered seems incontrovertibly right. But does understanding from where speech derives its power to wound alter our conception of what it might mean to counter that wounding power? Do we accept the notion that injurious speech is attributable to a singular subject and act? If we accept such a juridical constraint on thought … as a point of departure, what is lost from the political analysis of injury? Indeed, when political discourse is fully collapsed into juridical discourse, the meaning of political opposition runs the risk of being reduced to the act of prosecution.43

Butler wrote those words in the context of the 1980s and 1990s debates about campus speech codes; they are still applicable today when, once again (or still), arguments about the psychic impact of structures of discrimination have been coopted by neoliberal individualist discourses. When detecting microaggressions changes the conversation from structures of inequality to personal injuries, political discourse (and the action it conceives) can become disturbingly silent.

Then there is the movement for trigger warnings, which began with feminist objections to graphic discussions of rape online and has now morphed into a nightmare of calls for the suppression of speech. Trigger warnings are meant to prevent emotional stress for students who have experienced some kind of trauma—the definition has gotten wider and wider—by alerting them to potentially uncomfortable items on a course syllabus and even excusing them from the assignment. The AAUP report on the topic cited Oberlin College’s original policy (which was tabled to allow more faculty discussion) as an example of the extremes to which concern about triggers might lead. The college’s policy listed possible trigger topics as including “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism and other issues of privilege and oppression.” Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart might “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”44 A friend told me that he was cautioned not to use the word “suicide” in a presentation he gave at Amherst College. On a New Yorker blog, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gerson worried that hard-fought feminist reforms about rape law were being undermined by her students’ reluctance to talk about rape and to debate what counts and doesn’t count as consent, coercion, and crime—topics necessary for the teaching of the subject. “For at least some students,” she wrote,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.