An incisive piece on Lisa Duggan, Jack Halbertsam, and other Ronell apologists

I found this to be genuinely illuminating close reading all building towards this conclusion:

Senior queer scholars—Jack Halberstam, Lisa Duggan, Juana Maria Rodriguez—have closed ranks on Twitter. Their friends and colleagues and students and admirers have either joined them or are compelled to keep quiet because there are professional consequences for going against senior scholars.

This is about power.

This is also about affiliation and networks.

Job-insecure people—grad students, prospective grad students, untenured faculty, adjunct faculty—cannot afford to alienate those who might facilitate their professional advancement. I note, here, that this is precisely one of the weapons Avital Ronell used, and it is distressing to see it being deployed by senior queer scholars, no matter how implicit that deployment.