MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 15--MORE DISCUSSION WELCOME
The author of this piece is a gender critical feminist, but I found more interesting its description of "the New Ptolemaism" than its particular application to debates about trans identity:
This is a push for scholarship to be insistently insular and to be much less interested in the study of the world than in the study of the study of the world. This kind of work, which is by now very common in the social sciences and humanities, performs the same neat trick every time. It turns out, in every such analysis, that the framing of inquiry turns out to be more significant than the object of inquiry. Inevitably, the most important research site thus becomes academia itself because academia is where the framing happens. Any real understanding of the world–and any disruption of it–must on this view begin within the academy. The academy becomes the center around which everything else revolves, and the most profound forms of intervention into systems of “power/knowledge,” to use Foucault’s famous phrase, are those that upend academic conventions.
Curious whether this rings true to any readers. Please confine the discussion to this idea (and to whether Foucault is fairly implicated in it).
