yeah, yeah, i know, academia is an evil bourgeois lair of useless elitist white cishet men writing self-congratulatory articles about nothing and groping their brilliant female students’ arses and so on and so forth, but occasionally, it is prudent to let some of those useless academics - plenty of whom are women and/or poc and/or lgbt nowadays, how shocking, and who’ve spent their lives learning EVERYTHING about a certain subject - explain a text or a concept to you, so that you don’t run around after with a wildly inaccurate understanding of smth like what ‘social construct’ means, or what Nietzsche was all about, or what Freud actually wrote or did or said, or inventing already invented strains of feminism, etc etc etc
oh, and while i’m at it - this whole “academia is useless” is a belief that the far-right ideology has been extremely fond of all throughout the last century or so. just saying.
there are entire academic fields built by and about oppressed people. you can get a degree in disability studies, an academic field built on the academic works of disabled people and largely taught by disabled people. one of the colleges offering that degree in the US is among the largest and most prestigious state colleges in the country.
At a certain point the insistence that these people and their work simply doesn’t exist, or isn’t worth engaging with, is just regular bigotry no matter how progressive you think your reasoning is.
(via thoodleoo)
