Category: postmodern gibberish

More academic madness: Published feminist analysis of squirrel diets and reproduction shows that squirrels, like marginalized human groups, are otherized, gendered, and fat-shamed

May 8, 2017 • 11:00 am

I’ve written about dumb papers connecting Halloween pumpkins and Pilates with racism, and about how “feminist glaciology” could expel patriarchy from geology, but the paper I’m about to highlight takes the cake.

First, two preliminary comments:

1.) I have never been so ashamed to be an academic, and

2.) This paper is the kind of “scholarship” that is making university studies of feminism—and of much of the humanities—look ridiculous. This kind of work should be criticized and mocked not just by feminists themselves, but by biologists and academics of all stripes. It shows the enormous waste of time and intellectual energy that have resulted from the incursion of postmodern thought into humanities departments.

There. . . I feel better now. On to this paper, published in a recent issue of Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. Get the link by clicking on the title screenshot; it should be free if you have the free and legal “Unpaywall” app.

The author is described in the paper (I’ve added the link) this way

Teresa Lloro-Bidart is an assistant professor in the Liberal Studies Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She uses feminist posthumanist theories and perspectives from political ecology to study human-animal relationships, especially those developed in educational spaces.

Here is the abstract, packed to the gills with postmodern and obscurantist jargon. Read it!

Now, what is Lloro-Bidart’s argument? To paraphrase Mencken reviewing Thorstein Veblen, “What is the sweating professor trying to say?”  As far I understand it, here’s her argument, starting with some squirrel biology:

  • Around 1900, the eastern fox squirrel (Sciurus niger) was deliberately introduced to Southern California as a pet, and then the animals were released and thrived in the wild, particularly in urban areas.
  • They may have competed with, and partly displaced, the native squirrel, the western gray squirrel (Sciurus griseus), although the fox squirrel, which is more omnivorous, does better in urban areas.
  • The fox squirrel is also partly carnivorous, eating baby birds, bird eggs, and even rabbits.
  • The fox squirrel has two litters per year, the gray squirrel only one.

From these bald facts, Lloro-Bidart did “field work,” combing magazines and newspapers for mentions of the squirrels. She also studied and conversed with others at what she says is her “current fieldwork site, an urban community garden in the greater Los Angeles area.” From these researches, whose conclusions were of course in no way predetermined (LOL), Lloro-Bidart concludes the following:

  • The Fox squirrel has been “otherized” on account of its diet. I quote the author:

“As Bourdieu emphasizes in Distinction and feminist geographer Guthman elaborates on in her research on the alternative food movement in CA, eating is not simply a physiological requirement, but a performance that reflects taste, gender, race, culture, and class position. Depending on the cultural circumstances, those who do not eat ‘properly’ sometimes become the target of racialized discourses  DuPuis elaborates on the second point by highlighting how the complex relationship between food and the body is deeply intertwined with the history of American political reform.

. . . Those otherized as improper eaters for a variety of reasons – the impure – frequently become the target of various gendered, racialized and/or neoliberal discourses and policies to alter their eating habits – supposedly for their own, society’s, and sometimes animals’ wellbeing.”

They’re squirrels, for crying out loud, not humans! The analogy is forced to a predetermined conclusion.

  • The Fox Squirrel has also been otherized and gendered because it reproduces more often than the gray squirrel. It is also fat-shamed. I quote the author:

“These connections between the eastern fox squirrel’s eating of ‘everything’ and the fecundity of the [nonnative] squirrel resonate with what Subramaniam calls the ‘oversexed female’ narrative, where ‘[f]oreign women are typically associated with superfertility – reproduction gone amuck’. While not every article discussing the eastern fox squirrel’s eating of ‘everything’ also raised issues about reproduction, several did – and often concomitantly, suggesting the willingness of the eastern fox squirrel to eat everything is connected to the fecundity of the female. .

“Although none of these statements directly holds female squirrels accountable for these eating practices, they are gendered by implication: female squirrel bodies are those that physiologically deliver litters twice per year (not males), individualizing their bodies as the units of reproduction; in population ecology the term ‘fecundity’ refers to the ‘maximum potential reproductive output of an individual (usually female)…and feminist scholarship has demonstrated that ‘reproduction’ and ‘procreation’ are frequently [and negatively] associated with the human female body, which is constructed as closer to nature.

“While feminist scholarship has examined and critiqued how female animal bodies are uniquely enrolled in industrial farming (e.g. they produce milk for dairy production and, as a result, nursing mothers are separated from their young), feminist research on exotic/invasive species has only minimally considered the manifestation of more implicit gendered reproductive narratives, including how they are discursively connected to eating practices.

“Thus interpreted, these narratives intimate that eating and female fecundity are indeed intertwined, as the foreign squirrel is ultimately successful because she will eat everything, including bird eggs, baby animals, and trash in order to reproduce and outcompete the natives. Not unlike the discourses pervading the literature on feral cats, which suggest that withholding food from female cats is a desirable strategy for decreasing reproductive success, or new research in fat studies that unpacks how fat mothers unfairly shoulder blame for the obesity epidemic as what they eat literally becomes what their children will eat and become these statements, contextualized within the articles in which they appear, discursively perpetuate the notion that eastern fox squirrels are what they eat, i.e. inappropriate squirrel subjects like the inappropriate foods they choose to dine on in southern CA. As feminist food studies scholar Cooks highlights, the metaphor of food as body ‘individualizes the body as the unit of consumption’ and ‘prescribe[s] gender identities via what and how we eat’  Although the female squirrel is not overtly named in these articles, her body and identity thus become gendered as she consumes (eating everything) and reproduces improperly (delivering two litters per year).”

So here we have an intersectional feminist analysis of eating, reproduction, speciesism, racism, and marginalization. The paper goes on like this for 17 pages, and I was much relieved to reach the end.

But to what end was also this tortured analysis? As best I can make it out, it’s to show that we need to de-otherize squirrels and free the Fox Squirrel from its marginalization, allowing all squirrels, regardless of diet, reproduction, and habits, to live in harmony. In other words, Lloro-Bidart is calling for Social Justice for Squirrels. I conclude that from this passage:

These questions have important implications: Instead of characterizing eastern fox squirrels as nest robbers and trash eaters as specific detrimental meanings are attached to the foods they eat (and what their bodies do with these foods, such as deposit scat and plant trees or produce ‘too many offspring’), they demand a reconstitution of human interpretations of these squirrel-food becomings not in speciesist or gendered terms, but through an opening up of the category ‘squirrel’ so that many kinds of squirrels – and other beings – can flourish in suburban/urban spaces.

Of course, “opening up” categories like “squirrel”, and calling for harmonious squirrel diversity, neglect the possibility of invasive species destroying natives, as is happening in New Zealand, where “opening up the category of ‘vertebrate'” could lead to the extirpation of that land’s birdlife, or opening up the category of “plant” could destroy much of the native flora. Not all plants and animals can or should live in harmony.

But Lloro-Bidart is pretty sure she’s on the right track, because she talked with one of her enlightened friends at her “field site” (the communal garden) and that friend didn’t otherize the fox squirrels:

“To provide an example of what this flourishing might actually entail, I briefly turn to my current fieldwork site, an urban community garden in the greater Los Angeles area. This garden, like many suburban/urban spaces in the area, now supports a small eastern fox squirrel population that drops in from utility lines to feed on fruit trees. At the time of the informal conversation depicted below, the Garden Director, Isabel, resided in a suburban neighborhood approximately 5 miles from the garden. We had already discussed the garden’s squirrels several times – and also chatted about many other creatures, including Isabel’s rescue rabbits and pitbull and the resident garden birds who planted sunflowers every year. Prior to leaving this day, Isabel lamented about moving (she was going to miss her backyard western scrub jays, Aphelocoma californica), and animatedly told me about an encounter she had witnessed between a western scrub jay and an eastern fox squirrel in her backyard,

Fieldnote excerpt: April 2016

As I’m getting ready to leave the garden, Isabel and I end up chatting about squirrels. Since I have been enmeshed in doing analysis for my squirrel research project, Isabel’s story began to sound very familiar. She had apparently witnessed, for the first time, a scrub jay chase an eastern fox squirrel away from what she was sure was the scrub jay’s nest given that scrub jays nest every year in the bottlebrush plants that line her yard. Excitedly, she shared that she couldn’t believe that the bird was so relentlessly pursuing the squirrel.

“In contrast to the characterization of eastern fox squirrels as ‘nest robbers’ in the popular press, Isabel was not at all disgusted with the squirrel’s actions. Instead, she appeared entertained by the encounter and was quite surprised that a bird would so aggressively defend her/his nest from a squirrel. While in this case the eastern fox squirrel did not appear to actually make off with an egg or nestling, and if s/he had this might have changed the story Isabel told, her retelling of this encounter suggests a willingness to capture and grapple with animal agency (both eastern fox squirrel and scrub jay) – and her own.”

Good Lord! What is this doing in an academic paper? More important, what is that paper doing in an academic journal? And is that journal really producing useful scholarship? (I couldn’t bear to look.)

I needn’t rant much about the enormous waste of time this paper involved, and the enormous waste of paper (or electrons) its publication entailed, for the paper discredits itself. But of course this is the stuff that many professors in the humanities—deeply infected with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and other “posts”—are expected to extrude: bad ideas couched in unreadable prose.  This paper rates up there with the whiteness of pumpkins and the racism of Pilates as one of the most ridiculous academic exercises of our era.

I close with the author’s amusing “acknowledgement” section. Look at the last sentence—squirrel lived experience! (That’s opposed to squirrel non-lived experience, of course.):

Now I have some experts in my building: the Eastern Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) that I interact with daily. I showed Lloro-Bidart’s paper to one of them, who looked at it al fresco, but then, horrified by accusations of otherizing and fat-shaming, she retreated in disgust. Here’s the sequence of photos:

What is this? I was looking for nuts.

 

This looks nutty. . .
Oh noes! I am otherized!

Thank God I was a scientist and didn’t have to deal with this stuff in the humanities. (I hasten to add that, of course, not all university humanities work is like this!)

 

Pseudo’s (pseudosciece) corner, Private Eye

January 12, 2017 • 1:30 pm

I don’t read Private Eye, the British humor magazine, but Matthew Cobb sent a screenshot from his issue singling out what I thought was a joke, but isn’t. His notes:

Pseud’s corner is the bit in Private Eye where they publish genuine pseud0-intellectual garbage. This appears to be true.

I can’t explain it. I can understand why you might be interested in people’s responses to plastic bags but that’s not the same thing as saying they are conscious!

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A postmodern holiday: recent nonsense from the humanities

January 10, 2017 • 9:30 am

Reader Loren sent me this video (with an introduction by Noam Chomsky) on some of the shenanigans of postmodern nonsense (yes, I know that not all of the humanities or “science studies” is riddled with this stuff). A lot of the material presented comes from the Twi**er site New Real Peer Review, which is worth following.

Can you recognize the scholars pictured at the end?

You can find a lot of these papers simply by googling the titles. For instance, the paper by Eviatar Zurubabel, which the video summarizes (4:36) as saying “Science and reason are bad”, does in fact claim that. It was in the journal Cultural Sociology, and you can find it here. Here’s its first paragraph:

The realization that ‘reality’ may not be what I had always thought it was, and that our notion of absolute objectivity is ultimately social, blew my mind when I first read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic The Social Construction of Reality (1967 [1966]) as a college senior 44 years ago. And the mechanism most responsible for how we come to view something as objective, I discovered, is the process of reification.

I haven’t looked at all of the papers (I’d go nuts if I had to), but not all of them appear to be completely as characterized. For instance, the paper at 4:49 supposedly arguing “Why ‘Marxian selection’ has better explanatory power than Darwinian selection”, is really about how some sociocultural phenomena need a teleological approach because they’re the result of human “purpose.” That said, I wonder whether any of these papers have made a substantive contribution to human knowledge. Insofar as we’re supporting this research with institutional or government funds, we appear to not be expanding humanity’s knowledge, but propelling the careers of humanities scholars.

I received an angry email the other day from a prominent “science studies” scholar who will remain unnamed, telling me that I had no right to criticize that field because I hadn’t read widely in it, or had a degree in it.  I didn’t respond, but if I had I would have said that I’ve indeed read a great deal of “science studies,” from Popper and Kuhn down to modern days, and I know that a lot of it is worthwhile—the work of Phil Kitcher and my colleague Bob Richards, for instance, both of whom I’ve discussed on this website. But there’s no denying that even today “science studies” is riddled with postmodern nonsense, and you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in the field to conclude that.

For example, in one minute of Googling, I found the journal Catalyst (subtitle: “Feminism, theory, technoscience”) with a paper last year having this title and abstract. And there are many others:

“El tabaco se ha mulato”: Globalizing Race, Viruses, and Scientific Observation in the Late Nineteenth Century

Jih-Fei Cheng

Abstract

This article traces the earliest identified recorded descriptor for viral infection: the racialized Spanish expression “el tabaco se ha mulato” (“the tobacco has become mulatto”). The phrase appears in the late nineteenth-century travel writing of French colonial scientist Jules Crevaux, written as he journeyed through post-Spanish Independence Colombia and observed the demise of the once-thriving tobacco industry. I theorize the literary translations and visualizations, or what I call “visual translations,” of the phrase across scientific and historical texts that cite Crevaux to track the refraction of racial, gender, and sexual discourses in virology. I argue that the phrase refers to the historically dispossessed Indigenous and Black subjects of the nascent Colombian republic and their resistance to subjection when forced to work the tobacco fields.  The article historicizes virus discovery at the juncture between science, nation-building, global industrialization, and the disciplining of race and sex under the long shadow of Euro-American empire.  Drawing upon Ed Cohen’s concept of “viral paradox,” Nayan Shah’s notion of “strangerhood,” and Mel Y.  Chen’s framework for thinking about “queer animacies,” I deconstruct the visual, conceptual, and etymological roots of the phrase “el tabaco se ha mulato” to argue that the expression renders the virus as both “queer” and “strange” to the nation. The virus signifies the mulato subject as a stubborn challenge to racial hierarchies and to the host-guest-parasite relation, both of which are foundational to the social organization of the nation and polis. This signification insistently refuses the human/non-human binary that undergirds racial regimes and biological conceptions of life. In turn, I expand historical thinking about race, submit that pandemics result from global industrial resource extraction rather than merely poor hygiene, and offer a framework for “queer decolonizing.”

Virtually every paper in the three issues of that journal has an equally impenetrable and jargon-ridden abstract. I’m amazed that people get paid to write this stuff; it’s as if writing this way confers you membership in some secret and elite club with its own secret jargon.

Yogurt as a sexist, white-privileged product

December 4, 2016 • 12:30 pm

As we wait for the U.S. to go down the tubes after Trump takes office, and for the rest of the world to fall apart from war, terrorism, and hatred, it’s nice to know that our university professors are busy concentrating on the really important stuff, like the implications of yogurt “culture” for feminism and white privilege.

Yes, we’ve had feminist glaciology and Pilates, and discourses on how pumpkins at Halloween are racist and oppressive, but one item heretofore left untouched is the pressing issue of yogurt.

No longer, for Perin Gurel, an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, has published an incisive postmodern analysis of yogurt in America in the journal Gastronomica. The title is below (click on the screenshot to to go the paper; reference and additional link at bottom).

screen-shot-2016-12-04-at-11-35-30-am

Her observations are simple enough, and I can state the facts given in the paper in a few sentences. Yogurt was for generations a staple food in the Middle East. It was then imported into the U.S., where it was initially seen as a strange and exotic food. Then advertisers decided to sell it to women as a “health” food that could help one lose weight. It then became mainstream, and some producers like Dannon added fruit on the bottom. It was later adopted by hippies and feminists, increasing its popularity, and even some men became fans. More recently, “Greek yogurt”, a thicker version, has been successfully marketed by Chobani, and even more men have adopted that, though the yogurt is really not Greek but Turkish—”strained” yogurt.

That’s the story of yogurt, although, in the one inadvertently funny sentence in her article, Gurel says, “The origins of yogurt are cloudy.”

The problem, as always with this postmodern persiflage, is that Gurel has to trick out her story with all kinds of feminist and racial overtones, to the point where I’m not sure at all what she’s trying to say beyond waving her Postmodern Feminist credibility card (she teaches a course on “Gender and Popular Culture”). And so we get thickets of words like this (emphasis is mine and, by the way, if you see a lot of words that end with “-ize”, like “problematize,” “contextualize,” and “historicize”, those are sure signs of postmodern gibberish).

In her groundbreaking book The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol J. Adams coined the term “feminized protein” to describe food sources derived from the imprisonment and domestication of female animals, whose bodies are “manipulated as incubators of protein” (Adams 2010: 112). Interested in the intersection of two overwhelming binary oppositions, between human and animal and male and female, Adams’s analysis does not differentiate between, say,milk and yogurt. The recent work of Greta Gaard on “feminist postcolonial milk studies” builds upon Adams’s interventions to historicize and contextualize the femaleness as well as the whiteness of milk. Gaard (2013: 596) writes: “Milk—a commodity that the American dairy industry has marketed as ‘natural’ and ‘wholesome’—is not a homogeneous entity but one that has various meanings and compositions in different historical and cultural contexts.”

Well that says about exactly nothing.

As for yogurt being a form of sexual oppression as well as cultural appropriation, there’s this:

Although feminization and exoticization go together in canonical feminist analyses of Orientalism, in the case of yogurt’s popularization in the United States, feminization as a “diet” food has been a significant part of its cultural neutering. In the early twenty-first century, marketing campaigns for “Greek” yogurt have modified this cultural neutralization by foregrounding a nonthreatening “white” ethnicity, while further feminizing yogurt consumption and obscuring connections to the food cultures of the Middle East.

It’s true that yogurt marketing was directed largely toward women, since that sex is more concerned with weight loss and appearance, but “cultural neutering”? Was the deliberate? There is no evidence for that, simply the author’s assertions. As for “foregrounding a nonthreatening ‘white’ ethnicity”, that’s just a gratuitous form of virtue signaling.

When Perin manages to admit that some men took to yogurt, too, as in some later ads, she lapses into complete incoherence. Referring to Yoplait ads featuring men enjoying yogurt flavors like “banana cream pie”—ads that were removed after complaints—Perin goes to town:

The original version of this ad was pulled off the air in 2011 after activists accused it of promoting eating disorders; it certainly encourages an incredibly problematic relation to food (“Yoplait Pulls Ad . . . ” 2011). Having young men replace the women in this case follows a recent trend in media activism in which “gender flipping” deconstructs the normatively gendered source text. As Patrick Jung, the co-creator of the parody video with Nick Taylor, wrote in his paper about this piece, gender flipping makes us ask, “If it is uncomfortable to look at these flipped versions, then why was the original acceptable?” It, of course, would not have been but for a specific brand of capitalist patriarchy predicated upon policing women’s bodies.

Well, I saw those ads, and I wasn’t uncomfortable, so I don’t know what she’s talking about. And the stuff about “policing women’s bodies” is over the top, for yogurt companies were targeting that segment of the market most concerned with weight loss. Why are erectile-dysfunction ads aimed at men? Is that patriarchal policing of men’s bodies?

I needn’t go on except to give two more quotes about how yogurt is oppressive to women and people of color. To make the former case, Gurel notes that yogurt, while marketed to women in the U.S., is marketed to everybody in her native country of Turkey, but even there it’s oppressive (she also manages to throw in the Edward-Saidist buzzword “Orientalist”):

We must, therefore, be wary of a romantic, Orientalist binary opposition between Turkish tradition and American commercialism. Turkish and American ads for mass-produced yogurt both exemplify what Sut Jhally (1995) has called the “image-based culture” of modern capitalism, which causally links positive emotions to the consumption of commodities. In all cases, the empty signifier of coagulated milk sold under a brand name is enriched with signification borrowed from preexisting values. Similarly, ads in both countries are gendered in rather limited and stereotypical ways. While Turkish ads primarily incorporate folk foodways and the communal practices of food-based nurturing (provided by women) and hearty ingestion (showcased by men and children), American ads focus on individualized feminine consumption for “female” ills. Yet if staring at a fridge in doubt for minutes on end and eating controlled portions of artificially flavored yogurt alone on a couch is oppressive, what about slaving away at the kitchen all day to make sure store-bought yogurt can be consumed, mostly by others, alongside appropriately labor-intensive foods?

And here’s why yogurt is a form of white supremacy (I’ve removed the references for clarity, but you can see the full passage in the original paper):

Since the 1970s, popular American constructions of normative whiteness have pushed against the symbolic WASP and instead begun to celebrate white “ethnic” cultures, such as Greek, Italian, and Irish immigrant ancestries (Jacobson 2006). Both a product of and a backlash against the civil rights movement, this aspiration for a “special whiteness” beyond and within whiteness has boosted interest in “ethnic dining,” making available a cosmopolitan identity to those who can claim it by heritage or travel and consumption. Mass-produced Greek yogurt offers a tame version of this gastronomic cosmopolitanism to the masses. Of course, like more extensive practices of “eating the Other,” it does so without challenging the structural racism that generates asymmetric access to culinary adventurism.

So yogurt is a backlash against the Civil Rights movement? And is a form of “culinary adventurism” that itself is a kind of racism? Seriously, that’s stretching her thesis to the point of breaking.  It’s ludicrous—and this is taken as serious scholarship.

My conclusions about this paper and its author?

  1. Gurel doesn’t have enough to do.
  2. She also needs to learn how to write without using obscurantist postmodern jargon.
  3. The paper says nothing that hasn’t been said before. What is true is not novel (weight-loss foods are marketed to women), and what is novel is not true (yogurt is a manifestation of racist white cultural and structural paternalism).
  4. The paper adds nothing to the store of human knowledge; it was written solely to advance the author’s career.
  5. Isn’t postmodernism over yet?
  6. Shoot me now.
Aug. 21, 2013; Perin Gurel Photo by Matt Cashore/University of Notre Dame
Perin Gurel. Photo: Matt Sashore, University of Notre Dame

h/t: Barry
________

Gurel, P. 2016.  Live and active cultures: gender, ethnicity, and “Greek” yogurt in America. Gastronomica 16:66-77.  DOI: 10.1525/gfc.2016.16.4.66

The unbearable whiteness of pumpkins: more po-mo lunacy

October 2, 2016 • 9:30 am

CONTENT WARNING: THE PAPER I’M ABOUT TO DISCUSS IS NOT A JOKE
(OR AT LEAST NOT AN INTENTIONAL JOKE)

In the attempts of the Regressive Left to make everything part of identity politics, and to instill in all The Privileged an unspeakable sense of guilt, no object or behavior is off limits. And so, as Halloween approaches, we have a new paper in the journal GeoHumanities called: “The perilous whiteness of pumpkins” (reference and free download below). And it’s not about pumpkins bred for a lack of coloration, either: it’s how this seasonal gourd bears a horrible burden of racism and oppression. This is right up there with feminine glaciology and racist Pilates as one of the craziest po-mo papers I’ve seen.

The authors are Lisa J. Powell, a postdoc in the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Elizabeth S. D. Englehardt, the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor of Southern Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The paper, as usual with these screeds, is so abysmally written that it’s hard to make out its thesis, but I’ll try.

It begins by locating the pumpkin as a message of racist oppression, and to do that it uses the “Pumpkin riots” in Keene, New Hampshire in the fall of 2014, in which a largely white group of college students became unruly at a pumpkin festival, setting cars on fire, breaking windows, and running amok. Eighty of them were arrested and 170 disciplined by their college. This was about the time that the Ferguson riots took place in Missouri, and many saw the police as acting more leniently toward the white New Hampshire protestors than toward the black Missouri protestors (see the story here). Some of the Missouri demonstrators wrote slogans on pumpkins and took them to the St. Louis County Justice Center, and that’s all that Powell and Engelhardt need to write a paper showing that pumpkins are freighted with racial significance. The rest they just make up. (By the way, everybody’s forgotten about the pumpkins here except for these po-mo authors.)

The authors then take up three pumpkin-related issues (with ancillary points as well) to locate pumpkins in the sphere of oppressive whiteness. Here’s the word salad introducing their paper:

To explore race, culture, and food, we turn to three recent moments in the narrative of pumpkins’ whiteness: the pumpkin spice flavor industry and rhetoric connecting particular middle- or upper-class female whiteness to pumpkin spice lattes; the Internet phenomenon, “Decorative Gourd Season,” and lifestyle magazines’ fall embrace of class-aspirational pumpkins; and the working-class reality television Punkin Chunkin contests. Along the way, we briefly examine agricultural pumpkin production and pumpkins in U.S. history. Finally, we return to the Pumpkin Riot to consider how a deeper understanding of urban–rural divides in current U.S. cultures reveals what is so perilous about the equation of pumpkins and whiteness. Our aim is to make more legible the consequences of ruptures among food, race, class, gender, and place.

Their main points are in bold. I’ve put quotes from the paper in quotation marks.

  • The racism of pumpkin production. This part is a real stretch, but there’s some po-mo gems here as they desperately find ways to make pumpkins symbols of White Privilege:

“The relationship between the pumpkin’s position in contemporary U.S. culture and its role as an edible crop is complicated. Nevertheless, pumpkins are real, material food plants in addition to being cultural symbols.”

Amazing insight! And there’s this:

“Although people in the U.S. pumpkin-picking and pumpkin-processing labor force should not be lumped into one homogeneous group, labor guidelines and commentary on labor issues indicate many are migrant workers and many are of Mexican descent. In 2007, for example, 417 pumpkin growers in Colorado despaired after a state “crackdown” on undocumented immigrants disrupted their fall pumpkin harvest labor force (Rodriguez 2007). Labor controversies in other states, including Texas and North Carolina, suggest seasonal laborers primarily of Mexican descent pick their pumpkin fields (Lutton and Einhorn 2006; Henneberger 2008; Shaffer 2013).”

This issue isn’t brought up again, and they don’t present any real data. But certainly, like many mass-harvested crops, pumpkin-pickers must be heavily Latino. But this doesn’t make the squashes symbols of racism per se; it merely gives the authors an excuse to write their paper.

  • The racism of pumpkin spice lattes. I have never had a pumpkin spice latte (the authors abbreviate this as PSL), as I despise flavored coffees and that one sounds particularly noxious. But Powell and Englehardt strive mightily to make PSLs symbols of the privileged and affluent, ergo of whiteness. To do that they link them with Ugg boots because Buzzfeed once published an article showing PSLs, a candle, and Ugg boots as “signifiers of basicness,” which the authors take as an index of female consumerism seen as a sign of white superiority. (Oy!):

“Starbucks introduced the pumpkin spice latte (PSL) in 2003. The company claimed sales of more than 200 million by the start of PSL’s tenth season, noting that fans had established it as “the company’s most popular seasonal beverage of all time” (Starbucks 2013). Although the PSL was celebrated as a company and cultural success in 2013, one year later it was firmly hitched to discussions of white female identity and consumerism as both a dismissive, racially coded slur and a rallying counterpoint.

PSLs as a racially coded slur! Now I’m glad I never bought one.

“. . . But why did PSLs become the symbol of basic white girlness? Why did they stick even more than UGGs, yoga pants, or scented candles? The context and composition of the PSL might be revealing. Prior to fall 2015, PSLs did not actually contain pumpkin. Luxury items, they cost far more than plain cups of coffee, yet do not provide tangible extra nutrition other than that in milk. Actual pumpkins, in contrast, contribute vitamin A, beta-carotenoids, fiber, and potassium (Savoie and Hedstrom 2008).”

“. . . Extending Simon’s frame to pumpkins and race, the excesses of calories, profligate sweetness, whipped cream, and heady aroma position them solidly as luxury items. PSLs are quintessential “postneed” uses of pumpkin. We no longer need to consume pumpkins for caloric subsistence. Instead, we demonstrate consumer savvy and gleeful excess by choosing the particular comforts of status-demonstrating Starbucks PSLs. In fact, had they significant actual pumpkin, had they strong associations with healthy vegetables or vitamins, PSLs would fail these consumers.”

“. . . The status symbol is not any over-the-top caloric, sweet drink, nor does it come from just any place. Starbucks PSLs are products of coffee shop culture, with its gendered and racial codes.”

Having established that drinking a PSL in public is equivalent to wearing Klan robes, the authors move on to magazines that feature “decorative gourd season.”

  • Touting decorative gourds and pumpkin carving is also a sign of white privilege and racial bias.

“Gone are days when a kitchen knife making triangle eyes, nose, and an uneven grin sufficed for pumpkin carving. Stencils, paint, specialty gourds, and dedicated battery-powered or leather-encased artisanal carving tools combine with multilevel displays, electric lights, or expensive candles to mark the season. Even when people are absent, labor (of self or paid others), leisure, and aspiration are implied. We move from a pumpkin-spiced world where race was (over)stated to one of allusions, implications, elisions, and obfuscations of race, class, and imagined rurality.”

“. . . Even more than PSLs, pumpkins of decorative gourd season and lifestyle magazines signal privilege—class privilege certainly, but also white privilege—encompassing power, lack of worry, and leisure. Like lattes’ power, this privilege needs work.”

Yeah, work on the part of the authors, desperate to have Their Own Original Thesis, a requirement for joining the Regressive Club. Finally, there’s this:

  • Pumpkins were the subject of a television show, Punkin Chunkin, that identified the destruction of pumpkins with fun “whiteness”. I’ve never seen this show, but apparently it involves a bunch of guys who use elaborate methods to destroy pumpkins. Here’s a video clip:

What’s the significance of this? Well, pumpkins. Here we see Powell and Engelhardt becoming theologians: simply making up stuff to buttress their preconceived thesis. (This confirmation bias is characteristic of the po-mo papers I’ve highlighted about glaciology, yoga, and similar attempts at mass guilt-tripping.)

“When rural reality shows feature working-class residents in the South, itself an othered place symbolizing in shorthand fraught race relations, viewers can be twice-distant voyeurs. Portraying the behavior of characters in such shows as not only atypical, but also located in dark and scary versions of rural landscapes, reality television can trade on shame and fascination (Stewart 1996; D. Bell 1997; McPherson 2003; Romine 2014). But the nonthreatening, idealized, and normalized settings of Punkin Chunkin and its pumpkins position both viewers and competitors as safe, fun, and, as with PSLs and decorative gourds, predominantly white.”

That paragraph has every trope of postmodernism, including “othering”. And how they manage to make these show into a celebration of whiteness is beyond me. Seriously, the authors have drunk the Kool-Aid here, for one could easily, just based on the clip above, make the opposite case.

So what’s the conclusion here? What have the authors accomplished? Or, as H. L. Mencken said about Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (one of the funniest and greatest book reviews of all time), “What are the sweating professors trying to say?”

You got me. The whole point, it seems, is to associate pumpkins with whiteness. And even if you buy that tortured thesis, what are you supposed to do? Stop drinking PSLs? Stop decorating pumpkins at Halloween? The authors don’t tell us, for they are content to associate a squash with race privilege and move on to their next paper. The ending:

“Whiteness associated with pumpkins marks who resides where on the spectrum of U.S. social power. The entrenchment of such associations in daily lives and the spaces and places in which they are lived create the environments of Keene versus Ferguson—specific perils of today’s pumpkins. Accumulation of critical, relational, and contextual analyses, including things seemingly as innocuous as pumpkins, points the way to a food studies of humanities and geography, that helps make visible the racial, gendered, classed, and placed politics of contemporary life in the United States.

When Ferguson activists wrote RACISM and WHITE PRIVILEGE on pumpkins, they destabilized the whiteness of pumpkins and the comfort and normalization accompanying it. Bringing pumpkins into the demonstration, and then smashing them on the ground to show outrage at injustice (as opposed to the “holiday mischief” generally ascribed to pumpkin smashing), activists brought pumpkins into a space where racial inequality and instability could not be ignored or glossed over. Their actions made the white privilege encoded in pumpkins explicit and challenged its future.”

michelle-with-white-pumpkin
The unbearable heaviness of privilege
 ____________

Powell, L. J. and E. S. D. Engelhardt. 2016. The perilous whiteness of pumpkins. GeoHumanities 1:414-432. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1099421

The Gadfather mocks postmodernism

June 7, 2016 • 10:00 am

In this short (3.5-minute) video, evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad reads the abstract of a recent postmodern article on transsexuaity. (You can find the article, from the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, here.)

Reading these abstracts is a great exercise in showing the Emperor’s nudity, and I may do one of these myself (it’s a doozy!). I had thought that postmodernism was on the wane, but this article, and other pomo pieces equally risible, are from this year.

h/t: Gregory

The Atlantic: Genes are overrated; science doesn’t progress towards truth. Me: Wrong on both counts

May 22, 2016 • 11:30 am

The Atlantic has a review of Siddhartha’s new book on genetics; the review is by Nathaniel Comfort, a professor at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and carries the provocative title of “Genes are overrated.”

I haven’t yet read Mukherjee’s book, so I won’t comment on its content except to say that the reviews have been generally positive but mixed, as Comfort’s is. I want instead to concentrate briefly on Comfort’s attitude towards science and genes.

One of the criticisms Comfort levels at Mukherjee is that he holds a “whiggish” view of genetics; that is, he sees genetics’ history as being one of progressive understanding. To Comfort, that’s a misleading way of describing science, which, to him, doesn’t progress toward deeper understanding of reality—like building an edifice of understanding—but acts simply as a bulldozer, plowing under theories that are shown to be wrong. Some quotes (my emphasis):

The antidote to such Whig history is a Darwinian approach. Darwin’s great insight was that while species do change, they do not progress toward a predetermined goal: Organisms adapt to local conditions, using the tools available at the time. So too with science. What counts as an interesting or soluble scientific problem varies with time and place; today’s truth is tomorrow’s null hypothesis—and next year’s error.

. . . The point is not that this [a complex view of how genes work; see below] is the correct way to understand the genome. The point is that science is not a march toward truth. Rather, as the author John McPhee wrote in 1967, “science erases what was previously true.” Every generation of scientists mulches under yesterday’s facts to fertilize those of tomorrow.

“There is grandeur in this view of life,” insisted Darwin, despite its allowing no purpose, no goal, no chance of perfection. There is grandeur in a Darwinian view of science, too. The gene is not a Platonic ideal. It is a human idea, ever changing and always rooted in time and place. To echo Darwin himself, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the laws laid down by Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, endless interpretations of heredity have been, and are being, evolved.

Comfort is correct that science never knows when it’s reached the absolute, never-to-be-changed truth: there is no bell that goes off in our heads saying “ding ding ding: you’re there, and need go no further.” And a true Whiggish view of history—one that implies there’s an inevitable and unswerving path from error to truth, without any dead ends, mistakes, paths toward error, or roadblocks, is also a distortion, one that Matthew also criticized in his review of Mukherjee’s book in Nature.

But this doesn’t mean Comfort is right in arguing that everything we think we know will inevitably be demolished by future research. There are simply some things that are so unlikely to be falsified that we can see them not only as provisional truths, but as nearly absolute truths. A normal water molecule, for instance, has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and life evolved on it, with all tetrapods descending from ancestral fish. Bodies attract each other with a force inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. DNA is the purveyor of heredity, and in most organisms is a double helix. AIDS is caused by infection with a virus that attacks our immune system. You can all think of a gazillion more such “truths”—asssertions that you’d bet your house on.

Yes, science refines our understanding, and some theories, like Newton’s laws, are found to be special cases of deeper theories, like quantum mechanics. But to say that science is not a march toward truth, but a simple erasure of the false, is not only simplistic, but even a bit tautological: if we keep eliminating what doesn’t stand up, and keep adumbrating new theories, we will usually arrive at a more correct understanding of nature. For example, smallpox was once thought to be due to the wrath of gods. That theory was plowed under by the view that it was spread from person to person, and then to the notion that one could prevent it via inoculation. That, in turn, led to the recognition that the disease was caused by a virus, and then to the preparation of effective vaccines using live, attenuated viruses. The result: we understand fully how to get rid of the disease, and it’s been eliminated from our planet. In what sense is this not due to progressive homing in on the truth? We can use the laws of physics to land probes on comets. In what sense is that not due to a better understanding of how bodies move and interact, and not just a dispelling of what is false?

I see this kind of postmodernism infecting a lot of scientific writing, and it’s misguided; no, it’s simply wrong. 

Comfort also errs, I think, in claiming (as did Evelyn Fox Keller did in her 2000 book The Century of the Gene) that the gene is now pretty much a useless concept, both in definition and in action. (I critically reviewed that book in Nature; pdf available on request.) Comfort:

This handful of errors, drawn from a sackful of options, illustrates a larger point. The Whig interpretation of genetics is not merely ahistorical, it’s anti-scientific. If Copernicus displaced the Earth from the center of the universe and Darwin displaced humanity from the pinnacle of the organic world, a Whig history of the gene puts a kind of god back into our explanation of nature. It turns the gene into an eternal, essential thing awaiting elucidation by humans, instead of a living idea with ancestors, a development and maturation—and perhaps ultimately a death.

. . . Ironically, the more we study the genome, the more “the gene” recedes. A genome was initially defined as an organism’s complete set of genes. When I was in college, in the 1980s, humans had 100,000; today, only about 20,000 protein-coding genes are recognized. Those that remain are modular, repurposed, mixed and matched. They overlap and interleave. Some can be read forward or backward. The number of diseases understood to be caused by a single gene is shrinking; most genes’ effects on any given disease are small. Only about 1 percent of our genome encodes proteins. The rest is DNA dark matter. It is still incompletely understood, but some of it involves regulation of the genome itself. Some scientists who study non-protein-coding DNA are even moving away from the gene as a physical thing. They think of it as a “higher-order concept” or a “framework” that shifts with the needs of the cell. The old genome was a linear set of instructions, interspersed with junk; the new genome is a dynamic, three-dimensional body—as the geneticist Barbara McClintock called it, presciently, in 1983, a “sensitive organ of the cell.”

Yes, gene action is complicated, but the notion of a “gene” is not only not near death, but still extremely useful. Even if many diseases are caused by many different genes, they’re still genes, which I’ll define as “a segment of DNA that codes for a protein or an RNA molecule that regulates protein-coding genes.” In fact, there are many diseases and conditions—Landsteiner blood type, Rh type, Tay-Sachs disease, Huntington’s disease, sickle-cell anemia, color-blindness, and so on—that are caused by mutations in single genes, and can be effectively understood (and used in genetic counseling) by considering them as “single gene traits.” These are said to number over 10,000.

I’ve put at the bottom a discussion from Matthew’s book, Life’s Greatest Secret, about of the notion of “gene” and how it was questioned and then widely accepted.

And why the modern concept of a gene turns it into “kind of god” baffles me. The notion of genes, and of DNA as the molecule that carries them, has been immensely useful, and “true in the scientific sense. Does that make them into “gods”? Only to a postmodernist who resents the hegemony of scientific truth.

As for genes being a “higher order concept”, a “shifting framework” or a “three-dimensional body,” well, that’s not something that I, as a geneticist, am familiar with. Perhaps those concepts are adumbrated in the “science studies” departments—the same places where truths are seen as relative and privileged.

Let me add that most of Comfort’s review is okay, but then at the end he veers off into pomo la-la land. The usefulness of the idea of “genes” will survive: it survived Keller’s attack and will survive Comfort’s. But what I see as damaging is the notion that science doesn’t progress towards some kind of truth, or greater understanding of reality. It mystifies me how anyone familiar with the history of science can say that.

And if genes are overrated, it’s news to me. They are the bearers of heredity, the switches of development, and the coders of bodies. Without the notion of genes, and of the genetic code described so well in Matthew’s latest book, we’d be back in the days before 1900.

________

APPENDIX (!): Excerpts from Life’s Greatest Secret:

For much of the 1950s, scientists had felt uncomfortable about the word ‘gene’. In 1952, the Glasgow-based Italian geneticist Guido Pontecorvo highlighted the existence of four different definitions of the word that were regularly employed by scientists and which were sometimes mutually contradictory. A gene could refer to a self-replicating part of a chromosome, the smallest part of a chromosome that can show a mutation, the unit of physiological activity or, finally, the earliest definition of a gene – the unit of hereditary transmission. Pontecorvo questioned whether the gene could any longer be seen as a delimited part of a chromosome, and suggested instead that it was better seen as a process and that the word gene should therefore be used solely to describe the unit of physiological action.

. . . Although Pontecorvo’s suggestion was not taken up, scientists recognised the problem. The debate over words and concepts continued at the Johns Hopkins University symposium on ‘The Chemical Basis of Heredity’, which was held in June 1956. By this time it was generally accepted as a working hypothesis that all genes in all organisms were made of DNA and that the Watson–Crick double helix structure was also correct. Joshua Lederberg, a stickler for terminology, declared audaciously that ‘“gene” is no longer a useful term in exact discourse’ He would no doubt be surprised to learn that it is still being used, more than half a century later.

. . . The multiple roles of nucleic acids have expanded far beyond the initial definition of a gene as the fundamental unit of inheritance and show the inadequacy of Beadle and Tatum’s 1941 suggestion that each gene encodes an enzyme. As a consequence, some philosophers and scientists have suggested that we need a new definition of ‘gene’, and have come up with various complex alternatives. Most biologists have ignored these suggestions, just as they passed over the argument by Pontecorvo and Lederberg in the 1950s that the term ‘gene’ was obsolete.

In 2006, a group of scientists came up with a cumbersome definition of ‘gene’ that sought to cover most of the meanings: ‘A locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions. In reality, definitions such as ‘a stretch of DNA that is transcribed into RNA’, or ‘a DNA segment that contributes to phenotype/function’, seem to work in most circumstances. There are exceptions, but biologists are used to exceptions, which are found in every area of the study of life. The chaotic varieties of elements in our genome resist simple definitions because they have evolved over billions of years and have been continually sieved by natural selection. This explains why nucleic acids and the cellular systems that are required for them to function do not have the same strictly definable nature as the fundamental units of physics or chemistry.