Getting my strop on
In spite of having my yoga class today, I still finally let out an increasing groundswell of strop at someone on one of my listservs who has been being annoying for about a week now. (Maybe, however, I did it in a more serene and caring way than I might otherwise have done...)
I.e. asking a question aimed at a previous post which was (to my mind) a) irrelevant and immaterial to the post in question b) an example of Mi Knowingz and Mi Big Thortz, let me show u them (and this has manifested further in later postings in the discussion) c) making presumptions of ignorance &/or naivety about the terms and concepts in the precursor post (and of other posters) that's unwarranted and unjustified.
The more I read this person's posts, the more I wonder if they've actually read anything at all recent representing the burgeoning historiography of the area upon which the listserv focuses, because it doesn't sound like it, what it sounds like is that they're proceeding on their experiences in an allied area, about 20 years ago.
On account of, yes, the people person is citing may be Big Dead White Male Important Thinkers, and they may have something to contribute to our understanding of the field and to inform our analyses, but we don't have to take them as Holy Writ. Does anyone today in that particular field do the Foucault-by-the-numbers thing that I encountered in my earlier days in it?
I strongly suspect this person of wanting some Grand Unified Theory of Everything to apply to a really diverse field.
And sort of related to this, just because somebody has a really great idea that's intellectually productive in some way, or really illuminates something, you are not, actually, obligated to take on everything else they believed. One of my yays about Stella Browne is that while she found the ideas of Freud and psychoanalysis more generally very helpful, she was also right there with the critique of phallocentricity and the tendency of some people in the field to reinforce the social and political status quo.
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