Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Language Debate Continues
My post from last Thursday, June 8th, "Anecdotes, Facts and Wetbacks" has generated more comments than any other Dougout post. It has been a very interesting discussion and Otto has made some excellent contributions to it. He has also just posted on his own experience from reading abstracts for an coming up in August "Feminist gibberish in academic conference abstract:"
Good lord!
This is off topic but very important, Oriana Fallaci is on trial in Italy for "defaming Islam." Fallaci is living in New York and most likely won't appear for her heresy trial. The feminists and academics who obsess about pronouns will remain silent on this.
It just keeps getting weirder. Big Tent links to this story on how the "Fighting Sioux," of the Unversity of North Dakota may have to sue the NCAA for harassing them about their name:
No PC speech/expression codes here.
While there were quite a few abstracts for the German diaspora conference I would have rejected that got accepted, one stands out as particularly bad. The title of the paper is "The Domestication of Radical Ideas and Colonial Spaces: The Case of Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche - Session: Gender Perspectives." Immediately it is apparent that the paper does not deal with the topic of the conference and is written in language that is alien to everybody outside of the ivory tower...
Finally there is the convoluted writing. I am still not sure what the abstract is about exactly. Only that it manages to use all the proper politically correct code words. I reproduce some of the more difficult to read sentences below.
"At issue in my exploration of colonialist activities is not to demonstrate female complicity with the colonial enterprise-as has been done by various explorations of colonialism-,but rather to turn Forster-Nietzsche into a case study for the female appropriation of it."
"While Forster-Nietzsche's duplicitous activities as the wife of the anti-Semite Forster reflect her political opportunism and the partial internalization of bourgeois moral codes pertaining to women, they also indicate her ambiguous stance toward and partial rebellion against the intellectual and social dependency implied by her role of female supporter of the enterprises of men."
"In domesticating her anti-Semitic husband's radical conservative and racist ideas in Paraguay, Forster-Nietzsche sets in motion a process of dispossession as she attempts to counteract her own subordination under the enterprises of men."
Can anybody translate any of the three sentences above into English?
Good lord!
This is off topic but very important, Oriana Fallaci is on trial in Italy for "defaming Islam." Fallaci is living in New York and most likely won't appear for her heresy trial. The feminists and academics who obsess about pronouns will remain silent on this.
It just keeps getting weirder. Big Tent links to this story on how the "Fighting Sioux," of the Unversity of North Dakota may have to sue the NCAA for harassing them about their name:
Perhaps the most amazing thing is that through all of this – except for stirring things up – you have accomplished nothing. Your stand against Indian nicknames and logos – a stand that seemed to start out against all references to races and national origin – fizzled before it started when you left out Irish, Celtics, Vandals, and a host of other names. Then, for highly convoluted, hypocritical, and in some instances mysterious reasons, you exempted the Aztecs and other American Indian nicknames at the outset and, following that, you exempted the use of Chippewa, the Utes, the Choctaws, the Catawbas, and the Seminoles, leaving the NCAA position on even American Indian nicknames about as solid as room-temperature Jell-O. All of this was, and remains, highly arbitrary and capricious.
It may be that we have indeed forfeited our rights to fairness and evenhandedness by becoming “volunteer” members of the NCAA, but we may need to find out for sure in the courts since there really is no other membership option for UND.
No PC speech/expression codes here.
# posted by Grant Jones @ 1:50 PM 
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Grant: Thanks for the link. Just a minor clarification the conference is still in the future. It will take place 23-27 August this year. I am just reading over the 66 abstracts now. They are available in the entirety on the web.
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