Oh, Those Pesky Pronouns! March 2, 2013
Posted by Summerspeaker in Anarchism, Queer politics, Transhumanism.trackback
From the lovely Dale Carrico:
But more concretely what is happening in this instance is that you are pretending to be reasonable while identifying as a transhumanist — and all that while blathering on about how radical it is to pretend the sea is made of lemonade and how you are smashing the state when you are sleepwalking on a dlancefloor and how you are smashing patriarchy by castigating actual feminists for not keeping up with the latest fashionable theory-head pronoun choices and all the rest of your incessant bullshit — and there is simply no reason to extend to you the pretense that are reasonable in the least.
I consider the bolded section rather telling. As far as I can recall, this is the main spat Dale and I have had over pronouns. I read it as rather civil and see any castigation on my part as targeting Dale’s overall tone and insistent agism rather than the pronoun issue. I’m a bit confused why Dale now cites this as the key example of my purported posturing and frivolity. In my experience with anarchist and queer circles, it’s utterly standard to give preferred pronouns along with your name during introductions. I interpret the practice as a gesture of respect for transgender politics and trans individuals. If that’s fashionable, it’s a form of fashion I can firmly get behind. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling whenever people seem to care that I prefer gender-neutral pronouns.
Queering the Singularity 
Yeah, that’s kind of disturbing…I can agree with him on transhumanism though, and I can understand him thinking anarchism is stupid, certainly very used to that opinion myself.
Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to comment on what I remember him saying on anarchism. To quote him: “The state is not essentially violent.” That obviously depends on how you’re defining “the state”, “essentially” and “violence”. I’m not sure how he is, so I’ll just give my own. The state is a system in which a small privileged minority maintain their domination over the rest of the population via military might, economic exploitation and various authoritarian ideologies. Now, what is violence? In my opinion, any meaningful definition of violence cannot merely be restricted to assault. It may be physical harm or threats of such, it may be economic coercion, etc. Now, obviously, not everything the state does is violent per se. But it certainly depends on violence in the sense of poverty and economic exploitation, wars, kidnapping and imprisonment, political repression, and, one way or another, slavery (in the forms of chattel slavery, wage slavery, debt, whatever). Now whatever you might think about these definitions, clearly these are features that all states have shared to one degree or another. Is it for the greater good? Well, I think the answer is clearly no, but it’s certainly possible that there’s no other reasonable option. But I hope not.
Dale responds as follows:
I consider the bolded section a substantive critique. I specifically avoided using an image with a human in it as a way to migate the agism involved. Here my desire to be cute may have indeed gotten the better of me.