Who tends to suffer consequences from symbolic violence? Who tends not to suffer consequences from symbolic violence? What can be said and what cannot be said? What is heard, when, and by whom? And what, though said, seems never to be acknowledged? There can be symbolic violence in words unspoken, words that people are afraid to say or are made to feel ashamed for knowing that they – for the sake of justice or self-preservation -- must say

the Atlantic in September 2015 by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Trigger warnings have become standard fare on some college campuses over the past few years

younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their 40s and 50s

neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change

let’s acknowledge that being queer no longer automatically means being brutalized

let’s recognize these internal wars for the distraction they have become

Let’s call an end to the finger snapping moralism

When groups that share common cause, utopian dreams and a joined mission find fault with each other

These younger folks, with their gay-straight alliances, their supportive parents and their new right to marry regularly issue calls for “safe space.”

youth internalize narratives of damage that they themselves may or may not have actually experienced

have come to think of themselves as communities of naked, shivering, quaking little selves – too vulnerable to take a joke, too damaged to make one

and some students, accustomed to trotting out stories of painful events in their childhoods (dead pets/parrots, a bad injury in sports) in college applications and other such venues

Let me be clear – saying that you feel harmed by another queer person’s use of a reclaimed word like tranny and organizing against the use of that word is NOT social activism. It is censorship.

newer generations of queers seem only to have heard part of this story

any kind of representation or association that resembles or even merely represents the theme of the original painful experience

politics of the aggrieved

will cut out the offensive parts; or, as in the case of “Trannyshack,” the name of the club was changed.

a cultural event, a painting, a play, a speech, a casual use of slang, a characterization, a caricature and so on whether or not the “damaging” speech/characterization occurs within a complex aesthetic work

it is becoming difficult to speak, to perform, to offer up work nowadays without someone, somewhere claiming to feel hurt,

the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them into affectionate terms of endearment. When we obliterate terms like “tranny” in the quest for respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place!

focused on language, slang and naming.

And as people “call each other out” to a chorus of finger snapping, we seem to be rapidly losing all sense of perspective and instead of building alliances, we are dismantling hard fought for coalitions.

the triggered generation

the re-emergence of a rhetoric of harm and trauma that casts all social difference in terms of hurt feelings and that divides up politically allied subjects into hierarchies of woundedness

recognize that the enemy was not among us but embedded within new, rapacious economic systems

poorly phrased question, another person’s bad word choice

humor is something that feminists in particular, but radical politics in general, are accused of lacking. Recent controversies within queer communities around language, slang, satirical or ironic representation and perceptions of harm or offensive have created much controversy with very little humor recently, leading to demands for bans, censorship and name changes

censors

outrageous

The trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense.

And so, in this era of LGBT rights and recognition, let the butch stand as all that cannot be absorbed into systems of signification, legitimation, legibility, recognition and legality.

uickly transitioned to trans leaving the category of butch stranded like a missing link,

as rare as gay men on football teams or straight ladies in the power tools section at Home Depot

transgenderism

How, then, did we leap, in the last year or so, from uniform expressions of disgust, suspicion and dismay directed at the masculine female form to empathy, recognition and even acceptance?

Or, in an era of unprecedented visibility for transgender embodiment, does butch represent an obstinate fragment of an older paradigm, still capable of generating both fascination and fear?

the gay marriage era

a new generation

to believe that even if we cannot shield each other from harm, we can at least make the odd dead parrot joke in good humor and with impunity

I apologize to all those offended by my article. And to those who were not offended, it was not for lack of trying (joke)

to feel like a woman when you don’t have the body of a woman and to act like (and even get yourself the body of) a woman

There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument.

related to compliance with Title IX

There is a certain hubris to the notion that a mere academic writer is actually inveming. But the hubris is more than tempered by the self -evident modesty of the returns. So why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-serio usness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking-and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you arc adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending irs growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly-well, just hang it up. It is nor that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a question of right and wrong-nothing impor­ tant ever is. Rather, it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you arc busy critiquing you arc less busy augmenting. You are that much less fo stering. There are times when debunking is necessary. But, if applied in a blanket manner, adopted as a general operating principle, it is coun­ terproductive. Foster or debunk. It's a strategic question.

A well-de- veloped color, then, appears to partake of the "body" metaphor more than of the "painting" metaphor, for it is an integrated, unitary, natural- seeming part of the argument that persuades by its appearance of truth (lnst. 11.1.58-59), while a speech whose co/ores are discernibly "added-on" and not integrated fails to persuade

A common color for one side makes the brothers enemies

All such arguments involve invent- ing a "back story," a narrative of events preceding those specified in the thema, that explains the motivations of the defendant or plaintiff, thereby casting their actions as described in the tltema in a more sympathetic or invidious light

color as overtly added on, artificial, and ornamental, while the body metaphor usu- ally presents it as (seemingly) inherent, natural, and essential-sometimes in contrast to fucus, "dye" or "makeup," that is applied on the surface

for Engl is h ‘ sen se ’ (like Old Fren ch sen s ) is used for the w h ole h u m a n com plex o f tho ug ht, feeli ng, a nd perception, that kind of k no w ledge w h ich i s based in se nsor y e xperience

all the senses can be reduced to touch because of the atomic films touching the eye.

The snail's vein was removed, mixed with salt, and boiled until most of the flesh had been deposited. Varying the mixtures and boiling times produced different shades of colour.

flag up associations with flowers and femininity

exposed the limitations of assuming that colour is straightfor- wardly a visual phenomenon

the ancients were sensitive primarily to such things as luminosity, saturation and texture, or even less obvious variables such as smell, agitation and liquidity.

glancing, glimpsing, scanning, surveying, and other forms of casual or disinterested looking, staring

we will all be- come disabled if we live long enough

the act of proposing that communities forget select aspects of their institutional memory directs public attention to the question of what those communities have remem- bered, according to which rhetorical forms and limitations, and in accord with whose interests

digital memory systems radically augment the scope and dura- tion of personal ritemory far beyond the lifespan of the person in question

monument

Forgetting allows such monstrous crimes to exist in the absence of moral response and thereby compounds their destruction

Forgetting is psychologically unhealthy: it leads to repression,

Things like how you don't pick your passions, they pick you

too highly developed olfactory sensibility, then perceived as a symptom of hysterical hyperesthesia

the sailor had essentially lost the sharpness of his senses; he had become an insensitive being

frequently attracted people who felt frustrated, suffocated by their family, and lacking other means of self-expression than private writing. This explains the over representation of women and homosexuals within the ranks of the diarists

just when the outlines of the social order were becoming blurred. Smell, in particular, the sense of transitions (Howes 1987), of thresholds and margins, which reveals the processes by which beings and things are transformed, fascinated at this period of confusion, whilst the sense of sight was no longer able to read the hierarchies with the same assurance

There is no better source for anyone who seeks to understand the historicity of the affective mechanisms, to discover the configuration and functioning of the systems of emotions, or discern the ways in which the senses were educated and employed

armor

However much a boundary, it is always a permeable membrane between self and other.

warns us against equating changes in scientific understanding of a sense such as smell, what is called “osmology,” with experiential transformations. Attending to the history of smell, he tells us, is also valuable in undermining simple binary oppositions between boundaried individuals and their englobing environ- ment, the basis of Cartesian subject/object dualisms. Instead, it helps situate us in a more fluid, immersive context, where such stark oppositions are understood as themselves contingent rather than necessary

our lack of hardwired patterns of behavior

to research ‘sensory perception and reception’ requires methods that ‘are capable of grasping “the most profound type of knowledge [which] is not spoken of at all and thus inaccessible to ethnographic observation or interview” (Bloch 1998: 46)’ (Bendix 2000: 41). Thus sensory ethnography discussed in the book does not privilege any one type of data or research method. Rather, it is open to multiple ways of knowing and to the exploration of and reflection on new routes to knowledge.

But since all likeness and relationship is IJieasurable to an individual, necessarily all are more or less lovers of themselves

habits [are pleasurable]; for the habitual has already become, as it were, natural; for habit is something like nature

with the

plants

harking', the second 'sounding

'rbe concepts appear and reappellT like II revolving cast of characters, joining forces or interfer ing with each other in a tumble of abstract intrigues-at rimes (I admit) barely controlled

repression docs not apply

Rather, it is a question of dosage

Critical thinking disavows its own inventiveness as much as possible.

Habit is an acquired automatic self-r egulation. It resides in the flesh

without qualitatively changing enough to warrant a new name

The concept of nature concerns modification not essence

We arc looking at only one dimension of reality

it hits the target.

Gridlock

Other attachments matter for rhetoric

a feminine speaking style

Sensation alone is meaningless

stirred air stirs meaning

the language of electricity — stimulant, reactor, and voltage

be disseminated digitally

peripatetic video

extradiegetic sense experience

might represent olfactory experiences, let alone reproduce them

n the head and the body, in the way of listening

rising steam or smoke evokes smells of fire, incense, or cooking

Reading experiences are themselves sensorial

descriptively captioned video stills

There are good reasons for writing.

pain and illness (e.g. 1997, 2007

‘it is through catching a whiff of oneself, and being able to distinguish that scent from all the other odours that surround one, that one arrives at a sense of one's own identity