I wrote previously about the dust up caused by Sarah Kendzior’s penchant for intentionally misreading things. She does that a lot. It’s pretty silly.
Anyways, she’s at it again:
Last RT is re: Elizabeth Stoker, who said that I had to be “disciplined” through “character assassination”, as I received rape threats
This tweet is in reference to a post Elizabeth Stoker wrote titled “Disciplining Women.” In it, she makes a very lucid argument regarding the heinous ways in which women with unorthodox views are disciplined into shutting up:
But unorthodox views can, especially for women in left academic feminism, result in precisely that form of discipline: withdrawal of community, overwhelming assassination of character, a very sudden onslaught of negative feedback and demands for apology. It strikes me that this method of disciplining members is another symptom of the problem Amber gets at in her article: the community is not so concerned with what is true or false as with who is good and who is bad.
This has been a facet of the left academic community I’m associated with (and do enjoy the fellowship of) that has distressed me for sometime, and I’m glad Amber took the time to flesh the problem out, even if the process turned out to be a bit more performative than she may have intended.
There is no mystery as to the point here. It is that when women express unorthodox views — e.g. Frost’s objections to certain usages of the word “bro” — a huge swarm of outrage bots are sent their way to discipline them. Through the proximate mechanisms of “withdrawal of community, overwhelming assassination of character, [and] a very sudden onslaught of negative feedback and demands for apology,” non-conforming women are disciplined away from speaking their minds.
This does not say that Sarah Kendzior should be “disciplined” through “character assassination.” It doesn’t come even remotely close to saying that. Nobody could ever confuse it for saying that.
(Somewhat amusingly, Kendzior has actually provided a perfect example of the sort of disciplining — by any means necessary including obvious lies — Stoker’s point is remarking upon.)
But like I said before, this is par for the course for Kendzior. Frost’s argument regarding the inappropriateness of using the cutesy tag of “bro” when describing seriously heinous violence against women was not unclear. Kendzior intentionally misrepresented it. My prior argument about the asymmetric way class and gender identity is treated within the anti-oppressive language framework was not unclear. Kendzior intentionally misrepresented it. And here we are again. Nobody who can read would ever derive from that blockquoted text above what Kendzior tweeted it as saying.
Either Kendzior is a deceptive moron or she has literacy problems. I can’t say for sure which it is, but I suspect it’s more the former than the latter.