Feminist poststructuralist copybook headings, Kippled.

VP cited this woman. From her thesis, which is as good an example of how modern feminists have moved to what Popper would have called a total theory. Nothing can contradict their ideology: all will be made to fit, and it cannot be tested, as there is no way to make predictions which are falsifiable.

This study was framed through the lens of poststructuralist feminist thought to provide a lens through which I explored how power is gendered (Hesse-Biber, 2014). Poststructuralism “rejects objectivity and the notions of an absolute truth and single reality,” and “knowledge is complicated, contradictory, and contingent to a certain social context and historical context” (Hesse-Biber, 2014, p. 44). For poststructural feminists, emphasis is placed on language and discourse, “regarded as constitutive of experience and not simply representative of it” (HesseBiber, 2014, p. 44). As such, discourse analysis is a key tool of poststructuralist researchers because the link between power and knowledge can be seen by exploring language-in-use (Hesse-Biber, 2014; Lazar, 2005). Analysis of texts looks for practical ideologies to uncover what is framed as logical ways of thinking that, in reality, perpetuate inequality (Hesse-Biber, 2014). Since patriarchal gender ideology is structural, it is enacted in institutions and reflected in institutional texts, therefore, “The task of feminist CDA is to examine how power and dominance are discursively produced and/or resisted in a variety of ways through textual representations of gendered social practices” (Lazar, 2005, p. 10). Through a framework of poststructuralist feminist thought, this discourse analysis uncovers the ways that gendered practices that favor men are represented and replicated in the syllabus.

If you are going to be scholarly, consider something older, written by someone who has been there, and has tested the world. For the world is not words, but acts and consequences. The poststructuralists conflate what you say with what you do: forgetting that the most evil ideologies cloak themselves in righteousness.

And forget that their actions lead to consequences.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

1919

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I Make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place.
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Heading said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

* * * * *

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire —
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Rudyard Kipling

I have read enough of this thesis to see poststructuralism deny the fire, vomit and mire. I suggest that the author reads more Kipling. Better still, leave the university and raise a family, from which she may gain the wisdom to repent of this false scholarship.

2 thoughts on “Feminist poststructuralist copybook headings, Kippled.

  1. Kipling seems to be (once again) spot on for the times in which we live. Science as a whole has been drifting this way–unfalsifiable and all-encompassing, much like Media and Government. Strange coincidence, eh?

    Well done, Weka!

  2. “For poststructural feminists, emphasis is placed on language and discourse,…”
    How’s this then, dear. “What a total crock of s—“

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