More on Abigail Shrier's book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and the trans campaign to have it canceled - previously here - via Richard in the comments.
Grace Lavery, an assistant professor in the English Department at Berkeley, wants her Twitter followers to steal copies of Shrier's book and burn them.
"I DO encourage followers to steal Abigail Shrier's book and burn it on a pyre," said Dr. Grace Lavery, a self-described "thug prof," "octopus-f**ker," and "demon."
Lavery is, of course, trans, and from her photo on the Berkeley website you can see that she's quite the little minx, with that coy yet beguiling look.
As outlined in her Research Description, she's interested in George Eliot:
My current book project, "Getting Better: Realism, Repetition, and the Rhetoric of Technique," explores the relationship between classic literary realism, especially in the work of George Eliot, and another modern genre: texts which offered practical instructions about apparently ineffable phenomena. Where Romantics had treated literary achievement as attained only by inspiration, Victorian realists insisted that it can – and must – be acquired through methodical labor, on the part of both writers and readers. “Getting Better” traces such rhetorics of technique through a range of realist and post-realist texts, revealing hitherto unexplored connections between Eliot’s fiction and various other discourses of asymptotic self-improvement, including: recovery narrative (“Janet’s Repentance” and Alcoholics Anonymous); psychoanalytic technique (Adam Bede and Freud’s Essays on Technique); the technique of brainwashing (Eliot’s ecclesiastical writings and work by and about cults); and sex tips (Romola, Middlemarch, and Marie Stopes). In light of these questions, I also reconsider the controversial question of Eliot’s transgender identification, exploring the techniques associated with gendered literary styles, the gendered question of reference throughout Eliot’s fiction but especially in Middlemarch, and the discourse of transgender identity known, in our present moment, as “realness.” Deriving its method from narrative theory, queer theory, and the late work of Michel Foucault on “technologies of the self,” “Getting Better” offers a new account of the rhetoric of technique in Eliot’s work, and a new history of realism’s sedimentation into post-Bildung and secular narratives of growth.
If you managed to get through that - actually quite lucid compared to some academic theory-drenched jargon - you'll have spotted that bit about "Eliot’s transgender identification". Mary Ann Evans, of course, adopted the pen name George Eliot simply to get herself published in an era when women were not expected to write serious novels. To anachronistically claim her now for the trans movement is a grotesque distortion, and manages to erase her achievements as a woman.
From Carrie-Anne Brownian, in a prescient 2016 piece:
A most disturbing development in the current climate of transactivist zealotry has been the posthumous transing of famous gender-defiant women. Women such as Joan of Arc, Mulan, Carson McCullers, Radclyffe Hall, Mountain Charley (Elsa Jane Forest Guerin), George Sand, and Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, to name but a few, are now being claimed as transmen. Like so many other things about the modern trans movement, this is inherently sexist and harmful to women, particularly young women just starting to figure out who they really are; young women who sorely need strong female role models. [...]
For much of recorded human history, even into the twentieth century, women who wanted to serve in combat, travel or live alone, work in most professions, get published, compete in sports, or conduct research felt compelled to disguise themselves as men. That didn’t make them transmen; it made them girls and women with no other options in a patriarchal, androcentric world. No one would have, for example, published George Eliot, or taken her seriously as a writer, had she used her birth name of Mary Ann Evans, just as Kathrine Switzer had to sign up for the Boston Marathon as K.V. Switzer as recently as 1967 because women weren’t allowed to compete.
This may be hard for liberal Westerners under the age of twenty-five to comprehend, but women have historically been denied access to positions of power, most careers, education, legal protections, politics, combat roles, club memberships, athletic competitions, and so forth, solely on the basis of being female. Women even had to fight for the right to use their own names on legal documents, instead of being forced to sign as Mrs. Husband’s Full Name, or to do anything of importance without a husband or father’s co-signature or permission. By anachronistically pretending all these brave, trailblazing women were truly men, the historical realities of institutionalized sexism and male privilege are written out of existence, and impressionable young people will be led to believe women haven’t played any kind of important role in history.
She forgot to mention Yentl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHFbltJSRxo
Posted by: Recruiting Animal | November 18, 2020 at 09:26 PM
Maybe we should steal George Eliot for the Zionist cause...
Posted by: Shir | November 20, 2020 at 10:08 PM