By CR on Tuesday, 25 September 2018
Category: Race, Culture, Nation

Is Physics Sexist?! By Brian Simpson

     My son was looking on Quora, the geek science site, and saw a “joke’ question about whether a non-sexist rocket could be designed. The writers thought that it was a joke to regard the rocket as a phallic symbol, and played it for laughs. Obviously, these science guys have not been following what feminists have been saying about the gun debate, which is clearly a symbolic castration. But, to prove my point, I said to my son, that using the new Ducky search engine, I would find in under 15 seconds a crazy mainstream article that not only went far beyond the claim that rockets are sexist, but physics itself is.
  https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/quantum-physics-oppressive-marginalized-people/
  https://read.dukeupress.edu/the-minnesota-review/article-abstract/2017/88/69/28590/Assembled-BodiesReconfiguring-Quantum-Identities

     Here is the abstract, and if anyone can understand it, they  deserve a free cookie:

“In this semimanifesto, I approach how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies can (or always already do) ally with feminist anti-oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, or of work) is not stagnant, and new materialist feminisms help to recognize how multiple phenomena work together to behave in what can become legible at any given moment as a body. By utilizing the materiality of conceptions about connectivity often thought to be merely theoretical, by taking a critical look at the noncentralized and multiple movements of quantum physics, and by dehierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to reconfigure structures of value, longevity, and subjectivity in ways explicitly aligned with anti-oppression practices and identity politics. Combining intersectionality and quantum physics can provide for differing perspectives on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for enabling apparatuses that allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, and for practices of accountability.”

     Ok, I did not get a cookie either. Words, words, and more words, signifying nothing, if I have garbled my Shakespeare correctly. What seems to be “said” in the paper, I guess, is that Newtonian mechanics is based upon the notion that entities are separate and binary, and for the postmodern feminist, that means that hierarchy and oppression follows immediately. No use using logic here to ask for a justification by evidence, because that’s male logic, also based on dichotomies. But, never mind that quantum mechanics, which is supposed to be ‘feminist” probably because of quantum entanglement and non-local effects, is still full of dichotomies. No doubt it is col to throw around the word “quantum.”

     Feminism itself is based upon dichotomies such as good feminism, bad masculinity, and never seeks a dialectical resolution of its own paradoxes as cultural Marxists from other areas would. It is crude all the way down.

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