a lot of scientists don’t act on scientific ideals; a lot of them are actually bad people, who in both their professional and private lives are trying to get whatever they can get away with.
This is something I haven’t mentioned even when writing or talking about something closely related, which is why you shouldn’t trust the conclusions of a scientific study. I mean, a single scientific study. Because, I say, a single scientific study is typically using a single model, or studying a single population; you don’t know if the results really generalize. Or there could have just been some honest mistake; my go-to example is the paper about the faster-than-light neutrino. One of my friends, when I broke the news (apparently he hadn’t heard) that this turned out to be an artifact, he was kind of angry at the authors. But, although I don’t know the details, I don’t think they did anything wrong; my understanding is they made the measurement and they reported it. What would have been wrong would be to not report the measurement because they know the conclusion is impossible. So, even when everyone is acting as they should, sometimes the conclusion of a paper is misleading. That’s why we have reviews and meta-analyses, which can cite hundreds of studies. That’s how we know what’s really a general principle, that’s how we can make statements about what’s happening in the real world instead of one laboratory or one population.
But it must also be remembered that everyone is not acting as they should, so you have even more false and misleading results than you would in the best case scenario. These people will happily publish results that do not meet the standards of evidence of their field, if no one is forcing them to meet the standards of evidence of their field, and reviewers usually do not catch everything.
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
Jesus Christ all of this
i think a lot of kids of tumblr have this vague grudge against ‘straightwashing academics’ that they actually picked up from their highschool curriculum, which is kind of a completely different thing. like, it’s not ‘academics’ that’s the problem when it comes to american teenagers being fed an extremely white, straight, patriarchical version of history; it’s your fucking government.
Thesis: the tendency in academia to regard “pure” sciences as more prestigious than applied sciences is just the sciencey version of the idea that a true gentleman has no practical skills.
The engineering faculty is throwing a christmas party and invited, among others, the deans of most other faculties, resulting almost immediately in hostility on all fronts.
Sociology starts by taking the piss at Business: “You know that what you’re doing is basically just the application of our theories, right?“
“Well, sociology, too, is just building on the application of our theories“, says Psychology.
“Which wouldn’t be possible without us laying the groundwork“, Neurology states, to which Biology responds: “Dude, that’s just what we were doing already, you just took off!“
“Okay, but it’s both basically applied chemistry, anyway”, Chemistry chimes in
“Yeah, but you too just apply our findings“, Physics rebuts
“Well, I think-“, Philosophy wants to add to the conversation, but is hit by a brick wrapped in graph paper flying through the window.
The note on it is by Mathematics and reads: “Holy shit someone come down here and pick me up! I can’t find the door of this hellcube“
My first lecture of this semester heavily involved the lecturer explaining that he has to have this argument with himself across different modules
Bonus points if you can get a slapfight going about whether philosophy is just applied mathematics, or vice versa!
do you ever read an article so bad that it makes you want to get a PhD so that you can publish a response and thinkshame the author’s opinions with authority
“thinkshame” is officially the greatest word we’ve come up with as a species.
oh my god DO NOT GO INTO ACADEMIA IF YOU ARE AT ALL UNCERTAIN ABOUT IT, holy shit. holllllly shit. red alert, do not pass go, do not feed the animals, do not do not do this. cannot stress enough how bad an idea that is. especially if you’re american.
people who benefit from academia are passionate, driven, and totally in love with their subject: psychology, history, biology, whatever. academia is emotionally and physically destructive: in any field, you are required to pour an absolute fuckton of time, energy, dedication, and MONEY into your education. you will be required to live an extremely unhealthy, high-stress lifestyle. at the end of it, you’re going to be scraping desperately for a job that probably won’t pay you enough to live comfortably for years, if ever. tenured positions are disappearing, unpaid internships continue to proliferate, etc etc. sexism, racism, and classism is still rampant.
do not go into academia unless you love something so much you are willing to sacrifice your financial, emotional, physical, and social well-being for it. a lot of people are, and we as a species are probably better off for it. but jesus fucking christ don’t put yourself through that meat grinder because your parents think you’re too smart for the trades, dude. the days where academia was a fast track to a cushy life were gone forty years ago, and only existed for white dudes, anyway. these days you are looking at a life of constant, crushing stress and poverty.
welding classes can take four months of training, and are often subsidized or low-cost or free, and you can be making 20-30$ an hour within a year if you’re good. starting pay is 11-15$. some welders make 60$. some welders make hundreds. look for a Women In Trades program, or start calling your local community colleges, or run a search for ‘trade schools’. look into construction jobs, carpentry, masonry, or CNC operation. a lot of manufacturing and construction jobs are still hiring and still paying a living wage. you can pursue academic interests on your own time, debt free.
oh also personally i was interested in welding because it’s a hands-on manufacturing discipline i haven’t done before! i’ve done woodworking and ceramics, and cnc operation works with metal but involves programming machines to do the work for you– it’s just the right thing for a lot of people, but i much prefer to get my hands dirty.
i’ve been thinking, career-wise, about starting with welding, then moving on to carpentry, plumbing, and finally air-conditioning, before ultimately saving the world from the fire nation.
just moving along like everyone else 