- Sorry, I only just now looked at your article. It already uses Connor's The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism which answers your question in spades. It notes that Daniel Bell, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Charles Jencks, and Ihab Hassan were working on the topic simultaneously in the 1970s and 1980s, but it wasn't until the 80s that Fredric Jameson synthesized (in part) the disparate work into a cohesive whole, at which point it was anthologized in the 1990s, and became transformed into a kind of pseudo-hypothesis (my words) in the humanities, forming the first notions of what became known as postmodern theory in academia, followed by work by Hans Bertens and John Frow. By the late 1990s, it transformed into a kind of philosophy and became associated with "postcolonialism, multiculturalism and identity politics", which was a newer formulation. Connor notes that in 1970, it focused on postmodernist literature; in 1980, it was postmodern architecture; while by 1990 with the fall of the Soviet Union, it became a discussion of cultural postmodernism. Connor argues that by the 2000s, it had transformed into discussions of legal, religious, and performance postmodernism. There is some indication in the book that Jean Baudrillard may have had a lot to do with introducing the discussion into academia, but he famously distanced himself from postmodernism. Frankly, I find the entire topic confusing and obfuscatory, so this will be my last comment on it. Just looking at Connor's book for ten minutes made me remember why I dislike this subject so much. It's just nonsense.
Viriditas (
talk) 23:33, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
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- There's no real commonality between "gender equality" and "gender ideology", except for a word of six letters. Some gender ideology fanatics are among the strictest in insisting on basically traditional gender roles -- if a child (even far younger than puberty) shows any non-traditional gender-role characteristics, then the extremists will insist the child is "trans". (So much for tomboys, etc.) For example, Susie Green's son liked wearing tutus and playing with girls' toys, and his father was uncomfortable with that behavior, so that was apparently pretty much it, from anything that she's ever said publicly -- he was dragged off to Thailand and castrated. Our
Susie Green article is mealy-mouthed when it says she "unexpectedly" resigned -- she had received severe criticism from a number of sources, and the organization Mermaids which she dominated for years was placed under a legal inquiry a week after she resigned, and her boasting TED Talk mysteriously disappeared off of Youtube a month or two later, but you won't find any of that out from her Wikipedia article. Also, gay and lesbian advocates never displayed the personal vindictiveness that "transactivists" or "TRAs" do. Gays and lesbians singled out a few prominent figures like Anita Bryant and Rick Santorum, while TRAs try to destroy the careers or lives of a large number of people who dare to dissent from gender ideology, often using thuggish tactics of intimidation and harassment, and often seemingly motivated by misogyny in singling out women for heavier retribution than men. Gays and lesbians also never had any particular objections to heterosexuals meeting together for relevant purposes (such as in singles bars), while TRAs have devoted great effort to making it almost impossible for lesbians to publicly meet together in some regions and countries (see the Tickle v. Giggle lawsuit, whose only amusing feature is its name, etc etc). Much of lesbian life is now furtive and underground in those areas, while back in the 1990s it was open and free. A great advancement for "progressivism", I'm sure!
AnonMoos (
talk) 23:40, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
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-
Cancel culture and
deplatforming were invented by the right wing and are touchstones of conservatism, not the left. It was used for decades to ostracize anarchists, socialists, communists, peace and anti-war advocates, homosexuals, libertines, labor rights advocates, and anyone remotely perceived as a threat to capitalism, the military industrial complex, and the government. This changed in the 1960s and 1970s, as the right wing openly opposed progress such as civil rights and desegregation, aligning and identifying themselves as regressives, and engaging and supporting the criminal Nixon administration which was pardoned for its crimes. This led the right to create their own conservative counterculture, in the spirit of the Powell memo and the Koch network, and wage a campaign of conservative infiltration of the media and academia over about four decades, all the while claiming there was a "liberal media bias" and "liberal bent" to academia; once again showing that every accusation was, in fact, a confession. In response to this open opposition to democracy, obstructionism, and authoritarian impulse, progressives began to fight back. The right wing revised history (as they always do), to make it seem like the left invented cancel culture and deplatforming in the 2000s, when the right had been using those tactics for a century. Once again, the old conservative adage applies: "do as we say, not as we do". Or as I like to say, "watch what they do, not what they say". All this constant talk of "electoral fraud" and "irregularities" on the right, only to discover that it was the right who was trying to overturn the election. This is what conservatism looks like. Rank hypocrisy, disinformation, and lies. Every accusation is a confession. This is post-truth politics, and if it's postmodern, it's an invention of the right, not the left.
Viriditas (
talk) 00:24, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
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- Whatever -- I'm not right-wing, so most of your tirade whooshes right by me. In any case, whether I'm more right than wrong, or more wrong than right, either way, it's simply not working now (assuming that it ever did work) to try to paste a smiley face on the current situation and claim that everything connected with gender ideology is just fine and dandy except for a few complaining "right-wingers"[sic]. That won't accomplish anything for Scott Wiener or anyone else at this point...
AnonMoos (
talk) 20:57, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
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- I mean, yes, that's my point. "Gender ideology" is a manufactured controversy and culture war spread by the right. I get that you don't see it that way, but when you painstakingly trace it back, the majority of the talking points come from billionaire-backed, right-wing foundations working in partnership with Christian Nationalist-oriented interest groups, who perceive gender fluidity, or the notions thereof, as an "attack" on Christian values. The last time I looked into this, they went to great lengths to hide the connections through dark money slush-funds and front groups. And I think it's perfectly reasonable that you might not be aware of this subterfuge, as numerous, well-known left of center celebrities have been fooled into thinking otherwise. You should look a little closer at the connections in red states where the masks have accidentally come off. Florida is a well known example. The
Florida Parental Rights in Education Act was originally introduced by
Dennis Baxley, who was on the Steering Council of the Conservative Baptist Network, which is connected to the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL). The NACL uses the bill mill model of the Koch-connected American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to push Christian nationalism. The artificial culture war talking point of gender ideology is one of many ways that they introduce Christian nationalism into law to undermine democratic norms and freedoms. They are working towards establishing the US as a Christian theocracy, and this is one of their incrementalist approaches. The Kochs and other right-wing foundations may not be as religious as they are, but they work together to strengthen the power of oligarchs, corporations, and the state, such that individuals (in this case gay people) have less rights, which in turn, promotes the heteronormative paradigm of Christian nationalism. This kind of model of overreach can then be used in all other like-minded legislation in their agenda, from prohibiting the discussion of the environment or climate change within state government, to putting the breaks on renewable energy transitional models. All of these things, while vastly different on the outside, are intimately connected. The Kochs and these other foundations are all heavily invested in oil production, that's how they make their money. They can't just come out and say "pass a bill to make oil production and usage mandatory", so they work around on the outside margins, to test their legislation out on marginalized people first. Another good example is their well-funded backlash to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). You might think this has everything to do with racism, but once again, that's the going after marginalized people angle to test their strategy. In reality, the attack on DEI has to do with going after equity, which impacts oil producers because there are aspects of fossil fuel divestment connected to it. Once again, all of these things come back to oil. Things are just not what they appear to be. There's three agendas at work, the overarching agenda of the oil, chemical, and extraction industries, and their so-called "side-gigs", which keep people distracted from where their money is going and what they are doing with it. Christian nationalists attacking gender ideology is one of these side-gigs. About a year or so ago, I spent an entire day tracing it all back to these foundations. None of this is grassroots based, or originating in popular movements. In fact, every grassroots movement that comes forward and says they are, have been uncovered as part of this well-oiled machine, with
Moms for Liberty one of the most notable. And in case you haven't figured it out by now, if a group has "liberty" or "freedom" in its name, they are often a right-wing front group for the Koch network.
Viriditas (
talk) 21:35, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
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- So… it’s all a conspiracy by big oil? Please, spare me. We hear enough conspiracy crap from the right… we don’t need to hear it from the left.
Blueboar (
talk) 21:27, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
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- Yes, it is all connected to big oil, but big oil has shared interests with Christian nationalists. Some conspiracies are very real. The
Koch network and the
Council for National Policy are both well-known conspiracies working out in the open. This has been covered extensively by historians of science and investigative journalists like
Naomi Oreskes and
Jane Mayer. Sometimes the truth is too difficult for people to believe, which is why people like yourself prefer to believe in fantasies. You're in good company, as that's true for most people.
Viriditas (
talk) 21:35, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- You can add the
Federalist Society to the list. (See also
Leonard Leo.) For a more complete list, see the sections Think tanks and Other organizations of
Template:Conservatism US. Not all are equally conspirational, but they are very connected through personal unions, and the goals of several as they are actually scheming are not quite as democratic as their publicly professed aims. --
Lambiam 07:09, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
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- Listing all those people and organizations certainly make appear obsessions with conspiracies so obviously undeniably founded. It particularly quickly contributes to proving your point that everything worrying has been initially concocted by right-wingers with access to a lot of money and the means of more or less individually controlling the diffusion of their very personal and very wrong theories. That's forgetting that all right-wingers may have not been created equal just like leftist scholars identifying themselves as authorities regarding the roots of climate scepticism because they are primarly able to reiterate the discourses that showed the evilness of the tobacco industries. Then one who owns money and doesn't know where that only comes from and sometimes reads one or the other pieces of what's left of the press will easily decide that endorsing the role of a leftist billionaire would make of him at this point in history merely a follower. So he knows how to make followers but I'm sorry to say, those might not be be only the flock that will be rallying around his banner. He's also rallying the adequate opposition. But yes in my opinion, whatever it has to be considered morally or sociogically, that's also in all probably a very postmodern phenomenon. For example rallying against climate change was a move already possible in '65, though maybe not realistically in the US. Established hippies I met as late as fifteen or eighteen years later were still engaging in touristic activities, few good will people being able of realistically rejecting rationalism. Postmodernism transfers may have been the disguise of prudent attempts to finally start to be acting realistically, prudent because everybody has to be cautious to not definitively spoil their chances at a comfortable fucking session some time to begin with. --
Askedonty (
talk) 10:31, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- This was kind of what I was getting at, based on what AnonMoos wrote up above. We are told via conventional wisdom that the phenomenon of postmodernism originally came of out Marxist and leftist-counterculture, and by extension, centrists and conservatives objected to its embrace by the social sciences and the humanities and the loss of objectivity (to whatever extent that is even true). But when we look really closely at this, we see that it wasn't the left that embraced this kind of postmodernism, it was the right; conservatives, not liberals, gave birth to the very concept of doubting the truth, which later morphed into climate denial, alternative facts, COVID-denial, and post-truth Trumpism. But somehow the left is to blame for this? It doesn't make sense.
Viriditas (
talk) 10:39, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- Back in '65, climate denial was not even identifiable. For example my mother's ambition to be equal to men which was a highly considered goal amongst most men around us and most of the kids I had to play toy car with implied she was to own any fitting gas guzzler like the guy next door so soon as was feasible. So she was rather right-wing most of the time: the left were too many intellectuals. Among her motivations collectivism implied faring bus, and she was outraged at society imposing to the disabled them waiting for busses. So after she was used having her own cars and the left was explicitly busy focusing on the disabled because nobody else needed assistance anymore, she ceased being very much an ardent no-leftwinger. In a way in the end I would say, with perseverance she more or less managed to get money alloted by the right, with the left not bothering to interfere. After which she could afford growing leftist, make black people friends if she could even though them not in subservient roles etc. As with a too early climate denial charge for example truth if that ever can be determined would have to be gotten lost on the way. She simply would have been frightened under one different light. A frequent criticism regarding the left monopolizing ownership of truth relates to the denial problem including a dimension related to the initiative sequence - as in a present struggle - and also, representativity. The left does not divide itself on subjects as readily identifiable like the right would because their base just does not need, and is not required to consider the current contentious points in deep like those on other side would; a matter of the initiative sequence. Behind would have to be studied the relevant specific doctrines, it's really not interesting to get blinded by the effects after someone managed to
turn the lights to their's own advantage. --
Askedonty (
talk) 12:37, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
reply
- I'm going to belatedly invoke
WP:SOAPBOX at this point, and
WP:NOTFORUM. Before somebody more influential than me does, and perhaps questions the usefulness of the ref desks.
Card Zero
(talk) 08:04, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
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