Coupla things. Who funds all that nifty research in the physical sciences? The military industrial perplex. How much more money do these folks get. then look at who gets funding to do theory (let alone research) and ask, "Are they funding work that challenges the status quo?" Hardly.
It's not surprising that, on this score alone, there isn't the kind of theory of society that the C man wants.
Caveat: I don't know if we can do social theory or not, and I don't really care. But, I sure think there's a there there, unlike some theorists who've suggested that there's not. I don't necessarily think it's worthwhile to us, as leftists, to do such theorizing, either. But, like Miles, I don't see what is so horrifying about those who do this stuff that they can't just be left alone to do their thing. If something of interest comes out of their work--and there occasionally is stuff that can help us--then niftykeenokewl.
I guess, as a feminist who finds feminist theory, research, and social criticism very important and useful and not at all hard to understand, I can't see the problem. There is nothing about feminist theories (there's not just one), that made me feel excluded, as if it was some special club that used language to keep the barbarians out. I don't see much that's especially obscure about work that asks, "is there such a thing as patriarchy and, if there is, how is it related to capitalism?" It's not just "interesting". It matters. It helps feminists think through their personal and collective struggles. Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed is an enagement with at least one debate in feminist theory. She doesn't make it very obvious, but it's there if you're familiar with the debate.
Even when you read feminist researchers, they are often pursuing their work in order to address , inform, and extend theoretical debates. Some of them use this work to build theory that asks how and why gender oppression exists, how it works, how women are complicit in their own oppression. I was noting this the other day, elsewhere, referring to Nancy Tatom Ammerman's Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World. In that book, Ammerman addresses sociological theories of religion, as well as feminist theory, asking, "why do suburban, professional women flock to fundamentalist christianities that insist that women must be subordinate to men?" Her answer is that, because women are still economically dependent on men to live the kinds of lifestyles they want to lead, they are attracted because they believe christianity will help them keep their marriages together."
In this piece, the C man seems upset with crits of "white male" science. Ok. There's much to be critical of in this body of work. But, there's also a lot of stuff out that there that gives us a terrific understanding of how social institutions work to reproduce gender and racial oppression. As I said to Doug yesterday, the thing that seems odd is that the C sounds just like conservatives.
Here's what I mean: When conservatives hear the phrase "institutional/ized racism" they grunt and say, "yeahsureright." this is mainly because they can only understand racism as biological racism. Anything more subtle, fuhgeddaboudit. it just doesn't exist.
but the kind of racism i'll try to talk about and give, i think, really concrete examples of doesn't impress them either. last week, my rant about the way people in the booster club refuse to consider why poor kids are better at sports is an example of a kind of institutionalized racism. they attribute differences in skill as reducible completely to race and end up reproducing a backhanded racism.
Is that abstruse? Is that not clear? Can we not take this concrete example and see how it works elsewhere?
C sees "white male" and thinks people are talking about people, rather than social processes, norms, institutions. When some writers on academia as "white male" talk about it, they're talking about the way in which the structure of academia presumes that, for instance, the graduate student is someone who has no other burdens in life other than getting through graduate school. It's an ideal or normatively fictive person who has no family other than one that supports him, has few financial burdens and probably has family income and wealth to draw on to supplement his work, no bottoms to wipe, no family who is unfamiliar with academia (let alone hostile to it), etc.
Similarly, the structure of a professional career assumes someone who is going to bust their ass in their 20s and 30s, right when women and men raise families. So, you get analyses of why women earn less than men that say, "Well, it's because women are out of the labor force for longer periods." IThat's an answer that reproduces institutionalized gender oppression, where the structure of the professional career penalizes anyone who doesn't follow the normative pattern, as if taking time out to have a kid is naturally something we ought to penalize in the form of lower wages.
Now, I hope that this isn't true of NC. I hope that, in his vast body of work, he's grappled with these issues or indicated a sympathy to them. My concern here is that, in this particular critique he would prefer to assume all critiques of white male science are reducible to the six papers he read rather than maybe consider that there might be something to it, he just hasn't read someone who accepts rational inquiry, but wants to criticize the ways in which science as a social institution reproduces gender and racial oppression. that kind of work is out there. we've discussed it on this list plenty of times.
Kelley