The way the Right has seized on "postmodernism" in "academia" as this massive... thing... is so dissonant with my experiences as an academic. I learned about various postmodern/poststructural theories, foolishly went to grad school to study them, and they were already passe. https://twitter.com/DrBenLitherland/status/1296127132926705666

I mean, obviously the Right lies because it's what they do, but I do think a lot of people who haven't... been to academia... lately... think that humanities and social science scholarship is all fixed at precisely the left wing of 1992

I mean, first of all:
1. Marxists don't like postmodernism/poststructuralism, it was developed as a reaction to them, they think it's neoliberal, this is demonstrable from people on here like C*ffin but also tons of legit academics.

2. It's a matter of active debate, which Julia Serano among others has written on, the extent to which contemporary transgender issues are compatible with postmodernism/poststructuralism. Broadly the entire "LGBTIAA+" movement is not really a postmodern phenomenon at all.

Postmodernism/poststructuralism is NOT THE SAME AS CRITICAL THEORY, which is what at least half of the things these people hate (both the right blowhards and the left blowhards) actually is. Critical theory can be postmodern and poststructural but it was Marxist/Marxian first

(Related side note: there are people who basically cannot be classified on the standard left-right spectrum or for that matter Political Compass or anything conventional, who are "Marxians". I only ever knew one, and he died, but most of my publications in academia are "Marxian")

Marxians are not necessarily in favor of The Revolution; in the case of my adviser (Jim Aune, if you want to google him, he wrote a great book called Rhetoric & Marxism and another one on neoliberal economics, of which he was very critical) his politics were... everywhere

Jim voted for Bush I in 92. I don't know his exact reasoning. I don't believe it was a "protest vote," I think something in his highly consistent but idiosyncratic ideology made him think H.W. was better than Clinton. He was also one of the top communication studies Marx scholars

Jim was a big Freeze Peach guy who thought campus free speech was super important (but, as department head, implemented anti-hate speech policies because he recognized the faculty consensus was against his position, even though he could have gone over their heads to the admin)

And he was a massive trans ally, to the point that when he wrote his book on neoliberal economics engaging with the work of neoliberal(like, self identified, not an epithet) economic Deirdre McCloughskey,he spent an extensive amount of text apologizing for picking on a trans lady

Anyway, my point is academia is weird and complex and not what you think. Getting back to postmodernism, working with Jim turned me against it. Marxianism seemed to me much more consistent with my big priority - LGBT inclusion in society -and postmodernism seemed dismissive of it

Like, to be clear: both Marxists and Marxians dislike postmodernism because it's not "material" enough. I think this is an incredibly valid left critique of postmodernism, and also a valid critique from any position. You can twist words all you want, postmodernism is not material

For mainline Marxists, the issue is that postmodernism was CREATED to reject the core tenets of the Frankfurt School (which often gets conflated with postmodernism) and the Marxist idea of a linear progression toward a better society.

There are postmodernists who still claim to be radically anticapitalist, and to some extent this gets into the ancom/authcom thing, ancoms can probably reconcile communism with postmodernism. But the idea that postmodernism is in fact what neoliberalism actually means is legit

For LGBT and especially trans rights advocates, postmodern gender theory is one of those things that can seem liberating but has always been somewhat of a trap,and I think now completely is a trap. Its ideas have bee completely internalized by GCs.

The most important figures in postmodern gender theory are Michel Foucault (a cis white gay man, who would probably get mad if you called him cis) and Judith Butler (a cis white lesbian who reluctantly accepts both cis and lesbian as labels)

They were friends in the Bay Area during the 1980s, Foucault died in 1983 of AIDS after denying it existed (which was tbf a more legit position than it seemed given how the government was treating it and using it to crack down on gay people, but still)

Both were lecturers at Berkeley. Foucault was obsessed with violence against the body but also really hated medicalization (a term he helped theorize and create) so he would likely not have been terribly sympathetic to things like demands for trans health care

Butler wrote a book in 1992 called Gender Trouble which basically summed up the things she had talked about with Foucault &others, and which she acknowledged came from trauma having watched her transfem relative medically abused. But her premise is literally getting rid of gender

Almost immediately queer people set upon Butler and she rather self-indulgently wrote a follow up book in which she concedes "ok fine gender can real but how does work??? if i am lesbian how do text" and then she basically fcked off to write about geopolitics

The point is, none of the things that bigots are saying universities are teaching about postmodernism are being taught uncritically, even if you take the idea that LGBT people and Marxists control the university system (hah) at face value, bc postmodernism is not those things

I guess to a bigot, they can just start from "things that are traditionally thought to be true... are in fact... possibly NOT TRUE" as a claim postmodernism does in fact make, and assume that's the whole philosophy

but postmodernism among other things denies stable identities

So sure, if they were moral panicking about the gender system collapsing into some kind of hedonistic morass of everyone refusing to identify with a gender, all the time, everyone, then I guess postmodernism's gender agenda is what they're afraid of

but that's not their thing

Postmodernism/poststructuralism is the brainchild of privileged academics who don't have a lot of skin in the game. There have been efforts by marginalized people to reclaim it, but a lot of humanities academics have just rejected postmodernism altogether