Thanks to a blog reader for pointing this out. Once again, someone apparently incapable of doing actual science, technology, engineering or math is using the jargon of science in order to further the goals of anti-science rubbish. The possibility exists that this is another Sokal hoax at the expense of leftist nonsense, but if so they seem to be going to a lot of bother.
Feminist researcher invents ‘intersectional quantum physics’ to fight ‘oppression’ of Newton
Let’s read from this Masterpiece Of Science For The Ages, shall we:
Assembled Bodies
Reconfiguring Quantum Identities
Introduction
I invest in Donna Haraway’s claim that “what counts as an object is precisely what world history turns out to be about” (quoted in Barad 2007, 42); that is, politics are about the hierarchies of what connections, or closenesses, are prioritized as bodily. All bodies are political gatherings, as what is understood as closely related, kin, the measured, congealing intersections of phenomena (social identity, histories, water, particles) considered legible/intelligible/singularized is always a political configuration, with systems and apparatuses (e.g., colonial sciences or clarity fetishism) set up to recognize these prioritized configurations/ separations (a “cut together/apart” in Barad’s words [2010, 240]), naturalizing insidious assumptions and hierarchies of value. And so “connect[ing] what’s been dangerously disconnected” (Rich 1987, 214) is directly political. Re/cognizing the connective/constellatory bodies typically not understood as connected (e.g., across disciplines) allows for embellishing alliances not following rules of typically understood closeness or kinship (space, time, social category, eugenic lineage) while also not discounting differing mattering realities (steeped categorizations). And, possibly, deprioritizing particularly naturalized, fetishizing borders has potentials for destabilizing structures that enable hierarchical othering (which justifies sociopolitical oppression and material-discursive violence).
Quantum physics disrupts the stagnancies of typically humanly recognized bodies. In quantum understandings, particles (classically understood as stagnant objects) also have wavelike properties, diffract, leap, and are quantumly entangled.
And. So. On.
Ummm. To me, this *sure* reads a whole lot like someone who’s just slapping together word salad in the hopes of creating another Sokal Affair. But these days, who knows… this could just as easily, perhaps even more easily, be another “Gender Studies” hack Deepak-Chopra-ing some quantum nonsense together in the hopes of sounding smart. I mean, come on… does this sound like GenderBlather, or someone parodying GenderBlather?
I specifically utilize feminist new materialist discussions of quantum physics and cyborgian posthumanism (Haraway 1985), along with seemingly separated discussions of noncentralized leadership practices and anti-oppression organizing, subaltern studies, intersectional identity politics, and safer space.
I just can’t tell anymore.
Now, I haven’t read the whole thing. Because, preponderance of evidence perhaps to the contrary, I do have some semblance of a life. But what I’ve read just keeps going in this fashion. And I just can’t tell if this is serious or satire anymore. In an age when people dress up in black, hide thier identities and go out into the streets in mobs in order to commit acts of bloody violence against people who simply disagree with them politically, and they have the astonishing chutzpah to call themselves “anti-fascist…” well, irony seems to be not just dead, but shot through the head with a deer slug, chopped up with a saws-all, soaked in a plastic tub full of nitric acid until it’s just a stew, fed through an incinerator and the ashes mixed in with the solid propellants of a Space Launch System booster rocket and then test fired out in the desert.