/lit/ - Literature

Has anyone checked out Peterson's twitter recently? He's been on a tear with this, retweeted from here:

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview

I am offended!

>>9165354

Post the abstract.

>>9165367
Here's a summary:

"In her article Nguyen critiques the uncritical celebration of the cyborg as a “transcendent figure of the technological sublime” (284). She admits that cyborgs do help denaturalize essentialist notions of identity as fixed to a rigid material body. Nguyen writes, cyborgs have been popularly depicted as able to “generate new bodies and design new selves in the choosing and fusing of new parts in a potentially endless process of consumption and self-invention” (286). Cyborgs therefore support a concept of identity as fluid and flexible. The ease with which cyborgs can replace or alter parts of their material body also suggests that one’s interiority is not necessarily tied to one’s flesh. Nguyen accentuates that this disjunction can also be understood with respect to people who have queer sexual identities such as those who identify themselves as transgender or engage in drag. But rather than sanguinely glorifying the power of these queer cyborgs to reconfigure their bodies and endlessly reinvent themselves, Nguyen stresses the need to analyze what it means to be a queer cyborg and to engage in “cybernetic drag” in specific social and political contexts.

She offers the example of Karma, a Vietnamese cyborg in the New Mutants series of Marvel comics. Nguyen asserts that Karma’s mutant state recalls the traumatic history of the Vietnam War where the United States used biochemical weapons such as napalm. She emphasizes that this causal history should not be ignored in the celebration of Karma’s mutant powers. Nguyen further elucidates Karma’s vexed position as a cyborg who must masquerade as a normal human being or be otherwise marked as a freak, yet her Vietnamese-ness already distinguishes her as “foreign” and “freak-ish.” Nguyen ultimately encourages her readers to not merely entertain the fantasy of a cybernetic existence but rather what it means to be a cyborg in a specific historical, social, political context and all the discrimination that may come along with that."

Full article: https://cyborgdigitalculture.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/nguyen-qcnm.pdf

>>9165370

>The ease with which cyborgs can replace or alter parts of their material body also suggests that one’s interiority is not necessarily tied to one’s flesh

No fucking shit. Hegel figured this out centuries ago when making a mockery of phrenology.

I'd like to think that transcendence - that is, transcending this mortal coil (transhumanism/digitalization/etc) - will eliminate the likes of sexuality in general.

I'm so fucking glad I did my sociology/criminalogy degree back in the early 10s because I'd kill myself doing this shite now.

That's not academia, that's trash.
>>9165370
The same people writing this trash are also borderline positivists.

>Tfw I have a school subject called "masculinity under treat'

>>9165354
>He's never read an essay on why HAL is gay
I really don't think you cunts took the nothing after 1950 meme seriously, so what the fuck is going on here?

Not a cringe worthy text until it got to some throwaway marvel character. Pop culture is a disease

>>9165407
>throwaway marvel character
it's a pretty good idea for an essay. if you have to chart the changes for the Hulk for instance, you've to deal with why his name changes in franchises and the different colourings and all that. a minor character is always much easier to write a thesis on.

I'm surprised I didn't see Deleuze and Guattari being namedropped.

>>9165380
>will eliminate the likes of sexuality in general
You do realise that most of the goals of AI are to live up to Turing's standards, which if you listen to his interviews includes the ability to charm a man.

>>9165354
>21st century academia, ladies and gentlemen.
That is a generalization but I do wish this kind of crap would be eliminated.

>>9165444
>this kind of crap
sci-fi?

>>9165451

No, just bad sci-fi.

>>9165451
I was more referring to the stuff >>9165359 points out to.

But I think Peterson might be part of it, and people like Zizek certainly are.

There's more, if anyone is interested.

Full article: http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf

>>9165459
Don't be so hard to /co/. If you're an Arthur C Clarke fan you might like this guy's theory on HAL
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5899656/straight-gay-or-binary-hal-comes-out-of-the-cybernetic-closet
He writes well about slash fiction and Star Trek fans, but I can see why you might not want to read about that.

>>9165461

"From 1965 to 1975 the legendary Silicon Valley company Fairchild Semiconductor operated a state-of-the-art integrated circuit manufacturing plant in Shiprock, New Mexico on Navajo land. In the face of concerns about high-tech pollution, increasingly empowered labor organizations, and a newly politicized and visible American Indian civil rights movement, indigenous electronic workers at Shiprock were pressed into service as examples of the peaceful coexistence and integration of the past and the future, the primitive and the modern, creativity and capitalism. Navajo women workers were described as ideal predigital digital workers, uniquely suited to the job by temperament, culture, and gender. Their labor as platform builders was cited as evidence that digital work—the work of the hand and its digits—could be painlessly transferred from the indigenous cultural context into the world of technological commercial innovation, benefiting both in the process."

>>9165460
Yeah, I've decided to not get on that meme, so I'll not be reading that. Zizek memes have gone the same way for me.
Give me a summary of your interpretation instead of directing me to twitter?

>>9165468
This one is more interesting: http://mysite.du.edu/~lavita/edpx_3770_13s/_docs/nakamura_race_in_cyberspace.pdf

>>9165473
I am afraid I cannot do that

>>9165479
oh well
[[blissful ignorance intensifies]]

>>9165354
>nguyen

>>9165488
I am sorry Dave

>>9165491
kek

>>9165461
This one is actually really fucking good. I'm throughly impressed.

>>9165461

>Socialist-Feminism

>>9165609
we should remove offensive trends from history, i'm with you brother, no more nazis

>>9165615

>False-flagging /pol/ because you cannot dispute them

>>9165627
You can't dispute with a five-year old either, doesn't mean they are right.

you guys sure this isn't some undercover Nick Land AI gone haywire?

>>9165639

Except /pol/ is always right.

>>9165627
I don't see why removing one from stories is worse than removing the other. Frankly, nazis have been overdone. Even zombie nazis have been overdone, and some of the best nazi porn writers by the 1950s were Jews. Let fembot commies have a turn.

>>9165490
like 40 % of all vietnamese people are called nguyen

>>9165354
>stupid gook goes to university and writes about a comic book

person of color me surprised

>>9166362
n1

It's like "academic" is institutional aspergers

>>9165370
So basically just applying Donna Haraway using the case study of a particular comic book

Way to get butt-blasted about a vein of feminist scholarship that has existed since the mid-80s. Very little has changed since then save for feminism in academia becoming more acceptable now than it was then.