In its original incarnation, it means something like "interlocking oppression": the intersection of multiple disadvantages. These days, it seems to mean something like "our girlboss CEO should also be a Hindu lesbian".PeterC wrote: ↑Tue Sep 14, 2021 2:56 amIt frustrates me that to this day, despite trying quite hard, I still don't really understand what it means.Genjo Conan wrote: ↑Mon Sep 13, 2021 7:49 pm "intersectionality"--which, like CRT itself, has come to mean something different than it initially did
I'm not sure I'd agree with "blindly." I've never entirely warmed to crit, either in its original incarnation or as a method of legal analysis, but I think it's more elegant than you're making it out to be. The Frankfurt School writers could be impenetrable, but they weren't hacks; nor were the legal folks like Unger and Kelman.I was never really a fan of critical legal studies and critical theory. I have no issue with the marxist roots - I personally think Marx is one of the most consistently correct and also largely misrepresented writers of the last few centuries. I just didn't like the way that they blindly imported ideas and terminology from the study of literature into the social sciences. It just made no sense to me. Different disciplines develop different tools for different tasks.
Well, this is academia, isn't it? Before I went to law school I got a grad degree in history, and strongly considered getting a PhD. Some in the academy look down on popular history writers not because their research is shoddy or their conclusions suspect, but because they write so that laypeople can understand them.Most of the furore about CRT is purely manufactured. Few of those criticizing it can offer an adequate definition of it. But the proponents of the broad genre of critical theory have really not done themselves a favor by obfuscating some important basic ideas in a veil of opaque and self-referential terminology.
Now, there is a certain degree of jargon that is probably useful or at least understandable: specialized terms that would take too long to circumlocute. (The legal profession is moving away from Latin but res ipsa loquitur, for example, hangs on stubbornly because every lawyer understands what it means, and the alternative is "when something bad happened to the plaintiff and you can't prove that the defendant did it but you can infer that they did it with a sufficiently high degree of certainty to assign legal blame because the attendant circumstances make any other cause extremely improbable oh to hell with it res ipsa loquitur.") But most academic jargon is just an encrustation; if it serves any purposes it's as a guild cant, to keep the normies away. CRT isn't any different.