11:51am May 22, 2014

You want to know where I got the words “critical theory”?

From autistic people whose special interest was critical theory, as far as I could tell. Autistic people who gushed about it at length until I tried to study it and my brain exploded and I had to pick up the pieces.

So don’t give me bullshit about how critical theory is “just what people call it when people talk about their lives”. Critical theory is an actual thing. I don’t know exactly what it is because my brain is not capable of understanding either the ideas or the jargon and buzzwords involved. And yes, there are jargon and buzzwords, it’s an academic discipline, all academic disciplines have jargon and buzzwords.

I used it as an example because the people (who also happen to often be people I like, so this isn’t like some kind of attack on them) who rise to the top of certain hierarchies, are the same people who are really good at understanding and implementing things like critical theory. I used it as an example because I can’t even understand what it is because that’s how badly my brain meshes with certain academic concepts. I used it as an example because the ability to handle such concepts has become a source of prestige and status and leadership and such.

It’s only one of many things that work like that, but I used it as an example because it’s the words used by the people who, themselves, were quite interested in it. Don’t fucking act like I pulled it out of my ass to describe “people just talking about their lives” or something, because that’s not what I did.

I have the lost hours, the lost brainpower, the lost energy, the lost cognitive ability, to speak to having really fucking tried to get a handle on critical theory and similar academic disciplines that are highly favored in some circles. I had to pick up the splattered pieces of my brain afterwards. Don’t fucking tell me this is something I made up. That’s just insulting.

And I’m sick of operating in a system where people try to make it impossible to talk about what’s going on. Where we’re not allowed to give names to the theories people use (even when the people themselves give those names to those theories), we aren’t allowed to give names to the communities that have sprung up (at least not when we’re saying there’s something we dislike about those communities), basically every time anyone tries to give a dissenting opinion about any of this, the first thing that someone says is “But that doesn’t actually exist, and don’t use those words, don’t use any words that could help you actually describe what is happening.”

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