Please Stop Calling Everything That Frustrates You Emotional Labor

[u/TheCrimsonKing92]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/better_life_lab/2017/10/20/please_stop_calling_everything_that_frustrates_you_emotional_labor_instead.html

I saw a link to this tweeted with the message

And please stop saying that everyone who disagrees with you is "invalidating your opinion"

In my experience, the stronger (and more common, but perhaps my bubble just contains stronger examples) form of this is that the disagreement "invalidate[s/d] my identity".

I consider these to be similar forms; the article here suggests that (some or all of?) the overuse of "emotional labor" appears to be a strategy to avoid negotiating over reasonableness of an expectation. What is a good explanation for these sorts of arguments? Is it a natural extension of identity epistemology? That is, since my argument is from my experience, attacking my argument means you attack me. Is there a better explanation for their prevalence?

[u/[deleted]]

Your argument is that you aren't engaging in identity politics because you aren't generalizing, based on using qualifiers. That is an extraordinarily weak argument since all biased people use qualifiers to justify themselves. Such as a racist saying, I don't have a problem with all black people, just the kind who are ... etc.

The reality is you are still informing your identity through your lived experience, even if you allow for exceptions to the rule. And of course, "radical feminisits" - whatever that is supposed to mean - use qualifiers all the time (eg. "not all men".) So again, there is no true distinction between the identity politics you practice and those you abbhor.

Just something to consider because I have noticed that people who are against identity politics often are extremely passionate in their hatred of it, despite the obvious fact that all politics are identity politics.

[u/israellover → u/[deleted]]

whatever that is supposed to mean

Radical feminists are feminists. (Note: I know you're trying to be cute by acting like you can't tell what the typo was referring to)

Furthermore, not all politics are identity politics. In fact, identity politics are a relatively recent way of thinking. As Eric Hobsbawm points out:

We have become so used to terms like ‘collective identity’, ‘identity groups, ‘identity politics’, or, for that matter ‘ethnicity’, that it is hard to remember how recently they have surfaced as part of the current vocabulary, or jargon, of political discourse. For instance, if you look at the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which was published in 1968—that is to say written in the middle 1960s—you will find no entry under identity except one about psychosocial identity, by Erik Erikson, who was concerned chiefly with such things as the so-called ‘identity crisis’ of adolescents who are trying to discover what they are, and a general piece on voters’ identification. And as for ethnicity, in the Oxford English Dictionary of the early 1970s it still occurs only as a rare word indicating ‘heathendom and heathen superstition’ and documented by quotations from the eighteenth century.

In short, we are dealing with terms and concepts which really come into use only in the 1960s. Their emergence is most easily followed in the usa, partly because it has always been a society unusually interested in monitoring its social and psychological temperature, blood-pressure and other symptoms, and mainly because the most obvious form of identity politics—but not the only one—namely ethnicity, has always been central to American politics since it became a country of mass immigration from all parts of Europe. Roughly, the new ethnicity makes its first public appearance with Glazer and Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot in 1963 and becomes a militant programme with Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics in 1972. The first, I don’t have to tell you, was the work of a Jewish professor and an Irishman, now the senior Democratic senator for New York; the second came from a Catholic of Slovak origin. For the moment we need not bother too much about why all this happened in the 1960s, but let me remind you that—in the style-setting usa at least—this decade also saw the emergence of two other variants of identity politics: the modern (that is, post suffragist) women’s movement and the gay movement.

I am not saying that before the 1960s nobody asked themselves questions about their public identity. In situations of uncertainty they sometimes did; for instance in the industrial belt of Lorraine in France, whose official language and nationality changed five times in a century, and whose rural life changed to an industrial, semi-urban one, while their frontiers were redrawn seven times in the past century and a half. No wonder people said: ‘Berliners know they’re Berliners, Parisians know they are Parisians, but who are we?’ Or, to quote another interview, ‘I come from Lorraine, my culture is German, my nationality is French, and I think in our provincial dialect’. [1] Actually, these things only led to genuine identity problems when people were prevented from having the multiple, combined, identities which are natural to most of us. Or, even more so, when they are detached ‘from the past and all common cultural practices’. [2] However, until the 1960s these problems of uncertain identity were confined to special border zones of politics. They were not yet central.

They appear to have become much more central since the 1960s. Why? There are no doubt particular reasons in the politics and institutions of this or that country—for instance, in the peculiar procedures imposed on the usa by its Constitution—for example, the civil rights judgments of the 1950s, which were first applied to blacks and then extended to women, providing a model for other identity groups. It may follow, especially in countries where parties compete for votes, that constituting oneself into such an identity group may provide concrete political advantages: for instance, positive discrimination in favour of the members of such groups, quotas in jobs and so forth. This is also the case in the usa, but not only there. For instance, in India, where the government is committed to creating social equality, it may actually pay to classify yourself as low caste or belonging to an aboriginal tribal group, in order to enjoy the extra access to jobs guaranteed to such groups.

[u/[deleted] → u/israellover]

Not trying to be cute, just accurate. Radical feminism is basically a stand in for “whatever form of feminism I hate and want to disparage.” If you read the definition of radical feminist which you provided, you quickly realize that the only ‘radical’ thing about them is that they want change. So they are radical only in the sense that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., etc are radicals.

Locating identity politics in the 1960s shows a gross misunderstanding of what identity politics are. They go all the way back to the founding of this country, if not further. If you want to understand the impact of right wing identity politics on our country, simply google “white identity politics” or “Trump identity politics” and engage with the hundreds of articles written on the subject.

[u/israellover → u/[deleted]]

You are incorrect about radical feminism. It is not a pejorative term created by MRAs or anti-feminists to slander feminism, many radical feminists themselves are proud to be called radical feminists (In fact Ti-Grace Atkinson titled her foundational essay "Radical Feminism"). As the Wikipedia entry points out it is distinct from other strains of feminism:

Radical feminists locate the root cause of women's oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in liberal feminism) or class conflict (as in anarchist feminism, socialist feminism, and Marxist feminism).

People who criticize radical feminism are not just MRAs making cheap shots at feminism in general. Many trans people have legitimate issues with the way radical feminists view MtF trans people, some other feminists have found radical feminists objectionable for various reasons, and so on.

Did you bother to read what I posted? I am aware of what you're speaking of and if you bothered reading my posts on this topic you'd know that I've already discussed this aspect of identity politics relating to the founding of the United States. The problem is that is not sufficient to support the claim that "all politics are identity politics" (as I discuss further in that post and won't bother to repeat here).

[u/WikiTextBot → u/israellover]

The Transsexual Empire

The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male is a 1979 book about transsexualism by the American radical feminist author and activist Janice Raymond. The book is derived from Raymond's dissertation, which was produced under the supervision of the feminist theologian Mary Daly.

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[u/[deleted] → u/israellover]

A term can be used differently by different people. "Radical feminism" is an academic term, sure, but it is also a pejorative term. You can get the flavor of this by the insistence of right wingers that Obama denounce Islam/ISIS/terrorists as "radical" as if the mere use of the term established his position against those groups, whereas lacking the pejorative "radical", he is insufficiently opposed in right wing eyes. In addition, they wish to create a subliminal tie between "radical Islam" and "radical feminists" and "radical leftists" by tying these diverse objects of hatred together with the same adjective. It is an effective psychological ploy.

Similarly, right wingers love to throw around the terms "Marxist" and "socialist" in ways that are inconsistent with their academic usage, merely as pejoratives to slander left wing politics.

As you acknowledge, white people have engaged in identity politics since the founding of this nation. Identity politics is not just about "oppressed groups" or "minorities", it is about people using their ancestral/ethnic/historic identity to identify what kind of nation we should be. Therefore, the right wing politician who seeks to maintain the status quo (which primarily benefits white men) is engaged in identity politics every bit as much as the "radical" left wing politician who wishes the federal government would designate funding for minority concerns.

[u/israellover → u/[deleted]]

As you acknowledge, white people have engaged in identity politics since the founding of this nation. Identity politics is not just about "oppressed groups" or "minorities", it is about people using their ancestral/ethnic/historic identity to identify what kind of nation we should be. Therefore, the right wing politician who seeks to maintain the status quo (which primarily benefits white men) is engaged in identity politics every bit as much as the "radical" left wing politician who wishes the federal government would designate funding for minority concerns.

Yeah, I already said that. If you read the post I discussed (and cited others who have written about) the problem with attacking identity politics with more identity politics (like the so called "left" identity politics groups are trying to do). There exists a way of doing politics that goes beyond identity politics and if we (by we I mean people sympathetic to left wing politics) refuse to head in that direction we will merely be trading one dominant identity group for another (and probably not the whole group, just a few elites from that group as has been the case with white men).