A protest at Queens university in Kingston, Ontario against Lindsay Shepherd, claiming that she is a white supremacist, stretches bounds of … well, sanity. The video on the Global News page is priceless.
The leader of this protest group, Sofie Vlaad, has published an article that sheds much light on his/her “brilliance”. Here’s the abstract:
This paper seeks to develop a new framework for discussing transsexual subjectivities. Drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of Agential Realism, I posit sex not as an immanent quality, but one that exists through its relations. Agential Realism as a theory presents us with a framework for discussing things-in-phenomena, and the material-discursive practices from which they arise. Under this paradigm, I mark a distinction between transsexuality qua process as a natural function of sex by which determinate (sexed) boundaries are (re)articulated, and transsexuality qua subject as the determinate categories that boundary-making practices, such as sexology and state institutions, bring into being. Adapting Jay Prosser’s theory of transsexuality as a form of autobiography to Barad’s framework, I delineate the ways in which sex acts as a process of becoming. Finally, using the language of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, I describe gender dysphoria as both constructed and melancholic, existing as the psychic feeling of loss incurred when the determinate boundaries of sex are rendered legible to state institutions, but illegible to transsexual subjects themselves.
Would an SDA reader be so kind as to translate this into … you know … legible English for the rest of us.
Lest we forget, this person’s education is being highly subsidized by taxpayers.