Irrigational Feminism
It seemed like a normal morning. Brain working like some early 90’s modem struggling to load a page. Check. The vague awareness that one needs to take extra care whilst aiming. Check. The stagger downstairs to fumble with the coffee machine. Check.
After the basic operating system of my morning brain had loaded, and whilst still waiting for the more advanced apps to load, I turned on Twitter𝕏. As you do.
And it turned out to be a normal morning after all. I was reassured to find that the world was still crazy and that sanity had not magically restored itself overnight.
One of the first tweets in my feed was from Colin Wright who drew our attention to another classic from the nutty world of macademia, with a paper entitled
Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’
I’ve never imagined America’s dead sea in the first place, so I’m already at a disadvantage here.
And what is it with all this “reimagining” going on anyway? What’s next? Reimagining medieval turnip farming as a queer Marxist post-feminist substructural praxis of resistance?
I’d ‘reimagine’ myself as a devilishly handsome and charming multi-millionaire, but I don’t think it’d ever catch on.
I don’t know, maybe Jaguar could ‘reimagine’ itself to be a maker of cars, perhaps?
As Colin Wright notes, this new paper could even surpass the dizzy heights of batshit bonkers already established by the now classic paper on the feminist theory of glaciers1 (published back in 2016). Here’s a screenshot provided by Wright
If you actually want to read the paper itself it’s open access, so you don’t even have to pay to be entertained. It’s from a journal that is a member of Springer Nature’s family - although perhaps it’s time to consider abolishing some members of that family.
Here’s a screenshot I took of some more of it (with my highlights added)
It is hard to imagine (reimagine?) that this is not a parody. As a parody it’s brilliant. As a serious paper it’s a grotesque gaga-fest of gibberish.
Water-centred intersectional feminist scholarship?
There’s no comment I could make on this phrase that is as hilarious as the words themselves. There is no possible way to snark this and be funnier than the original.
I, rather unwisely it turns out, made the following comment on Twitter𝕏
Hydrosexual? Is that the scientific terminology for watersports? I'm only asking because one of the author's collaborators mentioned in the paper is someone called Annie Sprinkle
Yes. I’d spotted that someone called Annie Sprinkle was mentioned as a collaborator in this paper. I thought it was just an amusing coincidence - one of those unfortunate names like my friend’s doctor who was called Dr. D’eath.
Oh dear.
Turns out that Annie was a porn star who seemed to enjoy the odd bit of, erm, water play. Today she’s a kind of sex ‘educator’ I guess, being described by Wiki as an American certified sexologist. Well, you learn something new every day.
Amongst Annie’s more notable achievements was the film she directed and starred in in 2017 called Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure. Although I think as a film title her 1992 movie called War Is Menstrual Envy is probably better.
But what in the incontinence pants of destiny is a hydrosexual?
Here’s how they describe themselves
(i) HYDROSEXUALS WE ARE!
We are the aquaphiliacs, deeply contaminated bodies of water. We are babies in love with a non-binary, transitional, life-giving substance connecting every sparkle of existence on the ‘Blue planet’ at risk as never before. We come into the world through water. The joys of our sexuality are wet. Our reproductive system is disturbed by microplastic. We die dry without water under conditions of global warming, rising seas, acidification of the oceans, water scarcity, draughts, massive rains, melting icebergs, and floods.
So the problem is too much water and too little. Oh and draughts. They’re a pain in the arse too.
The author of the brine shrimp paper is Ewelina Jarosz and she’s written more stuff on this watery theme, including the intriguingly titled “Assuming a hydrosexual position in the time of mourning”
I’ll bet that’s not listed in The Kama Sutra
On that page you can read they’s bio :
(she/they) is a hydrosexual and blue queer feminist scholar and collaborative artist in trans- and postdisciplinary art projects including water. Luck was on their side as they were twice awarded The Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship to the United States, resulting in a longstanding collaboration with ecosexual artists, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. With her background deeply connected to The Baltic Sea, where they grew up surrounded by cyanosis and algae, Ewelina is like a child of the sea, but they are also a mother to brine shrimp babies. Currently based in Krakow, Ewelina wags their tail with scales at The Department of Media and Cultural Research at The Pedagogical University. A member of art_research cyber_nymphos duo. They are the co-founders of The Blue Humanities Archive, an innovative platform that merges the realms of digital art and the humanities. Their research includes queer and sex ecologies envisioning more-than-human worlds.
And that just abut sums it up, doesn’t it?
Move over intersectional feminism, it’s time for irrigational feminism.
A classic work about “merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.”
I’d long been worried about all that injustice in human-ice interactions, and it was high time someone addressed this pressing issue.
In other words, taking the piss gets her wet?
I am sadly in no way surprised to see her referencing Åsberg (Swedish name) as we are head-the-ball crazy for that kind of stuff here and could easily be said to be a leader in the field of postmodernist nonsense.
I fondly remember the professorial dissertation and thesis-paper on the sex of railroad-stations.
And the two feminists hired by Malmö City (which receives over 7 000 000 000:-/year from the rest of Sweden to function) to check that the city's statues weren't sexist or reinforcing sexist stereotypes on gender. They missed the point by the way. One of the kost famous statues have four men raising a block of granite upon which the city's silhouette is stylised. Each pair of men? Supported by /one/ woman. To the feminists, this meant women were under-represented...
Anyway. Thing is, you /must/ under current rules for grants, funding and such include idiocy such as this. Both in the department or the institution, and in your curriculum and literature, and your applications for money. That's the rule.
Even my brother, who's in Geology, must include some pre-written boilerplate about "decolonisation of groundwater access in a non-hierarchical anaylitical framwork". Because that matters so much to how you drill holes.
It's all part of the war on normal, the war on western civilisation.
Whatever you do, if you want to stay employed, don't ask "What does that mean?" when some bamstick starts spouting off about "reimagining" something.
I was a member of an industry group working with the School of Engineering at my local Uni for many years. A new Professor was appointed (an actual Professor, Ie head of school, not Professor in the lame American sense of the word) and she was full of ideas.
Sadly, she came up with a huge transformational plan called, would you believe it, "Reimagine", which was going to reimagine/transform how engineering research and education was done at the school.
That was in late 2019 as I recall. There was a grand launch function with lots of learned people, much high-falutin' talk, then a few months later along came Covid and that was the end of that.
"Reimagine" has become a favourite word of the loony left to describe pointless, unnecessary and often disastrous plans for change. So now, whenever I hear about something being "reimagined", I automatically translate that to "fashionable but expensive disaster thst achieves nothing".