reprobate

Ok, here we go. I gotta keep this brief, but I think I can indicate my points for you to yell at some more.

>I think the discussion on the boards bears out, for the most part, that people, mostly childless men here, don't bother to avail themselves of the rudimentary facts, or even read the thread before spewing out their ill formed opinions.

I already addressed this in part over at the original thread. But my sense was that the original analysis was a bit confused, mixing up various underlying criticisms and not plotting any of them out. I don't think this helped folks who wrote replies. More on this when I engage what you are presuming to be BP's perspective below.

>As for a good scolding, if I wanted to do that, I would have pointed out that you completely missed the point of the article and its underlying philosophy, substituting instead a handful of flavor of the minute scholars who addressed the absolute reverse of the phenomena at play here.

My inclination to mention the flavor of the month can be explained as follows. Reading BitchPhD, both here and on her blog, she always seems to me to be about negotiating late academic trends, the line between second- and third-wave feminisms, and popular culture. When she does this well, it's a great read and interesting. Not unlike the old magazine Lingua Franca, but with feminist leanings. (Katha Pollitt does a great job of this task on a regular basis.)

But please note the slippage in the original article between what is being done and what BitchPhD fears it will set the precedent for. The citation of the Holocaust seemed an evocation of Agamben, as he is most well-known in popularized form for his theorizations of politics and the State through thinking through the concentration camp. Then again, as you no doubt know, Agamben does not exactly endorse Foucault's notion of bio-power, which also seemed to be at play in BitchPhD's argument about medicine and re-thinking women's pregnant bodies. Of course, neither of these lines were developed, nor were any others. In part, I think it's because they're not a great fit and she'd have to stretch them pretty far for it to make any sense. Hence, her imaginary fears, which fit the theorists I note better--which is why I think she interjected those specters. But that, again, is guesswork. It's hard to tell from the scant analysis in the piece.

I think that her final point, however, regarding the slippery slope misses the point entirely of racial, gendered and class exclusions, and it's a mistake that none of the people we've mentioned would have made. That's what bothered me. And led to my suggestion that looking at the history of how the rhetoric of child endangerment might have helped as it well demonstrates the racialized, gendered and classed policing of behavior. (The first suggestion, which was the closest to how I see the matter was Tilly's work, as you're right that Foucault and Agamben fit poorly.)

>This has nothing to do with a sovereign jurdically excepting themselves from the law they impose, or the technology of power and control, but rather garden variety propaganda coupled with the exception of otherness. The government assumes no special extra legal power here, and they employ a 600 year old technology whose application to dominate social thought was perfected centuries before Foucault was a dirty thought (or had one).

Yeah, see above.

>The critical deconstructive analysis of the mechanism at play here, is, in the philosophical realm, pure existentialism, although in the legal (constructive) arena its tools were well understood and examined two centuries before. But it wouldn't have been any fun to cite Sartre or Beauvoir, because people have actually heard of them, would it? Hell, if you were going to mis-apply a post structuralist, you'd have been better off with Lacan. At least there you could have claimed that this was globalizing the ego and assigning its taxonomy to marginalize.

>See, I went to college, too, I just did it before fashion came to dominate over critical thought.

I guess I'd be somewhat surprised if folks are reading Sartre or Beauvoir (more than, say, Foucault), and I'd be surprised if they were what BP had on her mind. I guess you're just ignoring my point that the comment I left was meant as a note to BP and NOT as either a full analysis in and of itself or a show for the crowds. My point was more a meta-point about how the BitchPhD columns have come to function on the site as a space for pointless culture wars and how BitchPhD's work can play into that deleterious trend. In essence I was trying to prod her to be more like her best work.

Now I'm really wondering who's wagging what, though, I must say. Let's just deflate a little, huh?

sorry, i was just hoping you would be more specific regarding this 'overwhelming' evidence. im just curious, as i feel quite comfortable with the literature, and was surprised by your statement, as i feel we have different views of it. so "eh?" should have been "what about this evidence, specifically, makes you view it as support for an 'overwhelming' answer with regard to the effects of maternal alcohol consumption during the third trimester?" my apologies.