Hi all, hoping you're having a good day.
I'm currently towards the end of my undergrad journey in philosophy and I'm moving towards a masters in political science. It's kind of difficult to find professors that are interested in this thing of ours, but I managed to survive in that ideologically hostile environment. I'm currently on a commission to review the undergrad program and I'm sitting on the board with both professors and some studen colleagues of mine. We had our third encounter this past week and I've been confronted with a personnal dilemma that I wanted to ask the community about.
Since I'm mostly a masc, cishet presenting guy, I try to be careful in spaces that are meant to be safe for people who want to study and do their own thing. Gender/race/decolonial studies are very popular topics inside of the department where I study, but it's also firmly ideologically commited to the analytic tradition of the anglo-saxon world and as such, it's extremely liberal. We don't even have a course on Marx or any authors that are of the marxist tradition. The board mainly wants to introduce more diversity in the course offers, and I'm all for that, but of all the intersting women authors, she proposed Hannah Arendt. I've been kind of shocked by that proposal since Arendt isn't exactly a feminist or a leftist, it feels like they did the meme. I decided to say something and I said that it's important to note the contribution of the marxist tradition in the feminist struggle. I said that the Venn Diagram between feminists and marxists overlaps in kind of a big way and I made a point that tokenising diversity while ignoring the overarching ideology that made these movements successful is not a good approach. I got a weird reaction and it kind of reaffirmed a lot of what I've felt in terms of ideological alienation inside of that department.
So yeah, I'd like some feedback from the community. Since this department is very into feminist theory and has all types of radfems that vary in terms of political allegence, it's hard to bring up such things. I've picked up some hostile vibes from two of the women inside that board since then and it's not the first time that my leftist speeches kind of throw off women when they feel I'm mansplaning or something. I can totally understand women wanting spaces and being so-fucking-tired of dumbass trash men. Y'all go full volcel and queen off I support you 100%. But like, can we also stop ignoring history and the immense contribution of the leftist project to feminist emancipation? This is the education we give forward to the next generation and I'm not sure more racist-warlike-women in philosophy is exactly the thing that will solve those inequalities they pretend to care so much about.
Idiot