Post by samitch on Mar 9, 2016 3:39:20 GMT
I really liked my first experience reading Butler and I thought the Olson and Worsham piece was the best of this week’s readings. While I was onboard with everything Butler and the authors had to say about gender, performance, and speech act theory for the week, I found myself (a weekly tradition at this point) hung up by a sentiment of Butler’s. In Olson and Worsham (2000), they write that Butler “is dismayed by the increased calls for scholarly work to be accessible, to appeal to “common sense” through a “common language” and to be written in terms of an “already accepted grammar.” (p.730). While I would agree with Butler that we should not “dumb things down” to a common sense, I take issue with her apprehension toward academic accessibility. Simply put, if we are not accessible to real people with real problems, well then what are we doing!? I thought for a scholar such as Butler who is renowned for her work in gender and queer theory, she could easily find the need for accessible work to those that our work would (hopefully) directly effect. As it stands now, we may write all sorts of highbrow rhetorical critiques that call for change but if they’re truly great (by academic standards), they’re tucked away into a journal and never seen again by the masses.
I know this topic has been broached a few times in this class as well in our Rhetorical Criticism class in the fall, but I find it ridiculous that the great scholars are the ones finding it laughable that we need to be accessible. What is the point of producing critically analytical work if we are not intending it to be reached by the everyday person? Is it not the point to change what we find as problematic or harming so that our society just might be better moving forward? I can perhaps find a middle ground that Butler means by producing “accessible” work, we are diluting the potency of our critiques, but the current disconnect between academia and the everyday person is already massive, so why insist that we continue to dwell behind our ivory towers, writing in a way that 90 percent of people cannot understand?
I know this topic has been broached a few times in this class as well in our Rhetorical Criticism class in the fall, but I find it ridiculous that the great scholars are the ones finding it laughable that we need to be accessible. What is the point of producing critically analytical work if we are not intending it to be reached by the everyday person? Is it not the point to change what we find as problematic or harming so that our society just might be better moving forward? I can perhaps find a middle ground that Butler means by producing “accessible” work, we are diluting the potency of our critiques, but the current disconnect between academia and the everyday person is already massive, so why insist that we continue to dwell behind our ivory towers, writing in a way that 90 percent of people cannot understand?