"Second-wave essentialism couldn't handle the 1% of intersex people, for example, or the existence of trans individuals."
What a dishonest attempt at a characterization. You took the opporunity of the readers' unfamiliarity with a topic to interject your own subjective and vague opinion ("Second-wave essentiallism couldn't handle" -- what function does this phrase even serve beyond emotional release for the writer? What does it even mean?), without providing any links or citations to the extensive existing material that exists.
If you valued actual discourse, you would link to some article like Michelle Goldberg's "What is a Woman?"[0] in the New Yorker to provide some sort of context on the conflicting ideas of feminism and queer theory. But time and time again my fellow men who cheerlead for queer theory and identity politics bring nothing to the table but opportunistic, ingenuine rhetoric bordering on non-sequitur. I don't even need to claim anything about second-wave or modern radical feminists -- the transparently anti-intellectual liberal male digs his own grave.
As always, everything is presented at a certain level of abstraction. I was alluding to TERFs, whose 'e' stands for 'exclusionary,' ie, they exclude trans women from their idea of 'woman.' As with any summary, it of course glosses over details, and is clearly biased by who is speaking. It seems a bit strange to have to state that in a thread about Foucault. You are totally correct that my bias lies with queer theory.
I did understand who you were alluding to. But for those unfamiliar, are you implying that modern and historical feminists who have a conception of the oppression of women that you and some people in Queer Theroy and some tumblr users disagree with, coined the name "TERF", rather than the latter group? An uninformed reader would possibly take away that some number of feminists actually, non-ironically, take on the label "TERF". In my time in reading dozens of writers on these issues, which has been at least a year now, I've never seen this. So hopefully that wasn't the implication.
If one's confidence in one's own bias is such that one can inject it into discourse without feeling the need to cite any material which asserts ideas which they are biased "against" ("Second-wave essentiallism", whatever that entails), or even import material supporting their own claims, would one not mind if another was to comment with some reading material for those who may be interested in this thread? For example, the 2013 letter "Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of 'Gender'" written by 37 second-wave and modern radical feminists [0], or the essay "SSCAB/DSCAB: Reconsidering the Conversation" written by a black radical feminist [1], or glosswitch's "Beauty and the cis" [2]? Surely it shouldn't change anything to point out that these writings exist.
I didn't make any claims about the origin of the term. Your history is accurate, to my knowledge.
> without feeling the need to cite any material
This isn't a dissertation. It's HN. Not every last thing needs a citation.
And no, I don't 'mind' at all. I'm very sympathetic to many arguments made here. People should read second-wave stuff. I just come down on a different side of them, personally.
What a dishonest attempt at a characterization. You took the opporunity of the readers' unfamiliarity with a topic to interject your own subjective and vague opinion ("Second-wave essentiallism couldn't handle" -- what function does this phrase even serve beyond emotional release for the writer? What does it even mean?), without providing any links or citations to the extensive existing material that exists.
If you valued actual discourse, you would link to some article like Michelle Goldberg's "What is a Woman?"[0] in the New Yorker to provide some sort of context on the conflicting ideas of feminism and queer theory. But time and time again my fellow men who cheerlead for queer theory and identity politics bring nothing to the table but opportunistic, ingenuine rhetoric bordering on non-sequitur. I don't even need to claim anything about second-wave or modern radical feminists -- the transparently anti-intellectual liberal male digs his own grave.
[0] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2