07.03.2026 22:55
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For fans of explaining the joke:
Might be of interest to those who want more crossover between metaphilosophy, logic, linguistics, aesthetics, cognitive science, and social/political philosophy!
Co-wrote an essay with Steven Gimbel on "Jokes, Puns, and Philosophy" featuring an overview of syntactical / semantic / pragmatic approaches to humor! Carnap, Gödel, and Derrida together at last: philpapers.org/rec/MARJPA-5 #philsky
I think I'm not enjoying governance by disaster capitalism
My "Laughing at Trans Women" essay was originally a section of my dissertation that argued the consolidation of humor theories into 4 (or 5) approaches resulted in a tendency to prioritize depoliticized accounts of humor over political accounts of humor. It was connected w/ Bergson and Rousseau.
I didn't have any trans people on my dissertation committee! What I did have was one person who is now a trans ally after having been an (actual) trans exclusionary radical feminist in the 70s and another person who is (coincidentally) actively "gender critical."
Recently I was introduced before a talk as part of a 'first generation' who wrote a dissertation on trans philosophy when I'm actually part of a 'first generation' who wrote a dissertation on philosophy of humor. I think we could learn something by comparing these discipline-building projects.
savandepaul.bandcamp.com/album/wifef-...
B-B-B-B-BANDCAMP FRIDAY PUSH CUZ A GIRLS GOTTA EAT! GO GO GO GO GO!
this week in Feminist Thought I discussed the relationship between the performance of masculinity and imperialism & then the White House just decided to make it explicit
A classic of world philosophy, the Zhuangzi revolutionized ethics and ontology forever with its Dao.
Now, in our latest issue, Rose Novick brings this masterpiece to a new generation of English readers with her magisterial translation & commentary.
strangematters.coop/rose-novick-...
it's wifefucker friday! new music from Ishtar Sr. and a new zine from Other Spaces!
People's Joker
There's also a play of a priori gender as common sense in this video. For Joe Rogan man and woman aren't empirical categories with crossover or complication related to biological & social processes, they are categories conceived through public reason as eternal mutually exclusive roles and destinies
Julia Serano has some essays about it!
the thing about autogynephilia is that historically some trans people were open to the idea since it was initially put forward by clinical sexologists, but then after Bailey published Man Who Would Be Queen it became clear that it *is* primarily a tool of transphobia / casting us as sexual monsters
it's kind of weird to live in a society that both doesn't believe transphobia is real and fosters anxiety about getting called transphobic
There's also something I'm wondering about the practice of white bourgeois British masculinity where perhaps agency gets redirected into devotion towards preordained codes of propriety (including propriety of sex/gender). But I lack the empirical basis to take this beyond conjecture!
This is also related to contempt for a foolish / merely consumable / polluted class of sex-gender. Someone like Benjamin Ryan who has an obvious seething rage about us that might disqualify him in other contexts is transmuted into the neutral observer and all his opponents become 'trans activists'
I think transphobia also frequently acquires a consuming desire to see trans people fail, which is where it takes on some its legislative / journalistic obsession forms. Interest about us is there, but our ends must take a tragic-redemptive form.
Finally got to reading this! I think there's a deep fear that categories might relate with human agency rather than encountering a totally prearranged world, which maps to several of the dynamics that you point out in the other set of paragraphs. Transphobia is partly a fear of the unmoored self.
I like Martha Nussbaum's "Professor of Parody" essay because when someone shares it I know not to take them seriously
Cat Power is going to be performing the entirety of The Greatest just an hour away but sadly I am a You Are Free person
I put some new stuff up on internet archive this morning, including Jamie Berrout's translations of the late Argentinean travesti theorist and organizer Lohana Berkins.
archive.org/details/loha...
Alex Byrne is kind of giving "passing quote that Beauvoir dunks on during Second Sex"
Byrne kind of throws his agency in the garbage during the Introduction: this is not a political book, it's just analyzing confused concepts. Then him writing for the Trump administration is just a matter of making sure the argument is right. So it's also a strategy of totally ceding responsibility.
I'm really happy to have started the unit about Byrne with Beauvoir's chapter on biological data, because she both (1) affirms the importance of the body, which is obviously important to me but also (2) emphasizes agency, change, and responsibility.
I'm teaching Alex Byrne right now and the thing that stands out to me most is he wants the world to be very simple. Humans are biological creatures which is a straightforward situation, sex is grounded in the simplest kernel of gamete distinctions, and patriarchy just naturally emerges out of these.
You could try one of the novels! I like The Mandarins as a post-WWII story about the politics of publishing and literature scenes. Ethics of Ambiguity is shorter than Second Sex but I find Second Sex a bit more immediately accessible to students.
I would have a nobody under 35 rule, you need to have one saturn return and at least one divorce