Saturday, May 27, 2017

I'm Going to Have to Learn This Language

I mentioned to some folks last weekend that, when contemporary dissertation abstracts come across my virtual desk, I'm often baffled by their intention.  This is because they are now written in Gibberish, which is the language of 21st century academics.  While I can sometimes catch their meaning, since all of them basically say that every aspect of our world is racist, sexist, etc., I found this abstract to have a certain splendor to it:
This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies – so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future – as mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control operative at the level of the biomolecular.
Heck, my computer tells me that eight of these words don't exist.