WEDNESDAY 4 November, 5pm
Reception at 4:30pm
FHI Garage,
Smith Warehouse, Bay 4
Duke University
We are delighted to welcome one of the most interesting young women philosophers today to PAL. Kate Manne is an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University. She has recently been a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and works in moral philosophy and feminist philosophy. Her book on misogyny, Down Girl, is currently under contract with Oxford University Press, New York.
Trigger Discipline: On the Myth of Victim Culture
The myth of victim culture is certainly nothing new. But conservatives in the US are increasingly prone to touting it. In this talk, I will argue that the ideology of so-called victim culture deploys a mundane truth – that people can be maudlin and self-aggrandizing, and have an exaggerated sense of their own plight – in a highly selective way, and to women’s political detriment. This ideology also functions to disrupt solidarity between oppressed people generally, by misdescribing and policing the activities of those who are crowdsourcing power effectively at the moment. It depicts as weakness what is really strength in numbers. And it manages to distract us from the real and disastrous fragility to which we ought to pay attention – namely, that of Whiteness, as well as masculinity.
PAL 
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