In early March, the Presses Universitaires de France canceled the release of a book written by several members of the Observatory. Their mistake? Mentioning "woke obscurantism" in the title: historian Patrick Boucheron, the French pope of deconstruction, took offense. Everyone knows that "wokeism doesn't exist": so few, in fact, that ten words from a well-regarded activist-researcher are enough to censor anyone who doesn't think like him.
Faced with the outcry, the publisher finally changed his mind: and so much the better, because wokeism is alive and well, in full swing even. Amusing coincidence: the very week of cancel appeared in the United States the most deconstructed "scientific" article ever publishedIt blends anti-speciesism, radical feminism, transactivism, decolonialism… and all about cyborg dogs. It's the perfect opportunity to observe the torture the woke are capable of inflicting on objective truth and the meaning of words, when they see a political advantage in doing so; and how this sometimes backfires on them.
The author: anti-speciesism, decolonialism, transactivism… and purges
The author is Chloe Diamond-Lenow, a non-binary instructor in the Department of Woman & Gender Studies at the State University of New York. She claims to work to bring together LGBT+, feminist, anti-speciesist, and decolonial "sciences"; she is also seen very committed against “Islamophobia”. His thesis, defended in 2018 at Berkeley, focused on "the biopolitics of species in the war [against terrorism]", more precisely the way in which "dogs have been anthropologized (sic) as victims of "monstrous Arabs" to occupy the space of the latter's subjective liberal rights, [maintaining] a position based on exclusionary abjectivity..."
Let's translate: she accuses her government of having used their reputation for cruelty to animals against Muslims, a pretext she considers hypocritical: we don't really care about them in the USA, because we deny them equal rights to humans. Note that American "colonial humanism" (sic) is not a oppressor very resentful: these strong words did not harm Diamond-Lenow's career, far from it. She even quickly became AssistantProfessor (more or less “lecturer”) in one of the major universities in the country, with an extremely comfortable salary. Prestigious publishers like Routledge called on her.
These institutions were not put off by the protests of some students either. kicked out of their class because they are white or non-queer. It's worth noting that in many American universities, earning a degree requires earning a certain number of "diversity credits." Far from being a harmless, isolated eccentric, Diamond-Lenow has control over a large number of young people who have no choice but to accept her theories if they want to get ahead in life.
False, the activists will retort: they are free, they can always choose to follow the course of another "Studies" teacher. Certainly, but which one? Professor Hummel, who sets himself the goal of " queer harassment »? Professor Sadow, who claims to study " 18th century gender theory1 "? The student has no choice but to be woke or more woke. Diamond-Lenow may not be the most irrational person in her department, even if she is—by far—the least discreet.
The theory implemented: cyborg violence and militant untruth
Diamond-Lenow's article is titled "Becomings of Canine Queerism: Feminist Cyborg Politics and Interspecies Intimacies in Ecologies of Love and Violence." It is, in fact, a direct application of the theories of one of the leading thinkers of wokeism: the feminist and anti-speciesist philosopher Donna Haraway.
Donna Haraway (born 1944) has devoted her entire career to "deconstructing" the notion of objective truth, which she believes is guilty of "harming feminists"2 ". She therefore invents the concept of "situated knowledge": "neutral" science does not exist, because your point of view dictates your reasoning. My activism can now claim to be a science, while your rational arguments lose all value, reason being the mask of a male, white, heterosexual, anthropocentric bias... This anti-scientific dogma, inspired by the neo-animist philosopher Bruno Latour, has become one of the foundations of woke thought.
Haraway is also known for her "Cyborg Manifesto"3 » (1985), another call to go beyond the oppositions of true/false, man/woman, etc. She then proposes to activists the model of the science fiction “cyborg,” a living being whose body is partially made of machines. Neither flesh nor metal, Haraway’s cyborg is non-binary radicalism personified. It has an entirely fluid identity, a way of thinking that rejects any constructed logic, a sexuality as undifferentiated as that of a fern (sic). All that remains positive and anchored to it is an “instinct for coalition politics [of the oppressed] » : to sabotage the values of dominant, he "dedicates himself to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity."
Its birth was supposedly made possible, in particular, by the death of the hard sciences and the end of speciesism. The former was killed by consumer electronics, the mass production of devices "made primarily of light signals," thus, according to the author, immaterial and with an almost magical functioning. The latter would now be seen as absurd by both science and society: Haraway therefore declares the triple difference between man and animal, animal and machine, and real and unreal to be abolished.
The article: "Dyke land" and queer dogs
This radical denial inspires Diamond-Lenow, who, following Haraway, dreams of a "lesbian earth," that is, a "group of related feminist figures capable of making our world more livable." These groups are composed of "cyborg" beings, human or "more-than-human" (i.e., animals in anti-speciesist Newspeak). The author therefore sets out to "theorize [new] human-dog relationships." The only problem: however well-trained they may be, canines are remarkably poor at political action, lesbianism, and non-binary radicalism. But no denial of reality is too big for a woke person, as long as they can get away with it by manipulating language: Diamond-Lenow will prove herself a worthy student of Haraway.
She first draws on another recent publication in Gender Studies, “The Earth is a Big Butch Dyke”4 tough and menopausal" (sic). The authors are two fairly well-known "ecosexual and porno-feminist artists," E. Stephens and A. Sprinkle. Having won awards at several festivals for their work "mixing art and pornography," the couple also dabbles in theory : according to them, we must consider Nature as "a dyke lover" with whom we can have "queer interdependent relationships", uniting through "non-monogamous marriages of the senses" to put an end to "dominionist practices" and global warming.
If our relationships with the ecosystem are "lesbian," Diamond-Lenow seems to infer, so are those with our "companion species." She resolves the problem anyway by then unilaterally redefining " lesbian as a political orientation rather than a sexual identity." Even more surprisingly, she states that all “non-binary or trans” are lesbians… on the grounds that certains would be. This logical sleight of hand will quickly be explained: Diamond-Lenow wants not only to describe male/dog relationships as "lesbian," but also as "queer." Here again, this is in line with Haraway: why take into account the reason for dominant, when the animal cause gains nothing from it?
The body of the article is composed of two parts. In the first, the author analyzes how the dog is used by "white supremacy" in America: a dog symbolizing the happy "bourgeois heteronormative" family, a police officer, trained to attack Black people... Then talking about military "robot dogs" serves to introduce an example of a "bad" cyborg dog, used for repression, a possibility of misuse already considered by Haraway: isn't the science fiction cyborg first and foremost a killing machine, emanating from "neocolonial technoprogressivism"? That all this is fiction seems to escape the author... just as the fact that a "robot dog" is no more a canid than a "drone" is a flying insect.
The second part describes the "good" dog: one that lives with its humans in the "queer ecofeminist cyborg" approach that the author recommends. She then tries to convince us that this is already a common practice in LGBT+ circles, through a masterpiece of "cherry picking" (selecting facts that support your point).
Diamond-Lenow will first quote a "queer feminist theorist" (Kathy Rudy), claiming "that she cannot define herself as a lesbian because of her deep relationship with the dog": and the famous trans philosopher Paul (Beatriz) Préciado claiming that life with her bulldog Pepa helped her understand that she was not "a man stuck in a woman's body, but a bulldog stuck in a lesbian body" (sic). With the support of these two arguments from authority, the author can safely conclude that lesbianism also includes "canine intimacies."
She even goes so far as to argue that it is an ancient practice. To this end, she cites a lesbian classic: The Well of Solitude (1928) by the butch writer Radclyffe Hall. The cross-dressing heroine "Stephen" Gordon, after adopting a dog with her lover, thinks that they are "no longer two but three": first proof. Like her heroine, the author of the novel adopted two dogs with his partner, and gave them his last name as if they were human children: second proof. Needless to say, this is what many owners who are very attached to their animals think and do, without being queer or anti-speciesists.
The author then describes two episodes of a Netflix reality TV series, The Ultimatum (2023 season). Couples from sexual minorities test the strength of their love in the face of disagreement. In the first, a non-binary person breaks up with another because he refuses to let his dog sleep with them. In the second, a lesbian named Margaux and her partner try a threesome with another woman. Margaux then claims that "she couldn't have survived the experience" without the presence of her bulldog Yola in the bed. She also describes herself as a "fierce dog mom," which, according to the author, proves that pets "are an integral part of queer relationship dynamics."
Further evidence: the fact that many competitors call their pets "my baby"... something that is quite common. The author also notes that among LGBT+ people, pets often play the role of children among heterosexuals: which is not a new discovery. The article ends with a bark: that of the English bulldog Rumple, who demands that the author stop writing to play with him and his "Black" partner. genderqueer " Not very academic... but we're not going to be that far off anymore.
That such an outrageous article could have been published should not surprise us. In 2017, three American researchers jokingly sent a paper to a Gender Studies journal on " Rape culture and queer acceptance in dog parks »: it was immediately praised by the editorial staff and promised rapid publication. The theme was similar, the discourse barely more polished than that of Diamond-Lenow's article. And the Journal of Lesbian Studies who published the latter wasn't going to think twice: a year earlier, he validated the even crazier article on "menopausal butch Earth" that this one cites. It's easier to understand why Diamond-Lenow quickly broke through in academic Gender Studies circles: by contrast, she is undoubtedly considered a paragon of academic excellence.
The Strange Disappearance of the Author
The article was published on March 8: four days later, American freelance journalist Colin Wright put it online on X. Despite a (brief) comment from Elon Musk, coverage remained relatively limited on social media, where only the summary was broadcast. No media outlet picked up the information, which would have had no effect: writing an article without scientific value does not usually put the career of a woke academic in danger (and for good reason).
Almost immediately, however, Chloe Diamond-Lenow's name disappeared from the list of professors in her department. And with the utmost discretion: neither the Oneonta campus where she teaches nor the State University of New York commented on the matter. When contacted, neither responded. Since American academics have private status, the author could theoretically have been fired quickly and quietly; but again, this is highly unusual.
An accusation of plagiarism or AI writing can be dismissed: the article is too personal and specific. More likely, the author's heavy emphasis (28 times in 13 pages) on the subject of human-animal "intimate relationships" made people uncomfortable. Shocking as this may seem, researchers have already been caught woke à publish articles defending sexual relations with animals as a means of "fighting patriarchy." Haraway herself wrote in her "Cyborg Manifesto" that "zoophilia has a new status in the [cyborg] cycle of marital exchanges; in a second manifesto from 2003, she claimed to have "oral intercourse" with her Australian Shepherd "whose little tongue has impregnated [her] tonsils" (sic). She describes this as a " colonization of its cells [through saliva], which is very significant: we see how far the obsession with "overturning the power relations" has led certain activists.
Note that the pope of anti-speciesism himself, Peter Singer, has been defending bestiality since 2001 5, the prohibition of which, according to him, would be a "religious taboo," thus destined to disappear like those of "sodomy or contraception." It is therefore understandable that Diamond-Lenow was suspected of defending it too. Her article is literally based on Haraway's zoophile manifesto; she constantly talks about "intimate relationships with dogs," and even about "opening up non-anthropocentric possibilities of tactile [and] bodily intimacies"; the only time she mentions zoophilia is to see it as a "pathologized identity," etc.
This is not certain, however: the author may have simply given in to the woke obsession with "politicizing her relationship," that is, turning any emotional attachment into a camaraderie of struggle. Diamond-Lenow may have wanted to share with her "non-human companions" political labels that are dear to her... forgetting that they also had a sexual meaning. In her circles, as we have seen, "lesbian" and "queer" have long since lost all precise meaning to become virtuous buzzwords: to the point that we see heterosexual activists claiming to be of a "lesbian gender" in order to copy the radical speeches and dress of those concerned.
In both cases, Diamond-Lenow was careless: she should have known that the public (and the university administration) would interpret "queer relationship with a dog" as something very concrete. But by constantly fiddling with the definition of words, by professing that objective reality must yield to ideology, we end up no longer attaching importance to it, I suppose. Our activist found herself caught in her own tricks.
Mikhail Kostylev is Guillaume Pronesti's post-Soviet, talkative false nose.
