Beyond Intellectual Slut Shaming: Traversing Cartesian Dualism,Shame,and Self-Blame in the Neoliberalized Post-Structuralist Critical Classroom

Abstract

In this article, I conceptualize what I am calling “intellectual slut shaming” and illustrate how such an experience is a naturalized part of neoliberal subjectivity and knowledge production in academia. I will review how Cartesian and neoliberal subjects share several parallel structures, including mind–body dualism, and show how mind–body dualism is connected to the neoliberal experience of intellectual slut shaming. I then turn to one of Descartes’ critical contemporaries, Spinoza, for a powerful critique and expansion of the Cartesian subject. I explore Spinoza’s method of affirmation and how this might be used to ease intellectual slut shaming in the neoliberalist context. To engage in such an affirmative method, I turn to my own autoethnographic accounts in the neoliberal university classroom.