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Monday, December 7, 2015

King Nuance

Despite the brilliance of the critique of nuance in Healy's "Fuck Nuance," I still think that for my field, nuance is king. In other words, the vast majority of work could be improved by more attention to nuance and detail.

I accept that in sociology, the call for nuance might be a cheap move. In fact, it not a nuanced approach to call for more nuance in a facile way, when what is really meant is the introduction of missing category of analysis. So if you say, "what about class?" in an analysis focused on gender, that is not necessarily a call for more nuance per se. It more like an unnuanced attempt to outflank someone politically.

What I mean by "king nuance" is that

suppose someone were to talk about the postmodern death of the subject. There are a million ways of formulating that, a thousand applications, so a cliché version of that would not be very helpful, would it?

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