Abstract Vitriolic disputes over trans identity and decolonisation have made university campuses into the battlegrounds of the culture wars. Yet the connections between these controversies and the epistemic function of the academy remain underexamined. In this article, I argue that the structures of oppression and privilege that activists seek to dismantle are sustained by the disciplinarity of the academy. Inspired by Sylvia Wynter’s radical critique of Western humanism, I show how the entrenched division between the sciences and the humanities upholds a biocentric conception of truth that underwrites “Man,” the mode of life that colonises the concept of the human. The article outlines Wynter’s theory of sociogenesis to interrogate the role of the disciplines in repressing awareness of the sociocultural constitution of modes of life, arguing that this denial of discursive construction sustains the hegemony of Man while foreclosing trans liberation. What follows, I suggest, is that the academy’s culture wars crises cannot be resolved through diversity policies. Instead, I call for a transformation of disciplinarity that untethers the academy from the epistemological commitments of Man. Only by eschewing positivism and universalism can institutions of higher education break with the coloniality of gender and contribute to reimagining the human.
Christopher Griffin (Thu,) studied this question.