@nyx @realpetrateal this reminds me of some research I did at one point in archives of old feminist zines (65-79). there were a lot of comments about how they felt the feminist & especially lesbian movement were being actively undermined by the FBI. the radfem lesbians circa 66-73 had been organizing heavily around ending US imperialism in Vietnam, in a way that's been totally deemphasized in contemporary retellings of that era. this had led to federal disruption, probably the most infamous example of which being Gloria Steinem. but a lot of radical dykes were overall suspicious of academic involvement. they criticized academics--including Robin Morgan, Janice Raymond, and Mary Daly--of taking concepts from the radical organizing circles and watering them down for academic presentation. by the mid to late 70s a lot of their collectives had been disrupted including arrests and a whole lot of IRS fuckery, which they attributed to FBI involvement. I got the impression while reading it that the FBI's involvement was well-known and taken as a given. what was telling to me is that this shift of the late 70s precisely corresponds to the mainstreaming of TERF and SWERF politics in the US radical feminist scene, as well as dropping all serious discussion of imperialism as an issue of patriarchy. ever since learning about that I've suspected that the shift to cultural feminism was at least somewhat assisted by federal involvement.

another suspicious component in all this is where these departments even originated. by and large, all these queer studies / women's studies / black studies / etc departments are downstream of concessions made in response to militant campus building takeovers by students associated with the SDS. now obviously these students had other demands as well, most specifically ending the war in Vietnam. it's telling that the demands for minority studies were concessions administrators (with explicit DoD ties) were happy to grant. I don't at all think that most of the people in these departments are intentionally disrupting radical politics, but I think there's a great deal of institutional pressure that rewards obfuscation and punishes praxis, and the kind of shitty political theories we encounter are the emergent outcome of that.

of course I also wouldn't be surprised if I end up looking through an archive somewhere and finding out Janice Raymond or Michael Bailey interned with Jolly West.