My one comment concerns the way that you place your ironic feminist observations under the heading of the scholarly & disciplinary concerns as opposed to political ones.
I, too, am attracted to Weber’s formulation and think it’s a relevant, interesting ideal to bring to the discussion of internet studies (and other interdisciplinary fields, like scholarly feminism). But it’s not like any of the irritating gestures you report would be any less irritating, inadequate, misleading, etc in a political context or viewed as political.

Surely the complaint is both scholarly *and* political. Maybe they are not so much indistinguishable as interdependent – feminism fail is both bad scholarship and bad politics, for non identical reasons. And it’s hard to imagine making progress on either front without respect for both.

That is a fantastic picture, BTW. That and Ken Wark’s hand-sketched diagram have been my two principal take aways from the conference thus far.

I’ve long found Ian Hunter’s critique of this sort of “ethical athleticism” very persuasive, taking his point that it says more about establishing the moral persona of the critic than actual political engagement, which is invariably more mundane and prosaic. I’m also aware that this line of argument has little purchase in the U.S., where Fredric Jameson dismissed such arguments as “laughable” back in the mid 90s.