Oh, Gender Studies. Do you want fries with that?
For those who think conservatives’ critiques of modern feminism and the Gender Studies curriculum are overly harsh hyperbole, a new academic hoax by a philosopher and his writing partner has exposed just how extreme, and even outright preposterous, the Gender Studies field has become and how illegitimate its peer-review process can be.
Philosopher Peter Boghossian and his collaborator James Lindsay decided to see if they could pull off a hoax paper in the mode of Alan Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which facetiously claimed that quantum gravity is a “social construct” yet still managed to get published in the cultural studies journal Social Text in 1996.
Writing as “Peter Boyle” and “Jamie Lindsay,” the authors submitted an absurd-on-its-face, 3,000-word paper titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” to a peer-reviewed journal, Cogent Social Sciences. Despite packing it full of what they described afterward as “utter nonsense,” the journal published the paper in its May edition. Here’s a screengrab:
The two authors revealed the hoax in an article published this week in Skeptic Magazine, “‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’: A Sokal-style Hoax on Gender Studies,” which begins with the following forward note from the editor:
Every once in awhile it is necessary and desirable to expose extreme ideologies for what they are by carrying out their arguments and rhetoric to their logical and absurd conclusion, which is why we are proud to publish this expose of a hoaxed article published in a peer-reviewed article today. It’s ramifications are unknown but one hopes it will help reign in extremism in this and related areas.
—Michael Shermer
Boghossian and Lindsay then describe in detail their hoax paper and discuss the significance of such a “preposterous” piece of writing being published by a peer-reviewed journal that presents itself as a legitimate source of academic inquiry. Here’s how the authors begin the exposure of their own hoax.
Via the Daily Wire