SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies
As we all know, gender studies is an entirely bogus area of so-called science. Two professors, one who specializes in critical thinking [pdx.edu] set out to prove just that by submitting an over-the-top ridiculous paper to a peer reviewed humanities journal to see if it would be accepted. It was. The story of how the entire field of gender studies was revealed to be intellectually bankrupt was chronicled in an article for the widely regarded Skeptic Magazine. [skeptic.com]
The article is introduced by this 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
The article starts:
The Hoax
The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.
That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.
This paper should never have been published. Titled, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,” our paper “argues” that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.” As if to prove philosopher David Hume’s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, our should-never-have-been-published paper was published in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal Cogent Social Sciences.
But the story does not end there. Some critical thinker libertarians thought the issue deserved further investigation. They discovered: [bleedingheartlibertarians.com]
The first journal that Bognossian and Lindsay submitted their hoax paper to, and that rejected it, was NORMA: The International Journal for Masculinity Studies. This journal doesn’t even hit the top 115 journals in Gender Studies. So, what happened here was that they submitted a hoax paper to an unranked journal, which summarily rejected it. They then received an auto-generated response directing them to a pay-to-publish vanity journal. They submitted the paper there, and it was published. From this chain of events they conclude that the entire field of Gender Studies is “crippled academically”. This tells us very little about Gender Studies, but an awful lot about the perpetrators of this “hoax”…. and those who tout it as a take down of an entire field.
So it appears that extremism and blind ideology have indeed been revealed. Perhaps Michael Shermer can say if these revelations will reign in extremism?
