The Hoax That Backfired : How an Attempt to Discredit Gender Studies Will Only Strengthen It - Pacific Standard
▻https://psmag.com/education/the-hoax-that-backfired-how-an-attempt-to-discredit-gender-studies-will-only-
Heureusement que les belles foutaises se retournent parfois contre leurs auteurs... mais trop significatif de l’air du temps, anti-science d’une part et anti-femmes de l’autre.
The most recent stunt to roil the academic waters took about 3,000 words and focused on the penis. The authors, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay—a philosopher and a mathematician—co-authored a purposefully bogus paper ("The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct") in which they promoted the proposition that “The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct.”
The piece, as intended, is complete nonsense. Parodying postmodern jargon, the authors explain how "penises are not best understood as the male sexual organ, but instead as an enacted social construct.
The spoof was accepted by a peer-reviewed journal called Cogent Social Sciences. Needless to say, the authors’ revelation of their hoax rankled critics supportive of gender studies. More than any other point, the critics argued that the open-access journal that accepted the article was a pay-to-publish junk job, and therefore not an accurate reflection of the discipline itself.
This is the rhetoric of humiliation. According to Neel Burton, writing in Psychology Today: “To humiliate someone is to assert power over him by denying and destroying his status claims. To this day, humiliation remains a common form of punishment, abuse, and oppression.” Humiliation, furthermore, can also serve to “enforce a particular social order.” It follows that, in light of these motives, “humiliating someone, even a criminal, is rarely, if ever, a proportionate or justified response.” It is, most critically, a fundamentally different beast than embarrassment.
In the most recent scholarly effort to define humiliation precisely, the authors conclude: “humiliation is defined by feeling powerless, small, and inferior in a situation in which one is brought down and in which an audience is present – which may contribute to these diminutive feelings – leading the person to appraise the situation as unfair and resulting in a mix of emotions, most notably disappointment, anger, and shame.”
This, I would suggest, is what Boghossian and Lindsay were attempting to achieve when they submitted their bogus article for publication. They wanted to do something completely different than discredit the entire field of gender studies. They wanted to humiliate all those who are in it. Which is to say, they were being bullies.
