Professors’ academic hoax, ‘Sokal Squared’ unmask leftist, postmodern bias and low publishing standards
An elaborate academic-journal hoax, now nickmaned “Sokal Squared” by some, arrived on Wednesday, shocking scholars and gaining praise from critics of higher education, particularly liberal arts departments for their leftist, victim-obsessed ideological bias and low publishing standards.
The three scholars are Helen Pluckrose, a self-described “exile from the humanities” who studies medieval religious writings about women; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Taking on the postmodernism that has infiltrated universities, the trio spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers that illustrate and parody what they call “grievance studies,” and submitted them to “the best journals in the relevant fields.”
photo/ Gerd Altmann via pixabay
Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors “had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the study, before it could be properly concluded.”
A skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, began raising questions about some of the papers over the summer.
The Areo article details the ridiculous topics and the journals publishing their fictitious topics and theories. Check out the video clip at the bottom from one of them and some examples below.
Their “Dog Park” rape culture “gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture, a highly ranked journal that leads the field of feminist geography. The journal honored it as one of twelve leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration.”
This story was covered here on the Dispatch, calling out the absurdity of this research – read here.
Another paper stated that the reason superintelligent AI is potentially dangerous is because it is being programmed to be masculinist and imperialist using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lacanian psychoanalysis: their “Feminist AI” paper.
The professors argued that “a fat body is a legitimately built body” as a foundation for introducing a category for fat bodybuilding into the sport of professional bodybuilding. You can read how that went in Fat Studies.
This is so inappropriate and shocking, it’s hard to believe. The title of the paper: “Going in Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use”
Thesis: That it is suspicious that men rarely anally self-penetrate using sex toys, and that this is probably due to fear of being thought homosexual (“homohysteria”) and bigotry against trans people (transphobia). (It combines these ideas into a novel concept “transhysteria,” which was suggested by one of the paper’s peer reviewers.) Encouraging them to engage in receptive penetrative anal eroticism will decrease transphobia and increase feminist values.
Response:
Reviewer Comments:
“This article is an incredibly rich and exciting contribution to the study of sexuality and culture, and particularly the intersection between masculinity and anality. … This contribution, to be certain, is important, timely, and worthy of publication.” -Reviewer 1, Sexuality and Culture
“Sorry for so many questions, but this paper is so rich and exciting, I’m just overwhelmed by so many new questions—which is a sign of a marvelous paper!” -Reviewer 1, Sexuality and Culture
“Overall, this paper is a very interesting contribution to knowledge.” -Reviewer 1, Sexuality and Culture
“Thank you for this exciting research. I enjoyed reading your paper, and I recommend publishing it after significant revisions.” -Reviewer 2, Sexuality and Culture
The bomb has been dropped.
One professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex in the UK, tweeted that this hoax was a “coordinated attack from the right, supported by ‘gender critical’ feminists angry that Gender Studies is trans-inclusive.”
A historian alleged that the scholars were suspect because their targets “exclude straight white men.”
The Chronicle of Higher Education published an examination titled: ‘Sokal Squared’: Is Huge Publishing Hoax ‘Hilarious and Delightful’ or an Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith?
Yes, bad faith. The professors are being attacking and their findings “…had proved nothing beyond the bad faith and dishonesty of its authors.”
“I am so utterly unimpressed,” wrote Jacob T. Levy, a political theorist at McGill University, “by the fact that an enterprise that relies on a widespread presumption of not-fraud can be fooled some of the time by three people with Ph.D.s who spend 10 months deliberately trying to defraud it.”
Karen Gregory, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Edinburgh, wrote that “the chain of thought and action that encourages you to spend 10 months ‘pulling a fast one’ on academic journals disqualifies you from a community of scholarship. It only proves you are a bad-faith actor.”
photo/ Gerd Altmann via pixabay
