Appreciating Gender Studies

I once suggested that the reason gender and deviant sexuality majors were underemployed and underappreciated was because it was a less than useful endeavor. I was taken to task, naturally, for my anti-intellectualism and lack of interest in how other genders feel.  I was not convinced.

But now that there is a twitter account called Peer Reviewed, I have seen the error of my ways.

These are from the last few hours of twits.  Aside from the absurdity of their content, the inanity of their purporting to reflect some intellectual pursuit, I suspect half the words they use aren’t real. Is “performativities” really a word?

It’s easy to appreciate that there is so little to write about to create something to be published, such that people are grasping at straws to come up with long strings of meaningless gibberish that create the impression that there is something, anything, remotely intelligent in there.

But this effort to put everything into some sort of gender lens, make up some pseudo-intellectual words and string them together in the hope that academics won’t notice that it’s idiotic is no way to go through life.  But Georgetown lawprof Rebecca Tushnet?  Can we just call it a day, admit that there is nothing worthwhile left to be written about gender or broccoli (okay, there could be new scientific breakthroughs on the medicinal uses of broccoli), and move on?

 

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25 thoughts on “Appreciating Gender Studies”

  1. PDB

    This has to be a parody account, right? These articles seem even more absurd than that article about feminist glaciology (if that’s even possible). I really hope this is a Sokal-type hoax on steroids. If not, then society has jumped the shark.

  2. Michael Gardner

    Entire disciplines have been built on this nonsense, too many are too invested in this cultishness. Those of us who studied legitimate, intellectually rigorous disciplines like history are pissed off at having to hear this pseudo-intellectual drivel advanced by people who are, in their forms of behaviour if not the entirety of their politics, Stalinists who lie about Nobel prize winning scientists and get a free pass in the media because of their mates who buy into this garbage.

    1. SHG Post author

      What remains a mystery to me is why academia, in general, allows itself to be reduced to a joke by this nonsense. It devalues all disciplines.

  4. Rich

    Amen! Very well said, completely agree. Writing in an overly verbose manner to mask the fact that what you’re saying is horseshit doesn’t make you an academic, it makes you a fraud.

  5. REvers

    “Feminist leisure researchers.”

    I wonder how they list that on a resume? Chief Feminist Leisure Researcher at the Institute of Leg Hair, 2010-2016.

  6. losingtrader

    Q. Is “performativities” really a word?

    A. Supposably

    (yeah, the latter IS in the dictionary)

    I’m not sure why this post reminds me of the usefulness of your riddle, “How long must a man’s legs be?”
    Your answer is a macroagression against the disabled and those with extremely long penises.

  7. JD

    A study in women’s empowerment and body issues in heavy metal. Exploring the duality of love buns and abandonment issues involving the behind. Engage in a three year symposium to discover the microaggressions and female empowerment contained in Spinal Tap.

    The bigger the cushion, the sweeter the pushin
    That’s what I said
    The looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand
    Or so I have read
    My baby fits me like a flesh tuxedo
    I like to sink her with my pink torpedo
    Big bottom, big bottom
    Talk about bum cakes, my girl’s got ’em
    Big bottom, drive me out of my mind
    How could I leave this behind?

  8. DaveL

    Having sampled more than a couple papers on agricultural science myself, I think you might be surprised at the breath of useful research remaining to be done on broccoli. You can always strive for better yields, better disease resistance, drought tolerance, pest resistance, etc.

  9. Lucas Beauchamp

    I want to know more about gendered subjectivities.

    WordPress devalues marginalized discourses by underlining “subjectivities” as “misspelled,” thereby silencing diverse potentialities by fetishizing language acceptable to the patriarchy and devaluing transformative expressions of creativity.

  10. Nigel Declan

    One might almost come to the conclusion that these authors came into academia with the belief that if you simply use pseudo-intellectual lingo while unerringly advancing the party line, the correctness of either the language or the underlying thought process is immaterial.

  11. John Rew

    Just watch some late night evangelist T.V and you will see similar gobbledygook. Humans don’t change much in a couple of hundred years they just adjust to their environment. It seems real significant change in a species takes thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. For this reason it is to be expected that the mainstream will comprise of a large number of extremely loud and influential people who refuse to accept logic and therefore have their own enlightened language designed to be unassailable by anyone but the faithful.

  12. EH

    Do you think everyone actually believes that? Or are some of them merely writing what they know will match current SJ fervor, which is to say it will get them published/promoted/hired? Statistically it seems there must be SOME smart women saying “damn, this shit is stupid. But if I can parrot it well, I can get a very nice job.”

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