Silly Gender Studies

LowDown · Oct 12, 2016

Some of the stuff being published in the field of gender studies in peer reviewed journals as reviewed in a twitter feed, The New Peer Review:

Gender scholar puzzled over the fact that most females are women and most males are men. "needs to be explained." https://t.co/FXlDnQGMiy

Pregnancy has been socially gendered as feminine, insists a gender studies scholar. https://t.co/UeDvV25wIk

A postmodern scholar writes a paper on his experiences as a sex tourist in the caribbean. https://t.co/L2eYkAb1tj

From the abstract:

In my efforts to move away from representational logics, I mobilize an apparatus utilizing feminist and queer affect theory, notions of embodiment, and a phenomenological language of ‘orientation’. I analyze the journal accounts of my own erotic encounters with Dominican men to stimulate a certain type of layered thinking capable of accessing affective dispositions and challenging the notion of an oriented, stable, composed subject.

The perilous whiteness of pumpkins.

Hey, you! You, with the Starbucks pumpkin-spiced latte in your hand. That ridiculous concoction – with its fluffiness, lack of substance, and triviality – is the ultimate expression of white privilege. So shame on you.

The perilous whiteness of ? pumpkins? - The Globe and Mail

Gender sociologists frustrated that not all students buy their crackpot theories https://t.co/SMelM33T60

Gender scholars disappointed that female students see themselves as adults responsible for their own choices. https://t.co/3eXpD1gpYv

Sociologist wonders why women who do strength training do not become as muscular as men. Thinks it's due to ideology. https://t.co/8kWLoiI9Kn

Feminist thinks that attention gained by the problem of female genital mutiliation in the third world detracts attention from the horrible oppression Western women face. https://t.co/hpU4666zZC

"Gender studies is a worthless PhD. Fit for getting a job as a barista," says one scholar.

How Disney Parks perpetuate white supremacy. https://t.co/CSJvJVi2UY

From the abstract:

...We posit that Disney’s pedagogies of pleasure, which operate from the notion that escape is attainable via the pleasurable experiences offered at Disney parks, teach us how to be particular kinds of Disney subjects who escape into safe and controlled forms of pleasure – these escape fantasies offer a way for consumers to disavow the racism and white supremacy that characterize Western humanist and colonialist projects....

Anything that's not constantly scolding us about white supremacy, even during a holiday week to the amusement park, is thereby perpetuating white supremacy.

And it goes on and on. I invite you to look in on this twitter feed, which exposes this nonsense to what one can only hope will be the cleansing light of wider scrutiny.

When some of us worry about the corrosive effect that a Clinton presidency would have on our culture we're talking about stuff like this.

RabidAlpaca · Oct 12, 2016

LowDown said:
When some of us worry about the corrosive effect that a Clinton presidency would have on our culture we're talking about stuff like this.

I find it amazing that after all that completely unrelated rambling you manage to bring it back to a jab at Clinton. I guess if you can't beat her on substance just link random nonsense you find on the internet to her.

countryboy · Oct 12, 2016

RabidAlpaca said:
I find it amazing that after all that completely unrelated rambling you manage to bring it back to a jab at Clinton. I guess if you can't beat her on substance just link random nonsense you find on the internet to her.

What do you mean "bring it back to"? This is exactly the kind of stupid **** libs revel in. Do you think it's conservative republicans conducting or sponsoring these stupid studies? :roll:

ttwtt78640 · Oct 12, 2016

RabidAlpaca said:
I find it amazing that after all that completely unrelated rambling you manage to bring it back to a jab at Clinton. I guess if you can't beat her on substance just link random nonsense you find on the internet to her.

Yep, bad (loony?) stuff that currently exists (in academia?) would disappear under Trump and "take over" under Clinton.

ttwtt78640 · Oct 12, 2016

countryboy said:
What do you mean "bring it back to"? This is exactly the kind of stupid **** libs revel in. Do you think it's conservative republicans conducting or sponsoring these stupid studies? :roll:

Do you see Trump as a being a conservative republicant? Education is not a constitutional federal power - the republicants (via their platform) desire to stop federal spending on and meddling in education yet never seem seem to act on that "issue".

That is why American education has, for the last several decades, been the focus of constant controversy, as centralizing forces from outside the family and community have sought to remake education in order to remake America. They have done immense damage. The federal government should not be a partner in that effort, as the Constitution gives it no role in education.

https://www.gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/

RabidAlpaca · Oct 12, 2016

ttwtt78640 said:
Yep, bad (loony?) stuff that currently exists (in academia?) would disappear under Trump and "take over" under Clinton.

Well it's hilarious because Clinton hasn't even held office in years, and even when she did she had absolutely nothing to do with curriculum in colleges. This is just like how they whined for 8 years about Obama for every single thing that's happened even if it's completely unrelated. They know they've already lost this election so they're just getting warmed up to cry like little bitches for another 4-8 years.

countryboy · Oct 12, 2016

ttwtt78640 said:
Do you see Trump as a being a conservative republicant? Education is not a constitutional federal power - the republicants (via their platform) desire to stop federal spending on and meddling in education yet never seem seem to act on that "issue".

https://www.gop.com/platform/renewing-american-values/

What's a "republicant"? :roll:

Trump is not a conservative republican in the traditional sense. But, he seems to be against PC nonsense, which is what these ridiculous gender studies are all about.

LowDown · Oct 12, 2016

RabidAlpaca said:
I find it amazing that after all that completely unrelated rambling you manage to bring it back to a jab at Clinton. I guess if you can't beat her on substance just link random nonsense you find on the internet to her.

She will be bringing people who support this stuff in with her in her administration even if she doesn't know what it is. She will champion them because they are supposedly progressive scholars. The governmental funding of this nonsense will only increase.

LowDown · Oct 12, 2016

ttwtt78640 said:
Yep, bad (loony?) stuff that currently exists (in academia?) would disappear under Trump and "take over" under Clinton.

The best we could hope for is to cut funding for this and to stop the Dept. of Education from supporting it. There's a far better chance that Trump would do this than Hillary.

LowDown · Oct 12, 2016

RabidAlpaca said:
Well it's hilarious because Clinton hasn't even held office in years, and even when she did she had absolutely nothing to do with curriculum in colleges. This is just like how they whined for 8 years about Obama for every single thing that's happened even if it's completely unrelated. They know they've already lost this election so they're just getting warmed up to cry like little bitches for another 4-8 years.

Again, it's the people who will coattail in with Hillary, who support this sort of "scholarship", who are the problem. Hillary may not even know what her administration ends up promoting in that regard.

ashurbanipal · Oct 12, 2016

I might agree that many published papers are nonsense. But in just looking over the abstracts below, most appear not to be. What has happened instead is that you've (or whoever is running the twitter feed has) misrepresented what is being studied, and what is being argued, within those papers. See my brief comments below:

LowDown said:
]Gender scholar puzzled over the fact that most females are women and most males are men. "needs to be explained." https://t.co/FXlDnQGMiy

To understand what this paper is getting at, you need to understand that there is sex (i.e. being biologically male or female) and gender (the psychology of a person's sexuality). The two do not always match up--that is, not everyone with a male body feels masculine and not everyone with a female body feels feminine. Since there is an observed mismatch often enough, it seems that the two properties of a person (sex, gender) do not always exist in any logically necessary or nomic relationship. On the other hand, biology does seem to determine gender most of the time. Since there is no logical or nomic relationship, just what is the relationship between the two properties, and how do we explain that relationship?

LowDown said:
Pregnancy has been socially gendered as feminine, insists a gender studies scholar. https://t.co/UeDvV25wIk

Ummm...it obviously has. It's clear that females (i.e. biologically female persons) are the only ones who can give birth. But then why (again, since gender and sex can "come apart") would pregnancy be seen as exclusively feminine? Masculine female persons can give birth and some of them do; why does the fact of their pregnancy skew our perception of their gender?

LowDown said:
A postmodern scholar writes a paper on his experiences as a sex tourist in the caribbean. https://t.co/L2eYkAb1tj

This one, I agree, looks like fluff. There's a big movement on in some corners of the academy to do away with traditional logics. But in my experience, it's usually people who weren't capable of grasping first order predicate calculus that try to make those moves...which is kinda like insisting that trigonometry has to be trashed and redone because it's too focussed on "traditional triangles" or some such, as far as I can tell.

LowDown said:
The perilous whiteness of pumpkins.

This one, I admit, at first looked like fluff to me. But then I read the paper. The author is claiming that pumpkins and whiteness seem to go together in our culture, and is suggesting that this fact can lead to fruitful analysis in the humanities. She starts by pointing out that a riot in New Hampshire at a pumpkin festival was handled with rather less brutality than the protests in Ferguson...where apparently some protestors noticed the difference and decided to throw pumpkins at the police. The pumpkin became, in that instance, a symbol of something (human beings make novel symbols all the time, and how and why are interesting questions). In short, this incident, and pumpkins generally, are used as a kind of proxy within the paper for a more general phenomenon that is worthy of study.

LowDown said:
Gender sociologists frustrated that not all students buy their crackpot theories https://t.co/SMelM33T60

That's not what this paper is about.

LowDown said:
Gender scholars disappointed that female students see themselves as adults responsible for their own choices. https://t.co/3eXpD1gpYv

That's also not what this paper is about, though I would agree there is a (specious) assumption on the part of the authors that women who choose to stay at home and raise children are somehow not in control of their own choices--a view with which I do not agree.

LowDown said:
Sociologist wonders why women who do strength training do not become as muscular as men. Thinks it's due to ideology. https://t.co/8kWLoiI9Kn

Again, this is a pretty bad summary of this paper. The author wonders first why women hold back in weight training (most do) and then wonders what to do about it. She's not questioning why women can't become as muscular as men--she's questioning why women are conditioned to not put their maximum effort into weight training.

LowDown said:
Feminist thinks that attention gained by the problem of female genital mutiliation in the third world detracts attention from the horrible oppression Western women face. https://t.co/hpU4666zZC

This description of the paper is so bad it's not even wrong...by way of analogy: suppose there are three people. A imprisons B and C for no reason. One day, A tortures B to death and then cuts off C's hands. When C complains, A responds "Hey, you have it great. Look what I did to B!" C is perfectly right to complain, however, and calling attention to B's more horrible situation is a red herring when it comes to discussion of what A did to C.

ashurbanipal · Oct 12, 2016

To put the cap on my previous post: look, do you really think that common sense will always survive careful investigation? If you do, there's really no reason for investigation in the first place, since we would already know everything just based on common sense. It should be no surprise that people who study something for a number of years in a rigorous manner come up with very different thoughts than they might have had when first going in--especially with a topic as mysterious and deep as sexuality. This doesn't mean these authors are all correct--I don't say that they are. Merely that their claims, and their topics, are not as unreasonable as might first appear.

LowDown · Oct 12, 2016

ashurbanipal said:
I might agree that many published papers are nonsense. But in just looking over the abstracts below, most appear not to be.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste on gender studies claptrap. An apologia of this sort of thing is even worse.

LowDown · Oct 12, 2016

ashurbanipal said:
To put the cap on my previous post: look, do you really think that common sense will always survive careful investigation? If you do, there's really no reason for investigation in the first place, since we would already know everything just based on common sense. It should be no surprise that people who study something for a number of years in a rigorous manner come up with very different thoughts than they might have had when first going in--especially with a topic as mysterious and deep as sexuality. This doesn't mean these authors are all correct--I don't say that they are. Merely that their claims, and their topics, are not as unreasonable as might first appear.

You do a nice job of making sense of this stuff through very sympathetic interpolation and speculation. Seen as it is it's nonsense.

ttwtt78640 · Oct 12, 2016

LowDown said:
The best we could hope for is to cut funding for this and to stop the Dept. of Education from supporting it. There's a far better chance that Trump would do this than Hillary.

There is little chance that "free" federal education aid to the states (or to students) will ever be reduced, much less eliminated.

ashurbanipal · Oct 13, 2016

LowDown said:
A mind is a terrible thing to waste on gender studies claptrap. An apologia of this sort of thing is even worse.

You do a nice job of making sense of this stuff through very sympathetic interpolation and speculation. Seen as it is it's nonsense.

If anything you say is true, you'd be able to actually argue the point, rather than just call out some insults and insisting that you're correct.

LowDown · Oct 13, 2016

ashurbanipal said:
If anything you say is true, you'd be able to actually argue the point, rather than just call out some insults and insisting that you're correct.

Sorry, but it's not worth spending a lot of time on.

Mr Person · Oct 13, 2016

"Here are some things I don't like, which I will call papers; these papers are bad, therefore, Hillary is bad".

What?

ashurbanipal · Oct 13, 2016

LowDown said:
Sorry, but it's not worth spending a lot of time on.

It was apparently worth your taking the time to post. But it's not worth taking the time to defend? Why post it in the first place?

Well...on second thought, nevermind. Schedules change, and sometimes you just lose interest. It's happened to me, so I shouldn't say anything.

Absentglare · Oct 14, 2016

LowDown said:
Some of the stuff being published in the field of gender studies in peer reviewed journals as reviewed in a twitter feed, The New Peer Review:

Gender scholar puzzled over the fact that most females are women and most males are men. "needs to be explained." https://t.co/FXlDnQGMiy

Pregnancy has been socially gendered as feminine, insists a gender studies scholar. https://t.co/UeDvV25wIk

A postmodern scholar writes a paper on his experiences as a sex tourist in the caribbean. https://t.co/L2eYkAb1tj

From the abstract:

The perilous whiteness of pumpkins.
The perilous whiteness of ? pumpkins? - The Globe and Mail

Gender sociologists frustrated that not all students buy their crackpot theories https://t.co/SMelM33T60

Gender scholars disappointed that female students see themselves as adults responsible for their own choices. https://t.co/3eXpD1gpYv

Sociologist wonders why women who do strength training do not become as muscular as men. Thinks it's due to ideology. https://t.co/8kWLoiI9Kn

Feminist thinks that attention gained by the problem of female genital mutiliation in the third world detracts attention from the horrible oppression Western women face. https://t.co/hpU4666zZC

"Gender studies is a worthless PhD. Fit for getting a job as a barista," says one scholar.

How Disney Parks perpetuate white supremacy. https://t.co/CSJvJVi2UY

From the abstract: Anything that's not constantly scolding us about white supremacy, even during a holiday week to the amusement park, is thereby perpetuating white supremacy.

And it goes on and on. I invite you to look in on this twitter feed, which exposes this nonsense to what one can only hope will be the cleansing light of wider scrutiny.

When some of us worry about the corrosive effect that a Clinton presidency would have on our culture we're talking about stuff like this.

I looked at the first link. You didn't understand the abstract. The need to explain why most females are women is why a constructivist theory is needed :

"Feminist theory needs a constructivist account of biological sex for at least two reasons."

I stopped there because it became immediately clear that you had no coherent argument, just a scrambling of misunderstandings.

LowDown · Oct 14, 2016

Absentglare said:
I looked at the first link. You didn't understand the abstract. The need to explain why most females are women is why a constructivist theory is needed :

"Feminist theory needs a constructivist account of biological sex for at least two reasons."

I stopped there because it became immediately clear that you had no coherent argument, just a scrambling of misunderstandings.

Sorry, but you don't go deep enough. Why is a feminist theory needed? Why is it necessary to ask such questions? A discipline that formulates silly questions is silly. Anyone not already indoctrinated in this silly crap would see that.

Absentglare · Oct 14, 2016

LowDown said:
Sorry, but you don't go deep enough. Why is a feminist theory needed? Why is it necessary to ask such questions? A discipline that formulates silly questions is silly. Anyone not already indoctrinated in this silly crap would see that.

...

It's not silly, you just don't seem to understand it.

Silly Gender Studies

LowDown

Curmudgeon

RabidAlpaca

Engineer

countryboy

ttwtt78640

Sometimes wrong

ttwtt78640

Sometimes wrong

RabidAlpaca

Engineer

countryboy

LowDown

Curmudgeon

LowDown

Curmudgeon

LowDown

Curmudgeon

ashurbanipal

ashurbanipal

LowDown

Curmudgeon

LowDown

Curmudgeon

ttwtt78640

Sometimes wrong

ashurbanipal

LowDown

Curmudgeon

Mr Person

A Little Bitter

ashurbanipal

Absentglare

LowDown

Curmudgeon

Absentglare