That’s an interesting article, and an interesting approach, but it’s not without it’s own issues. The last comment (or near to it) sort of gets to the point that while Boghossian and Findlay do indeed identify several real issues, their overall broader critique of, in this case, the entire filed of gender studies as well as other non-“canonical” disciplines isn’t sustained by their actual evidence.
I mean, yeah, their paper was ludicrous, no doubt. But it should have been, and probably would have been, seen as ludicrous as rejected by any of the more traditional-model peer reviewed journals in gender studies or related fields. The problem really is with crappy journals, more than crappy disciplines. I work with quite a few people with backgrounds in gender studies or African-American studies, or similar fields, and pretty much all of them are rigorous, thorough, and intellectually honest scholars. Whether I or anyone else agrees with their specific findings or arguments–for me, it’s a pretty mixed record–they do in fact make academically sound arguments with actual evidence that, while often jargon-ridden, is hardly at the throw-away level of this hoax paper.
The issue of ideology has been a challenge for academics forever. What folks like Boghossian and Findlay seem to forget, though, is that academic was never about “pure” truth, it was always political. The Church controlled it for a time, then the state; the very creation of specific disciplines, largely in the nineteenth century for many of them, was itself an expressly political act, legitimating some and delegitimating others, and incidentally pretty much eliminating the much more traditional in Western thought concept of the “natural philosopher,” or broad-based inquirer into the world around us. I’d agree that post-modernism has been a particularly ripe field for, shall we say, pushing the boundaries of the comprehensible, but I’d also argue that the Abolitionists in the antebellum period of American history were seen as pretty much insane by most political and social observers.
But, this is indeed an interesting troll. The fake article works because it rides a very fine line between utter nonsense and something that is, actually, arguable in a serious academic sense. The idea of gender as a social construct has been pretty firmly established at least since Sandra Bem’s groundbreaking work back in the seventies, in psychology, and it’s not that much of a jump to build an argument around the penis, per se, as having a definite conceptual dimension as an idea. The joke article takes this basic idea and runs it far beyond logic or proportion, as the Grace Slick might say, but it works because at its core you could actually do something with that idea.
My only real problem with stuff like this (the hoax and the conclusions drawn from it) is that, like the stuff these guys are skewering, this sort of thing is also making a very ideological argument, where the audience reading about the hoax is expected to sympathize with the political slant of the hoaxers, in exactly the same way the lampooned disciplines and academics are getting skewered for doing in their respective niches.
For the record, my Ph.D. is in plain old history, and my M.A. in Foreign Affairs, rather stodgy boring non-post-modern disciplines. Though I do rather enjoy some wacky post-modern stuff, which at its best, like Baudrillard, is at least interesting and has a lot of cool useful stuff embedded in the, well, other stuff. But then, a hell of a lot of traditional history is, as Henry Ford said, bunk as well.