Scholars' Rewrite of 'Mein Kampf' as Feminist Screed Accepted by Academic Journal for Publication
By Petr Svab
October 4, 2018 Updated: October 4, 2018
https://www.theepochtimes.com/schola...n_2678375.html
Three academics rewrote parts of Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf,"
infused it with far-left buzzwords, and made it
a major part of an intentionally absurd "research paper." And a notable feminist-oriented journal accepted it for publication.
The paper was a part of a broader effort by academics James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, and Helen Pluckrose to expose political bias in humanities research fields such as race, gender, and sexuality, according to a press release.
"Although purposely biased and satirical, our papers are indistinguishable from other work in these disciplines. This is a big problem as this scholarship is
taught in universities, taken up by activists, and misinforms politicians and journalists about the true nature of our cultural realities," Boghossian, an assistant philosophy professor at Portland State University, said in the release.
Over a 10-month period, the three produced
20 papers that covered disciplines such as gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy.
"Each paper began with something absurd or deeply unethical (or both) that we wanted to forward or conclude," they wrote in an Oct. 2 essay.
Seven of the papers were accepted for publication and
four were already published, they say, also estimating
three to five more papers would have probably been accepted if they hadn't stopped their experiment....
..."After having spent a year immersed and becoming recognized experts within these fields, in addition to witnessing the
divisive and destructive effects when activists and social media mobs put it to use, we can now state with confidence that it is neither essentially good nor sound," they stated.
Dog Park
One of the papers was titled
"Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon." It presented dog parks as "rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against 'the oppressed dog' through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured."
The paper went as far as suggesting training men like dogs as a way of "interrupting masculinist hegemonies."
The paper was published in
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.
In fact, the journal honored it as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of its
25th-anniversary celebration.
A spokeswoman for the journal said it has already issued an expression of concern about the paper and that a "retraction for this paper was already in progress before this hoax was revealed, and it has now been removed from the scholarly record," she said...
....She failed to mention, though, that the journal only issued the Expression of Concern after the paper was mocked on social media and its fictional author was probed by
The Wall Street Journal.
Empress Has No Clothes
In another shenanigan, one of the authors took a few "poems" from
a website that automatically generates imitation teenage poetry. After some tweaking, the author interspersed the poems
"with self-indulgent auto-ethnographical reflections on female sexuality and spirituality" and it was accepted by
Journal of Poetry Therapy, under the name
"Moon Meetings and the Meaning of Sisterhood: A Poetic Portrayal of Lived Feminist Spirituality."
The entire 11-page paper was created within six hours by Lindsay, a man with a doctorate in mathematics....