https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.chronicle.com_article_What-2Dthe-2DGrievance_244753_&d=DwICAg&c=clK7kQUTWtAVEOVIgvi0NU5BOUHhpN0H8p7CSfnc_gI&r=LVw5zH6C4LHpVQcGEdVcrQ&m=UVtjr0RW4Cqy8SVrhnaYN7FRyp0ZHYgOj-_-LMqlZc8&s=ioEw-lH9I1sjtK8ganMUNcsmuNf1JmeMY0NobdFxo3E&e= What the 'Grievance Studies' Hoax Means October 09, 2018 Over the summer, the Wall Street Journal's Jillian Kay Melchior became suspicious of a bizarre-sounding academic journal article, "Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon," published in the journal Gender, Place & Culture. She started investigating, and discovered that the article's author, "Helen Wilson," did not exist. The article was part of an elaborate hoax cooked up by Helen Pluckrose, the editor of the online magazine Areo, James A. Lindsay, a Ph.D. in math, and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University. "Sokal Squared," Yascha Mounk called it, and the label stuck. The trio of hoaxers, Melchior discovered, had written 20 fake papers and managed to get seven of them accepted at peer-reviewed journals, including "Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism," composed of passages of Hitler's Mein Kampf rewritten so as to appear to be a theoretical argument about social justice. As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they targeted fields they pejoratively dub "grievance studies" - "gender studies, masculinities studies, queer studies, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, critical whiteness theory, fat studies, sociology, and educational philosophy" - which they consider peculiarly susceptible to fashionable nonsense. Does the hoax identify something uniquely rotten in gender and sexuality studies, or could it just as easily have targeted other fields? Is it a salutary correction or a reactionary hit job? And what does it portend for already imperiled fields? The Chronicle Review asked scholars from a variety of disciplines. Here are their responses. To hoax morally suspect fields like economics, one of the fake papers concocted by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian and accepted for publication in Hypatia argued, is morally righteous. To hoax morally righteous fields like gender studies, on the other hand, is morally suspect. This hilarious little piece of meta-textualism shows that the scholars behind Sokal Squared are more conversant in postmodern discourse - and more attuned to its lighter modes - than some of their critics seem to assume. It also shows that they know their enemies well enough to predict their reactions with uncanny accuracy. What is most striking in the intense debate which this hoax has already occasioned is the sheer amount of tribal solidarity it has elicited among leftists and academics. Virtually the whole debate has focused on the supposedly malign motives, or the supposedly evident stupidity, of the authors. I don't find these criticisms to be particularly persuasive. Like Alan Sokal, Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian locate themselves on the left. And while it did them no favors to write up their hoax in the style of a social-scientific experiment, thus inviting the wrong standard of judgment, their mastery of postmodern jargon and their sly humor is evident in the corpus of work they have produced in the past year. If you don't believe me, dear "Sokal Squared" critics, I beseech you to actually skim some of the papers: you may even, despite yourself, end up having a good chuckle. But what I've found most striking - and debased - about this grand circling of the imperiled wagons is the ad hominem nature of so many of the reactions. So let me concede, for the sake of argument, that the motives behind the hoaxes were nasty; that they provided succor to the anti-intellectual enemies of the academy; that their hoax was, by its very nature (or, as Hypatia would have it, by its impermissible choice of target), immoral. What would follow from all of this? Practically nothing. Because, after all, it is possible to glean valuable information from the immoral actions of evil people. And even if all of the charges laid at the feet of Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian were true, they would have demonstrated a very worrying fact: Some of the leading journals in areas like gender studies have failed to distinguish between real scholarship and intellectually vacuous as well as morally troubling bullshit. Perhaps this does not mean that we should celebrate the perpetrators of the hoax as moral heroes. Perhaps it would have been possible to hoax other fields in similar ways. And as the hoaxers themselves emphasize, there is no reason to conclude that all of academia is rotten, or that we shouldn't devote serious attention and resources to studying sex, gender, and race. But for all of the caveats, one thing remains incontestable in my mind: Any academic who is not at least a little troubled by the ease with which the hoaxers passed satire off as wisdom has fallen foul to the same kind of motivated reasoning and naked partisanship that is currently engulfing the country as a whole. Yascha Mounk is a lecturer on government at Harvard University.