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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.