Syd's Vacation Daily Blog Challenge - Day 3: A Peak Into Academic Grievance Studies

Today's entry is going to be a short one, but an important one. I'm surprised at how few people are aware of this story. I can't criticize people to harshly though, because this story broke to me in January.

The headline is too clickbaity to resist: "Professor uses ‘feminist buzzwords’ to get entire passage from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ published in academic journal". However, a deeper look into this story reveals that this is part of an ongoing project that Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose had been undertaking for about a year.

Being pretty involved with the artistic community here in Montreal, I wanted to make sure I crossed all my Ts and dotted all my Is before even bringing it up, so I read their initial reporting on their project. Turns out it's even worse! To be clear, the "Feminist Mein Kampf" article was never actually published, but it WAS accepted for publication. That means it WOULD have been published had they not been forced by their prior successes to come clean with the whole thing.

Their most damning success, in my opinion, was the publication of an article that proposes that men should self-penetrate with dildos to help fight transphobia. You read that correctly! Not only that, they received multiple invitations to become peer reviewers! Not only did they start from scratch to get multiple papers published and accepted for publication in academic journals, but they could have enabled the publication of even more nonsense!

One thing is crystal clear to me: this project has exposed something rotten at the very root of intersectional feminism, and all other fields of study like it. Being in the artistic community here, this affects me on a semi-daily basis. If the people I share one of my deepest passions with have beliefs that rest on bad epistemology, I have to let them know! But I want to do this the right way.

That's why this whole thing inspired me to take a deep dive into the world of intersectional feminism, and the epistemology that it rests on. I haven't devoted as much time to this project as I would like, but I hope to get to a place where I can at least confirm or deny one of my main hypotheses: that the epistemological roots of intersectional feminism are rooted in solipsism. As I've always planned to do, I'll keep you posted on my progress as I go. Take care!