So… The day has come. Leftist theory has been caught red handed. Those identity theorists; those applied postmodernists; those purveyors of grievances; those shameless listeners to voices. No more wandering (however new-found and short-lived) in the hallowed halls of academia alongside respectable centers of inquiry.
The sting operation? Three academics recently completed what came to be known as The Grievance Studies Affair. Their project consisted of drafting, submitting, and (initially hopefully) publishing intentionally bogus academic journal articles in disciplines (and specifically theoretical angles) that they believe to be a threat to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Their targets were some of those areas and angles in the social sciences that purport to study the human condition from the perspective of marginalisation; some of these being critical race theory, intersectional feminism, and so-called, queer studies. The operatives are convinced that these academic disciplines (which are really sub-disciplines within sub-disciplines) focusing on hegemony and marginalisation has disciplined the entirety of status quo academia into a cowering margin of political correctness.
The operatives submitted twenty articles and seven of them were eventually accepted. What is interesting to note is that they initially wrote as much fashionable nonsense as they could muster; smugly confident that it was no more nonsensical than how they perceived the grievances of margin studies to be when they read them. Sure…. it would still be accepted, right? These attempts were all rejected, even by borderline pay-to-publish journals. At that stage they seemed to realize that there was some sort of underlying logic to this nonsense and that they had to intensely study some of the underlying thought processes (or pathologies, I suppose?) to prove that it was illogical. After doing so, they started to achieve some success. So… they had to perpetrate a really convincing fraud in able for them to prove that their target was fraudulent? Go figure…
Eventually they published seven out of the twenty articles. Did they pull off a convincing fraud? Well… obviously convincing enough for the esteemed reviewers and editor of the journal articles to accept these submissions. Not convincing enough for some of these articles not to be disturbingly, and (yes… these guys claim that you get crucified if you’re not always PC, whatever that means…. so stone me) comically off track of what most of us would consider normal. OK….. so really…. leftist theory has been exposed for being respectful to marginalised voices, even if they seem stranger than we might at first imagine?
Now, many problems of academic procedure and logic have been pointed out with this experiment. Even according to their own interpretation of the scientific method, it is flawed in numerous ways (which I will not repeat here). However; it seems that the fundamental conceptual basis of this project is the idea that truth about marginalisation should be dispassionate; normal; within the fold; unstrange. The reality of actors on the stage of life should be described by those not fundamentally interested in understanding the drama. Truth about the life of those affected by injustice can only be understood under the gaze of scientists with seemingly no recognition of life? When did truth get divorced from life? When did truth get divorced from justice? More importantly; when did being passionate about truth become a disqualifier?
