The ‘grievance studies’ hoaxers are back, but should we listen?

There was much media interest and amusement when three researchers – James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian – took aim at what they termed “grievance studies” and managed to convince leading journals to publish a handful of deliberately ridiculous spoof papers written in opaque social science jargon and incorporating reference to genuine articles.

By the time the scam was exposed in 2018, four papers had already appeared online, including one on dog parks as places of “rampant canine rape culture” and another arguing that heterosexual men might become more enlightened by opting to “anally self-penetrate using sex toys”.

While some applauded the trio for exposing what they regarded as modish nonsense, critics pointed to the lack of a control group (to determine whether the problems were confined to “grievance studies” or applied to other disciplines as well); the ethical issues around the manipulation of journal editors and reviewers; and the danger that the prank could fuel right-wing attacks on feminism and critical race theory.

Now, however, Ms Pluckrose, editor of Areo magazine, and Dr Lindsay, a mathematician, have returned to the fray with a book titled Cynical Theories: How activist scholarship made everything about race, gender, and identity – and why this harms everybody.

The book takes aim at what they call “social justice scholarship”, including “critical race theory’s hallmark paranoid mindset, which assumes racism is everywhere, always, just waiting to be found”.

The authors also express doubts about whether “previously colonised people have any use” for contributions to post-colonial theory such as those that “argue that math is a tool of Western imperialism” or “confront France and the United States about their understanding of big black butts”.

Meanwhile, queer theory, they argue, is not only unfamiliar to most LGBT people but also “tends to render itself baffling and irrelevant, if not positively alienating to most members of the society it wishes to change”.

“We are looking at the ideas that are influential,” explained Ms Pluckrose, such as “white fragility”, “toxic masculinity” and “heterocentrism”, which she believed “have left the academy and are causing some quite significant problems”, for example in diversity training courses.

Furthermore, with the left now associated with such ideas, she worried that “people will get so sick of them that it will strengthen a right-wing pushback that is anti-intellectual and anti-equality as well as anti-social justice warriors”.

So what did people working within what the authors label “grievance studies” make of this charge sheet?

Gregory Woods, professor emeritus in gay and lesbian studies at Nottingham Trent University, felt that Ms Pluckrose and Dr Lindsay had “come very late to the party” and to battles that had been “fought many years ago”.

He also saw something insensitive in the way they had mentioned Aids only in passing and so had failed to “properly contextualise their appraisal of queer theory, and of the more general adoption of ‘queer’ as a term of creative dissent. The queer movement arose out of the fast-moving, material circumstances of a catastrophe much aggravated from the outset by homophobia: the Aids pandemic. The connection with activism was crucial: queer theory was an emergency cultural development, fired less by grievance than by grief. If these were ‘grievance studies’, the grievance was vital and fatal.”

Vinita Damodaran, professor of South Asian history at the University of Sussex, is committed to research that is accessible and useful to those outside the academy, and she acknowledged that it was “right to challenge the buzzwords, content-less assumptions, opaque writing and fashionable theory that sometimes pass for scholarship”.

Yet she also saw Ms Pluckrose and Dr Lindsay as “in danger of oversimplification, poor scholarship and even complacency when it comes to issues of colonialism, racism, social justice and discrimination integral to our modern world system…Post-colonial theory and scholarship have revolutionised the humanities in the past several decades, and a few examples of bad writing cannot undermine their immense contribution to changing the way we think about the modern world.”

Meanwhile, Elleke Boehmer, professor of world literature in English at the University of Oxford, argued that the style of Cynical Theories “makes debate on neutral ground almost impossible” because “distortions are mixed in with evaluative remarks in such a way as to obscure the operations and values of the approaches being discussed and so frame them negatively − and in an accumulative way”.

The authors had “picked some pretty extremist examples” to make their case, added Professor Boehmer, when “the great power of post-colonial approaches is how they allow an analysis of structures over personalities − so showing, for example, how racism was produced historically, or how gender and other power imbalances tend to reproduce themselves to the advantage of those in power”.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com