{"id":38625,"date":"2017-05-21T03:00:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-21T07:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38625"},"modified":"2017-05-20T09:57:58","modified_gmt":"2017-05-20T13:57:58","slug":"the-conceptual-penis-as-a-social-construct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/05\/21\/the-conceptual-penis-as-a-social-construct\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;The conceptual penis as a social construct&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Getting a paper published is one of the regular measurements of academic life &mdash; usually expressed as &#8220;publish or perish&#8221; &mdash; so getting your latest work into print is a high priority for almost all academics. Some fields have rather &#8230; <em>lower<\/em> &#8230; standards for publishing than others. Peter Boghossian, Ed.D. (aka Peter Boyle, ED.D.) and James Lindsay, Ph.D. (aka Jamie Lindsay, Ph.D.) submitted a paper written in imitation of post-structuralist discursive gender theory and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skeptic.com\/reading_room\/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies\/?utm_source=eSkeptic&#038;utm_campaign=a766bfd2a8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_05_19&#038;utm_medium=email&#038;utm_term=0_8c0a740eb4-a766bfd2a8-73377877&#038;mc_cid=a766bfd2a8&#038;mc_eid=bfec1b5b70\" target=\"_blank\">got it published in a peer-reviewed journal<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<p><em>The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That\u2019s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a \u201cpaper\u201d consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.<\/p>\n<p>This paper should <em>never<\/em> have been published. Titled, \u201cThe Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,\u201d our paper \u201cargues\u201d that \u201cThe penis <em>vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the <em>conceptual penis<\/em> is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct.\u201d As if to prove philosopher David Hume\u2019s claim that there is a deep gap between what is and what ought to be, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cogentoa.com\/article\/10.1080\/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">our <em>should-never-have-been-published<\/em> paper <em>was<\/em> published<\/a> in the open-access (meaning that articles are freely accessible and not behind a paywall), peer-reviewed journal <em>Cogent Social Sciences<\/em>. (In case the PDF is removed, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skeptic.com\/downloads\/conceptual-penis\/23311886.2017.1330439.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">we\u2019ve archived it<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Assuming the pen names \u201cJamie Lindsay\u201d and \u201cPeter Boyle,\u201d and writing for the fictitious \u201cSoutheast Independent Social Research Group,\u201d we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn\u2019t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what \u201cpost-structuralist discursive gender theory\u201d actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.<\/p>\n<p>This already damning characterization of our hoax understates our paper\u2019s lack of fitness for academic publication by orders of magnitude. We didn\u2019t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like \u201cdiscursive\u201d and \u201cisomorphism\u201d), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like \u201cpre-post-patriarchal society\u201d), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being \u201cunable to coerce a mate\u201d), and allusions to rape (we stated that \u201cmanspreading,\u201d a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is \u201cakin to raping the empty space around him\u201d). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn\u2019t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.advicegoddess.com\/archives\/2017\/05\/20\/feminist_schola.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amy Alkon<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Getting a paper published is one of the regular measurements of academic life &mdash; usually expressed as &#8220;publish or perish&#8221; &mdash; so getting your latest work into print is a high priority for almost all academics. Some fields have rather &#8230; lower &#8230; standards for publishing than others. Peter Boghossian, Ed.D. (aka Peter Boyle, ED.D.) [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,28,13],"tags":[987,254,463,434,764],"class_list":["post-38625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-media","category-usa","tag-feminism","tag-gender","tag-parody","tag-peerreview","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a2Z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38625"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38626,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38625\/revisions\/38626"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}