This paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (click title below to read, or find the pdf here) is a strong contender for Bonkers Paper of the Year. The author, Ewelina Jarosz, is a Polish professor from Kraków—not a scientist, but an assistant professor of Media and Cultural Studies (of course).
Ewelina Jarosz
Below is the abstract, which promotes “hydrosexuality” and denigrates “settler science”. If you had a shot of tequila for every buzzword in this abstract, you’d be stinking drunk at the end:
The article aims to transform narratives surrounding Utah’s Great Salt Lake, often referred to as “America’s Dead Sea,” by reimagining how brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) are perceived in science, culture, and art. It introduces the concept of hydrosexuality to bridge these realms, thereby enriching feminist blue posthumanities and feminist biology through art-based practices and queer advocacy. By navigating the environmental narrative of the GSL, the hydrosexual perspective challenges settler science by exploring the connections between the reproductive system of brine shrimp and the economy, ecology and culture. The article provides a framework for integrative cultural analysis that bolsters arguments about the multilayered exploitation of the lake and amplifies voices that recognize the brine shrimp as vital to the survival of multiple species and to the GSL as a unique ecosystem. Furthermore, this cultural analysis draws inspiration from low trophic theory and Queer Death Studies. This multifaceted approach is exemplified by two case studies in the arts, which gradually alter white humans’ perceptions and understandings of the brine shrimp, helping to reimagine the GSL in the context of rapid climate change.
If you want an analysis of what the paper actually says, read and give credit to Colin Wright, who read it and analyzed it on his site Reality’s Last Stand (click below to read):
Colin’s introduction (I can’t believe he read the entire paper, apparently without gastric distress, but he did):
In the annals of academic absurdity, there are moments that make even seasoned critics pause in awe. “Loving the Brine Shrimp: Exploring Queer Feminist Blue Posthumanities to Reimagine the ‘America’s Dead Sea’” is one such moment. This is not a parody—though it reads like one—but a “serious” paper, or so the author insists. In what is best described as a surrealist love letter to brine shrimp, the author, Ewelina Jarosz (she/they), wades through a soup of critical theory, environmental activism, and performance art, asking the reader to reconsider their relationship with brine shrimp—not as mere crustaceans but as symbols of queer resilience, ecological ethics, and, somehow, hydrosexual love.
This paper is part of a growing tradition of postmodern scholarship that prioritizes ideological signaling over intellectual rigor. Following in the footsteps of infamous works like the 2016 “Feminist Glaciology” paper—which posited that glaciers are gendered—“Loving the Brine Shrimp” sets a new standard for academic ridiculousness. Its culmination in a cyber wedding to augmented reality brine shrimp makes feminist glaciers seem like a grounded scientific pursuit by comparison. But before we arrive at the nuptial climax, let’s examine how this spectacle unfolds.
There was performance art involved: a marriage of two Polish academics to brine shrimp at the Great Salt Lake of Utah:
The paper reached peak woke in a section titled “Loving the Brine Shrimp,” which recounts a performance art piece called Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp. This event, staged on the receding shores of the Great Salt Lake, involved artists, scientists, and augmented reality brine shrimp. Participants made vows to the crustaceans, marched in a procession, and capped it off with a communal bath in the lake. The author describes this as “making love to the lake,” a phrase that may haunt frequent swimmers of the Great Salt Lake for the rest of their lives.
Here’s a photo and article found by Malgorzata at the right-wing website David Horowitz’s The Front Page. Just read it for the lolz:
On September 14, 2021, two Polish female professors headed to the Great Salt Lake in Utah to marry some brine shrimp in an ecosexual wedding.
Presided over by Bonnie Baxter PhD, a biology professor at Westminster University in nearby Salt Lake City, the two Polish professor brides in clinging wedding dresses approached holding hands and together with the rest of the wedding party which included a sexologist and Elizabeth Stephens, the chair of UC Santa Cruz’s Art Department, who helped create the ‘Ecosexual’ movement, went into the lake to marry the shrimp through an exchange of psychic vows.
The 12-minute video of the wedding vows and the postnuptial swim in the lake, “Cyber Wedding to the Brine Shrimp”, can (and must) be seen at Colin’s website.
One thing is clear: Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics lacks even a scintilla of academic rigor. In fact, when the journal publishes a paper, replete with buzzwords, that’s indistinguishable from the “hoax papers” of Alan Sokal or of Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay, you know that something has gone badly wrong with scholarship. Is there any contribution to knowledge here? I can’t detect any.
Yes, it’s all hilarious, but only in the sense that academics become lunatics in their effort to promulgate social justice, or, in this case, “environmental justice.” As Colin says at the end of his herculean reading of the paper:
In an era where intellectual rigor often takes a backseat to performative absurdity, it’s important to keep a sense of humor about the bizarre trajectory of academic publishing. After all, what else can we do when purportedly serious scholars convene weddings for brine shrimp or ascribe nonbinary identities to water?
Alas, these are the times we live in.
h/t: Ann
Is this ‘scientific paper’ another sign confirming the overproduction of elites, or is it the normalization of mental illness?
Why not both?
Only one thing comes to mind: “May God Have Mercy On Your Soul”
I can only imagine that they’ve pirated a “lost” Monty Python sketch that Cleese et al. never got around to producing.
Briny perfection [cry-laugh emoji]
Notice the fertile conditions for gnosticism – a sort of notion that who are we to say, just because it seems rare and weird.
A Titania McGrath article of course marked the beginning of the ecosexual movement. Readers will have to find it (bad results putting any parts of a url in the comments… there’s a good joke somewhere in that, but I’ll let it go).
Weren’t the old “sea monkeys” from the ads in comic books just brine shrimp? Maybe this person either was very attached to the brine shrimp they had as a child or were DEPRIVED of brine shrimp by their parents and so turned that loss and resentment into a deep-seated psychopathology.
LOL those ads!
One of the signs in the group photo mentions “sea monkeys.” No, not the one on the right that seems to say “Science Erotica,” but the one on the left.
I believe they argue that referring to brine shrimp as “sea monkeys” was a degrading act of colonialism.
It’s been suggested that “marrying the shrimp” should join “jumping the shark” as a way to indicate when something has gone over the edge and it’s all downhill. In this case, it’s applied to academia.
As in
“Last month’s edition of Nature really married the shrimp.”
“O gawd what now?”
Holy Crap, that is completely off the rails.
But perhaps the author should learn that “Sea Monkeys” (a.k.a. brine shrimp), have a Dark History that connects to the goddamn Klu Klux Klan!
This is a somewhat serious and pointy-point. Folks can watch this very entertaining video that tells the tale of how Sea Monkeys as a cultural icon of White Suburban ‘Mericah was invented by an American entrepreneur with a very problematical history.
That’s one weird tale.
It’s about Sea Monkeys.
“…you’d be stinking drunk at the end:”
…and need to be.
Postmodernism has produced nothing of any value whatsoever. I have started describing myself as “an old-fashioned modernist.”
Brine shrimp are cool. This paper, not so much. I used to buy brine shrimp eggs and hatch them to provide food for the baby egg-layer fish in my aquarium. Every aquarist knows brine shrimp. It’s good to see that this brine-shrimpy paper serves another useful purpose in providing “a framework for integrative cultural analysis.” A new science of culture is emerging!
On the positive side the original paper contained no mention of ‘quantum’.
Separation of State and Education
Imagine if a private foundation funded this school. Imagine having to justify this to the benefactors and founder/contributors. At least if a batshit bonkers private university and its funders tolerated it, it would not be at the taxpayers’ expense.
Separation of State and Education
Hopefully this is ‘out of the system’ and no one will go there again.
It reminded me… I once had to go through hundreds of unsold vynal records, I was checking to see if any were of note and I could take what I wanted.
There were a number of albums that by their covers and instrument combination made me laugh and strangely I didnt want to play them. Someone went to great effort to record these acts only for their efforts to fall into a deep hole of obscurity.
This performance paper has the same feel about it… a laugh and nah!
Lots of pressure these days for interdisciplinary projects…this should make us rethink this. Sure, academic silos suck, but compared to this???
Another exposé of the sort of cringeworthy crap that, well, weakens any reasonable notion liberal progress and justice and gives delight to the right wing and makes my head hurt.
I could pile on, too.
Instead, I’ll retreat to self-appointed sanctimony and warn about the dangers of hard liquor (people, people, please…) and hope that a bit of dark wry humor seeps though. (…where’s that joint — oh no, not that, too)
oops, darnit, Reality’s Last Stand requires a subscription. I’m not ready for that, but thanks for the link and this post.
Did they sail across the Atlantic? One would hope they didn’t cause any pollution in their travels…
I linked to that sea monkey paper in a comment last week. Love the follow-up. The author’s collaborators Sprinkle & Stephens at UC Santa Cruz are a main wellspring of ecosexuality. Their scholarship is awesome in its awfulness.
Jerry is there no chance you could meet Ewelina Jarosz while you’re in Poland? Ask her about her scholarship? Could be considered a kind of field work – you could write an ethnographic study of hydrosexual scholars (she/they edition).
LOL. No, I’m not going to Krakow.
As a woman, I can’t keep it in any longer: Feminist studies of every ilk are an intellectual atrocity. A carbuncle on the face of the university. Inventing and supporting the field has been a disaster. It should have been aborted before birth.
Feminist studies haven’t added to our knowledge about the world – or even about women! And they certainly haven’t improved the welfare of women. They have just detracted from both. Examples abound.
Worst of all, maybe, is the fact that the reams of bilge produced by these feminist pseudo-intellectuals just provides evidence for neanderthal males who claim women are intellectually inferior. If this was all women were producing, even I would agree.
I think the main reason for feminist studies programs is not to further knowledge but rather to improve the welfare of the women majoring in feminist studies by enabling them to get jobs as professors of feminist studies.
Actually dumber by accident than the Saturnian Neurgosurgey paper was on purpose.
The sheer triviality of it all is just exhausting.
Bonkers runner-up:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11378218/
There was a description about that one about a week ago. I think on Hili.
One openly wonders if that one wasn’t meant as a joke, since joke papers do go out.
But the brine shrimp paper … ain’t no joke.
You know, I expected better of the Poles, but I see the rot has set in there too.
Why is no one thinking about the brine shrimp?? Can they consent to interspecies hydrosexual activities?? Are they even of legal age?? We should be outraged about this blatant sexual exploitation of helpless crustacean! The power differential between Polish feminist scholar and brine shrimp is so large, that consent seems impossible. Shame on the author for her perpetuation of rape culture!
I will have to dub this the comment of the month, if not of the year!
Hilarious!
This is a funny comment, but it also underscores a critical flaw in these postmodern approaches. By the very lights of their own philosophy, the concept of hydrosexual relations perpetuates the “discourses” that produce the “systems of oppression” that their “discourses of liberation” are intended to overturn. The same is true of concepts such as “cultural appropriation” and “land acknowledgements,” which presume an intellectual property right in the former and a real property right in the latter, both “discourses” participating in the maintenance of the Capitalist “system of oppression” they rail against. Even if they were right, they’d be wrong.
Sea Monkey business.
This appears to be a massively elaborate hoax, including meticulous creation of a long trace of references and institutional affiliation.
Has anyone actually tried to verify that Ewelina Jarosz actually exists, or works at the claimed “Institute” (if exists)?
I did check, and the person exists and does work at that place.