I’ve dissected many crazy papers over the years—just to show what passes for “scholarship” in some of the humanities. Yes, of course there’s good scholarship there, too, but I have a feeling that in STEM you won’t find anything as inconclusive or incoherently written as this paper (h/t: Luana for finding it). And nearly all science papers at least reveal a tentative fact or two about nature. In contrast, many “studies” papers like this one seem like wheel spinning, and are baffling. They seem to be vehicles not for finding knowledge, but getting tenure and promotions. If there is a contribution to human knowledge from this effort, I can’t find it. This one was published in the Journal of Lesbian Studies.
You can read the paper by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.
I scanned it once and then read it more carefully a second time, and I swear I still can’t figure out what it’s trying to say. Some AI analysis given below didn’t help much.. Not only is the paper’s thesis obscure, but it is written so poorly, and with the use of so many jargon words (“attending to,” “becomings,” “intersectional ecoqueer feminist perspective,” “disrupt normative ideas,” etc), that it would kill George Orwell if he wasn’t already dead.
The paper notes that Dr. Diamond-Lenow “(she/they) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at SUNY Oneonta,” but on the list of faculty in that department I cannot find her.
Knock yourself out (and you will):
Below is the abstract, and I hope you can get something out of it. All I can remember is that lesbians seem to have a special relationship with dogs (and machines like iPhones), and this tells us something about the “the rich complexity of dyke culture and its processes of continually processing and becoming.” (“Becoming” is a favorite word in the paper, and “dyke” is a word used by Diamond-Lenow). And the author decries the misuse of dogs as tools of racism, white supremacy, and militarism.
Abstract:
This article offers a queer lesbian feminist analysis attuned to lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities. Specifically, the article places queer and lesbian ecofeminism in conversation with Donna Haraway’s work on the cyborg and companion species to theorize the interconnected queer becomings of people, nature, animals, and machines amidst ecologies of love and violence in the 2020s. It takes two key case studies as the focus for analysis: first, the state instrumentalization of dogs and robot dogs for racialized and imperial violence, and second, quotidian queer and lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings. In the first, the article traces how dogs are weaponized as tools of state violence and proposes a queer lesbian feminist critique of white supremacy and militarization that can also extend to a critique of the violence committed through and toward the dogs. In the second, the article analyzes how, within lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies, dogs help articulate queer gender, sexuality, and kinship formations, and as such, queer worlds for gender, sexual, and kin becomings. The entanglements of violence and love in these queer dog relationalities provide insights into the complexities of queer and lesbian feminist worldbuilding. Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics can help theorize the potentials and challenges of these interspecies entanglements.
Some dog-dissing from the paper, giving a flavor of its content:
As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).
Historically, dogs have been tools of settler colonialism and enslavement mediating racialized naturecultures (Johnson, Citation 2009, Boisseron, Citation 2018). They are also instrumentalized for racialized securitization in policing, border patrol, and carceral systems—they are in this sense, part of the violent cyborg offspring Haraway discusses. Police have long used dogs to intimidate and attack marginalized communities, as seen in numerous documented incidents: during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963; against anti-police violence protests in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 (Wall, Citation 2016); against Indigenous activists opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota in 2016 (Democracy Now!, Citation 2016); during Black Lives Matter protests in Baltimore and elsewhere (The Marshall Project, Citation 2020); and most recently, in 2024, against student protests over the genocide in Gaza on college and university campuses (Most, Citation 2024).
Look! Dogs are also vehicles for racial criminalization!
. . . . As companion species, dogs have been deeply entwined with the gendered and sexual formations of white supremacy and heteronormative domesticity. They play a foundational role in symbolizing the white bourgeois heteronormative nuclear family and the U.S. home. At the same time, dogs are often used to stigmatize and police “improper” homes and communities. For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).
And military dogs are tools of sexualized colonization and dehumanization!:
In the military, dogs are used as cyborg weapons, used to detect Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), patrol bases, police detainees, and target enemies. They played key roles in U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killings of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 (Bumiller, Citation2011) and ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019 (Rogers, Citation2019). Dogs were also involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in 2004 (Schmitt, Citation2006). These deployments reflect a logic of heteronormative nationalism and sexualized colonization, dehumanizing Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern men within necropolitical formations of war (Diamond-Lenow, Citation2020).
There are lots of neologisms like “natureculture”. But here is the paper’s conclusion:
The article thus contributes a queer trans feminist perspective on human-dog becomings to queer ecological critique, highlighting the significance of lesbian queer feminism in analyzing more-than-human relationalities, particularly with dogs.
For some reason the last three words make me laugh out loud.
At any rate, Luana found a site where you can enter the URL of an article like this one, and it will give you both an AI summary and a podcast. I haven’t tried it, but you can if you wish. At any rate, when she put in the URL of this paper, here’s what AI spit out. I must say that it merely reiterates the paper’s language in a way that a cheating student might copy, but doesn’t shed much further light on this black hole of scholarship:
- What is the central focus of this article?
This article centers on the interconnectedness of queer (specifically lesbian, non-binary, and trans) identities, human-animal (primarily canine) relationships, and technology (drawing on cyborg theory) within contexts of both affection and oppression. It aims to analyze how these entanglements contribute to the formation of queer worlds and how they are shaped by and respond to societal structures of power, particularly white supremacy and militarization.
- How does the article connect queer ecofeminism with cyborg and companion species theories?
The article brings queer and lesbian ecofeminist perspectives into dialogue with Donna Haraway’s concepts of the cyborg (as a hybrid of machine and organism challenging traditional boundaries) and companion species (highlighting the co-evolution and interdependence of humans and domesticated animals). By doing so, it seeks to understand how the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs, in their technologically mediated and ecologically situated contexts, challenge and redefine categories of nature, culture, human, and animal.
- What are the two main case studies used in the article’s analysis?
The article examines two primary case studies: firstly, the ways in which dogs, including robotic dogs, are utilized and instrumentalized by the state for purposes of racialized and imperial violence. Secondly, it analyzes the everyday intimacies and relational experiences between queer (lesbian, non-binary, and trans) individuals and their dogs, focusing on how these relationships contribute to the articulation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship.
- How does the article critique the state’s use of dogs and robot dogs?
The article offers a queer lesbian feminist critique of the state’s deployment of dogs and robot dogs, particularly in the context of racialized and imperial violence. It argues that this instrumentalization of canines as tools of militarization and control is intertwined with white supremacist ideologies and inflicts violence not only on targeted human populations but also through and toward the dogs themselves. The critique aims to expose the underlying power structures and ethical implications of such practices.
- In what ways do dogs contribute to the lives and identities of queer individuals, according to the article?
The article suggests that dogs play a significant role in the lives of lesbian, non-binary, and trans individuals, contributing to the formation of queer gender, sexuality, and kinship structures. Through intimate relationships with dogs, queer individuals can articulate and experience their identities in ways that challenge normative understandings of these categories. These interspecies bonds help in the creation of queer social worlds and facilitate unique forms of becoming.
- What does the article mean by “queer canine becomings”?
“Queer canine becomings” refers to the ongoing and mutual shaping of identities and ways of being that occur within the relationships between queer individuals and their dogs. It emphasizes that these relationships are not static but rather involve processes of co-creation and transformation. The “queer” aspect highlights how these becomings often challenge and expand conventional understandings of gender, sexuality, and species boundaries.
- How do love and violence intertwine in the queer dog relationalities discussed in the article?
The article posits that queer-dog relationships exist within “ecologies of love and violence.” This means that these intimate bonds are not immune to broader societal forces of oppression and violence. The article explores how the potential for both deep affection and the awareness of systemic violence against both queer individuals and animals shape these interspecies connections, offering insights into the complexities of queer feminist worldbuilding in a non-ideal world.
- What is the significance of lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics in understanding these interspecies entanglements?
Lesbian and queer feminist cyborg politics, as proposed in the article, provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the potentials and challenges inherent in the entanglements of queer identities, dogs, and technology. This perspective allows for a nuanced understanding of how power operates within these relationships, how boundaries are blurred and renegotiated, and how new forms of resistance and world-making can emerge from these complex interspecies intimacies in the face of both love and violence.
This may be the wackiest paper I’ve ever covered here, though it has had some tough competition.
UPDATE: The right-wing College Fix also found this paper, and proffers its own summary:
Basically, the professor’s argument seems to boil down to this: Dogs provide a positive relational experience for many LGBTQ people. However, the government also uses dogs and robo-dogs, or cyborgs, to commit unjust violence against marginalized people. Therefore, the relationships between dogs and humans are complex.
LOL! But although that seems satirical, it also seems accurate.
ChatGPT, write an academic paper on lesbian cyborg dogs in the style of the Sokal Affair paper.
Scientists use a lot of jargon (I’m guilty as charged!), but wow, this one really elevates it to an art form (of dubious quality of course)!!
I would say the paper’s quality is not dubious at all. Flat out nonsensical.
OMG this one is a masterpiece!
Note that Queer is opposed to “any stable identity” (Halperin). That is, any notion of sex is by definition post-discursive notion, that mystifies our pure origins.
That’s hasty comment – but the Authentic entry in Translations from the Wokish can help “understand” it in Butlerian thought – e.g. in discursive terms.
Yes good point. That’s the lens (ha ha) through which I also have come to view writing like this. The neologisms are the point: they don’t have any shared understood meanings, so they allow the author to imply as many meanings as her/their readers want to project onto the words. And instead of shared understanding among readers and the author we get shared misunderstanding or ambiguity. This is queering as I understand it.
Queer world-making (rough quote of Lil Hot Mess)
“make the world more gay” (Halperin)
They make the world queer in discourse, i.e. this paper – to them, it literally is a new world.
It’s like playing rugby with all the players of both teams wearing balaclavas and random clothing pulled from their own closets. Not only could the players not tell the teams apart but they couldn’t even distinguish the players from intoxicated spectators who had wandered onto the field. Indeed, the spectators might be the ones more likely to be wearing official team jerseys!
The authors somehow overlooked incorporating Subarus into their crazed thinking.
Haha! Great point.
I showed our dog this paper, and she didn’t understand it either!
A dog is to smart to understand such nonsense.
Lol! Nice one!
Thanks for giving me a headache on a beautiful Sunday morning :-).
I found this at the American University website where she is a “she/her.” Apparently, she has written a book full of gobbledygook!
“Her book project “Boundary Affects: Race, Sex, and Species in U.S. Empire,” analyzes the racialized borders of humanity and animality and frames of heteropatriarchal nationalisms in U.S. militarism during the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as part of the “war on terror.” Her work has been published in The Journal of Intercultural Studies and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human/Animal Interface Studies.”
If you do a search-and-replace, replacing “dog” with “turnip” (or “cheese doodle,” or, really, just about anything), the abstract—and presumably the article—is immeasurably improved.
Hilarious!
😂
Your colonialist supremacist attitude toward cheese doodles I find very offensive.
Spot on sarcasm, JM!
PLEASE don’t give them ideas!
If this paper had been widely commented on and then endorsed by some of my fellow Democrats before the 2024 prez election, it could have cost us even more votes–and better secured DJT’s chances of destroying our democratic republic. This sort of allegedly “woke” garbage and the sort of blind cancel-culture “defense” of it that it inspires, is hugely destructive.
What dangerous, vapid nonsense! If it weren’t such a splendid example of the ilk, a case could be made arguing that Coyne should have let this remain obscure.
Yes, well, we all suffer a lot of nonsense (and very frustrated by Democrats’ cluelessness (Tony Evers — “inseminated persons” how could you –?)
By the way — you write good stuff.
Thank you for kind words, SN.
Lordy lordy lordy! I think part of this paper was shown in a Hili Dialog post a few days ago, with interspersed highlights of several crazy sentences. But I remember thinking: Why highlight just those items? The non-highlighted stuff was equally bonkers!
One can summarize the summary: There are different kinds of people who have different needs and priorities. But whatever are those needs and priorities, you can use a dog to help you.
I think I might have put up Colin Wright’s tweet, which highlighted several bonkers sections: https://x.com/SwipeWright/status/1899670993183862813
And since “becoming” is emphasized so much, it is worth reviewing where this came up before (bold added):
“One is not born, but becomes, a woman.”
-Simone de Beauvoir
1973 (as cited by Butler)
Judith Butler cites this, and as wonderful as that notion might be, or as much as de Beauvoir hates it, Queer Theory and gender performativity is the inevitable dialectical product of it.
‘One is not born, but becomes, an idiot.’
-Simon de Beauchump.
I am not making it up (bold added – “factic” is as-written) – sorry it’s so long PCC(E) – but I think this connects well to this post and ongoing subversion in biology :
” ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ — Simone de Beauvoir’s formulation distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually acquired. The distinction between sex and gender has been crucial to the long-standing feminist effort to debunk the claim that anatomy is destiny, sex is understood to be the invariant, anatomically distinct, and factic aspects of the female body, whereas gender is the cultural meaning and form that that body acquires, the variable modes of that body’s acculturation.”
And :
“For Simone de Beauvoir, it seems, the verb “become” contains a consequential ambiguity. Gender is not only a cultural construction imposed upon identity, but in some sense gender is a process of constructing ourselves. To become a woman is a purposive and appropriative set of acts, the acquisition of a skill, a ‘project’, to use Sartrian terms, to assume a certain corporeal style and significance. ”
-Judith Butler
Sex and Gender in Simone de
Beauvoir’s Second Sex
1986
Does Judith Butler deliberately misunderstand Simone de Beauvoir’s arguments?
I agree with that – but looking at it all, it doesn’t seen to matter.
Can someone explain how this is a legitimate field of study worthy of taxpayer funding (given she is a SUNY academic)?
Private funding…fine. But I believe the State of New York has more pressing responsibilities on belalf of its citizens.
SUNY Oneonta’s claim to fame is having more bars per capita than any other SUNY location. At least when I was attending SUNY Binghamton in the early 80s and headed to Oneonta to party. Seems appropriate. Sorry, if I offended any grads, but this paper is way more offensive to your Alma Mater than my comment.
She/they forgot to cite the most important and relevant recent paper in this field of research.
Wilson, H. (2020). Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Gender, Place & Culture, 27, 307–326. DOI:10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346
Yup, it makes that (sadly retracted) hoax paper look sane! https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2018.1475346
Edited to add: I want the idiotic academic to publish similar analysis of cat-owning lesbians next!
I wouldn’t argue that Wilson’s paper about doggie rape culture and such contains worthier ideas than Diamond-Lenow’s paper, but it is more coherent.
Jerry, you should really listen to the NotebookLM podcast based on this essay, it is fun! Two virtual personae (male and female) discuss everything you feed them, in a lively, witty and credible way, and will tell you if they can’t make head or tail of it.
I don’t know how to get to that podcast. When I go to that page I can’t find it.
Only the person who generated the NotebookLM summary of the essay can send you a public link to it.
Here you go: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d0163a72-c3a4-4bb4-8070-e284c1541523/audio
Based only on the abstract. Mmm, AI goes like: “Dogs are fascinating creatures.”
Could this be a Lindsay/Pluckrose/Boghossian prank, or somebody copying their style?
That also occurred to me. Perhaps this paper is a hoax. Sadly Chloe Diamond-Lenow (the author) appears to be a real person. The number and prevalence of crazy papers is actually a key asset of the hoaxers. To be blunt, a hoax can not be easily distinguished from the real thing. For example, I was not able to render a hoax/not a hoax judgement based on the content of this paper. Instead, I looked up the author to see if she was a real person.
“For instance, breed-specific bans in the U.S. disproportionately target Black and Brown dog owners, functioning as a form of racialized criminalization”
As written, this could refer to black and brown owners of dogs, but I assume it’s supposed to refer to owners of black and brown dogs (perhaps the strange capitalisation of black and brown is meant to indicate this). But as ‘black and brown’ covers the colours of the vast majority of dogs, it is only to be expected that dog breed bans mostly target black and brown dogs. I mean, when did you last see a real, purple, green, blue or red dog?
More seriously, ridiculous ‘papers’ like this provide ammunition for anti-science and anti-academia zealots, and as such can be considered harmful.
I’m guessing that the sentence does indeed refer to black and brown owners of dogs, and is meant to refer to the fact that pit bulls are popular in high crime urban areas – and unpopular with landlords.
Is it the case that dangerous dog breeds worth banning are mainly owned by black and brown people? Writing from the UK, that doesn’t appear to be the case here, hence my alternative interpretation of the sentence. Thanks.
By the way, among the dog breeds banned in the UK is one called the XL Bully. Makes me think of Donald Trump, for some reason.
My understanding is that inner cities are statistically more likely to have higher ratios of both racial minorities and crime. The stereotype is that drug dealers and gang members own attack dogs to protect their territories from rivals – and law abiding neighbors own attack dogs to protect their properties from the drug dealers and gang members.
While breeds which were bred for violence/defense can be wonderful, loving pets, statistically speaking they’re trouble. My husband worked for an insurance company which covered homeowners and damage caused by dog bites: numbers don’t lie. The stigma against pit bulls is not unfounded.
Pit bulls are also banned in the UK, which seems reasonable to me. People are not allowed to own lions as pets, so why should they be allowed to walk around with dogs that, allegedly, have an even more powerful bite?
Coming back to the sentence that started this discussion, it is obvious that certain dog breeds are banned because they are dangerous, not with the aim of criminalising a particular demographic. Such a twisted interpretation borders on paranoia. But the entire paper seems full of ‘victim ecologies’ like this.
This effect works against trans people in rental housing, for those who think trans renters should have civil rights against discrimination in housing they way black and brown people do.
.
Trans people, the activists tell us, are “marginalized” and suffer “minority stress” which leads to high rates of mental instability, unemployment, drug addiction, and homelessness. To a landlord, these are red flags for non-payment of rent, so don’t rent to anyone who exhibits them. From there it’s a short step to concluding that a prospective tenant who remonstrates with you if you call him Sir during the interview is a red-flag tenant and best avoided. It’s not anti-trans animus as much as trying to avoid problem tenants who can’t be easily evicted for rent default. Landlords don’t care much about your race or sexuality these days. They just want you to pay rent on time and not damage the place. And not bite the other tenants and the mailman.
The impact on racial minority renters from their dogs is probably similar. As long as a rule against pit bulls has “disparate impact” on a protected class it’s illegal in jurisdictions that make it so. As soon as someone figures out that refusing to rent to unemployed drug addicts has a disparate impact on trans people, I can see another manuscript from the pen of Diamond-Lenow et al.
Wrt ammunition yes this is the Achilles’ heel of scholars who oppose the orange menace. A scientist in one of C. P. Snow’s two cultures can’t easily argue against broad cuts to university funding when universities spend public money on the salaries and retirement benefits and conference travel of scholars in the other culture doing queer lesbian feminist cyborg politics. Trump is a terrible person and he’s having bad effects on my country and on his (Canadians booed The Star Spangled Banner last night at the NHL game I went to). But when it comes to attacking the academy and slashing its funding, I have to admit he sort of has a point.
Agree (I’m also Canadian). Trump is mostly a madman but on occasional topics he’s right.
What’s discouraging is how few left leaning people will admit that. I see people discussing it in comments. If you suggest that men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports many will attack you, as if you personally responsible for Trump.
Seth Moulton (D-MA) personally elected Trump. His guilt is obvious. Just ask Liz Bradt (head of the Democratic party in Salem). He is a transphobe. He is a Nazi cooperaor. He stated “I have two girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
I rather suspect that for the last couple years many of these papers published in the grievance studies journals are mostly written by ChatGPT and similar AI systems. AI can effortlessly churn out drivel like this. Then the publishing “scholar” can spend half an hour polishing the paper and changing a word here and there. There is no need anymore for aspiring experts on feminist intersectionality and queer theory and such to write this kind of nonsense themselves.
Alan Sokal, ghost writer
OMG. A significant problem that underlies this type of scholarship is that it is untethered to anything that is solid and secure. That is, there is no external standard against which to measure its conclusions. In the sciences, external standards are things like organisms, rocks, materials, observed phenomena (e.g., lightning), etc.* But in studies such as the one described above, what constrains the author from wandering about without limit? It would seem that the only limits are those imposed by the ideologies espoused by the practitioners. The conclusions can neither be right nor wrong.
The young assistant professor is simply engaging in the scholarship that is expected of her in her field. It’s sad to contemplate how much talent is going to waste.
*I understand that there is argument over the ontological status of these things, but at least there’s a there, there.
This niche of papers in the humanities has a curious place in academia. While the areas of science and history have a process where claims can be empirically tested, and some claims can be rebutted when they do not comport to reality, I don’t think any claims of the above sorts will ever be falsified in the same journals. White pumpkins are forever symbols of White Supremacy. Glaciology will remain racist. All because someone concocted feelings that these were so.
I agree that this person is responding to incentives. I think the constraints are the language that’s available for her/them to express the ideology. Inventing neologisms like “queer canine becomings” is seen by these scholars as a way to transcend those limitations by seeming to create some new unexplored linguistic territory. Like extending the rugby game of Leslie@3 beyond the stadium. But the new language is really just a way to put bags over the heads of all the players as Leslie says so that nobody knows what they’re doing or talking about, and each player can imagine having gone far beyond the boundaries of the game while simply wandering aimlessly around the pitch. (End of metaphor, and sorry if I’ve overcommented.)
Even those who dispute the ontological status if lightning are are well advised to not play golf in a thunderstorm.
LOL. Good example of scientific scholarship being tethered to something real—or at least real”ish,” for those who doubt.
Talent going to waste?
I’m not sure there’s talent there TO waste, unless the point is that some people should not pursue “studies” programs at university in the first place. I cannot imagine that someone writing such rot would be successful in any other rigorous field of study.
“lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities.”
Are you sure it’s not a hoax or joke?
A joke, you mean like the assertion that men can give birth?!
While it appears that the professor’s name was removed from her department website, she has been listed in the university’s undergraduate catalog since AY2021-22. While her paper might seem unreal, the lady herself does exist.
https://catalog.oneonta.edu/content.php?catoid=23&navoid=1494#d
The author appears to be a real person
She’s definitely a real person. If you search for her name, several universities come up.
It’s just so far fetched. But it appears to be real.
She introduces herself in detail in this Zoom lecture:
I don’t think she’s an AI. However, her pronouns (she/they) are suspicious–both subject pronouns, not subject/object, which is why I’ve reverted to the former.
She’s a fucking clown.
Here is this freakazoid’s bio:
Note the evolution of the pronouns. Scare quotes are cute, too: “War on terror,” but not “animality” or “humanimalia.”
Uh-Oh – someone’s brain has gone off leash!
Every dog has its day.
https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/every-dog-has-its-day/
I think that the point of the paper is to assuage the feelings of Marginalized Queer Folx who depend on the unconditional love of their canine pets but can’t help thinking about ways Bad People have used dogs against Marginalized Queer Folx and others. There’s therefore a suspicious history that needs to be wiped clean by academic papers such as this one, which emphasize the good connection by stigmatizing the bad ones.
My own thoughts were that this paper was intended to enrich the author’s publishing history with a impressive demonstration of the grasp of subject matter cant (in the sense of characteristic language of a particular group).
Take a look at this one too:
“Queer Intimacies : Rethinking Epistemology of Conducting Research with Jihadist Group Members” (https://lup.lub.lu.se/search/publication/cdaafd34-53ca-4d27-920a-a5750b0ec258).
It’s a paper on the “lived reality” of jihadist terrorists. I found it even more depressing. From the abstract:
“Challenging reductionist narratives that frame jihadist group members as deviant or monstrous, [this dissertation] argues for nuanced interpretations that account for their complex lived experiences. (…) The dissertation concludes by urging scholars to critically examine how the War on Terror perpetuates colonial and imperial legacies in the way one produces knowledge, advocating for a justice-oriented—and tangible—humanistic sociological practice, one which ought to resist dehumanizing narratives.
As one who attended three different colleges of the State University of New York system on my way to earning a bachelor’s degree, I am embarrassed.
There are two key takeaways I get from the paper:
some universities waste a lot of money
the better pet might be a cat.
The wonderful, wonderful W.S Gilbert penned these lines, referring to members of the Aesthetic Movement, and particularly Oscar Wilde. It’s not too hard (for me) to relate them to author of the paper.
But fair’s fair. Professor Diamands personal motto is “Eschew Obfuscation”, otherwise we wouldn’t know what she was talking about.
And to quote from another lyricist – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”
Very good!
The ‘crazy diamond’ referred to may have been more rational than this authoress.
Semantic garbage with a lot of made up words. I’m reminded of the nonsense languages spoken by young children.
Thanks to Mark in Comment #6 for referencing The Journal of Intercultural Studies and Humanimalia, a veritable treasure trove of scholarship in the vein under discussion. One of many examples is this masterpiece: “Queering Multispecies Bonding: Reading Donna Haraway’s Dog Stories as Queer Feminism”. How bold the academic world has been, these last ~30 years, in showing the general public that this sort of thing is what academics are hired and promoted to do. Recent development in the US suggest that the general public, and some of its elected officials, have indeed noticed. LOL to Academia
Why is ‘dogs’ spelled with an asterisk in the tags on this article?
It is because the bl*g owner is a cat person, not a d*g person.
This might be a hoax paper. Have these three been up to their old tricks?
https://www.thefire.org/news/podcasts/so-speak-free-speech-podcast/grievance-studies-affair
She seems to be a real person. Search on her name, there are a number of references.
I thoroughly appreciate and enjoyed reading the comments! I asked Bing Co-pilot to rewrite the first paragraph without any further direction- results:
As companion animals, dogs have been intricately linked to the gendered and sexual constructs underpinning white supremacy and heteronormative domestic ideals. They serve as powerful symbols of the white bourgeois nuclear family and the U.S. household. Simultaneously, dogs are often employed to marginalize and monitor “improper” homes and communities. For example, breed-specific legislation in the U.S. disproportionately impacts Black and Brown dog owners, operating as a form of racialized criminalization (Weaver, Citation 2021).
Thanks for reading and reviewing so I didn’t have to! It exhausts my brain too much.
Some years ago Jerry posted an academic piece by a humanities professor which won an award for the worst piece of writing that year ( I forget who used to sponsor the award). Somewhere the writer had argued that scientific papers are full of technical jargon but scientists don’t get criticized, while humanities professors do. I do wonder, though, whether Dr Diamond Lenow’s colleagues read her paper as easily as the average person reads a newspaper, or whether they are equally baffled as most of us commenting here.
The “becomings” tell us (ht Dr Lindsay) that this is a piece of secular Marxist gnostic mysticism.
As DiAngelo and Sensoy tell us in ‘Is there Equality…’ , a text for teachers, that there are 3 types of knowledge: common sense, traditional academic knowkedge and the special knowledge, for the elect iniates, of critical theory knowledge, to which one is to have a life long commitment. In short a religious cult.
As horrific as this article is, I wonder whether it is fair to the young academic (note, she is Assistant Professor) to trash her work in public. Maybe the Editors would be a better target for the criticism? They did let this one go through, didnt they? Which brings us to more structural aspects. Is the generation of fees maybe more important for some journals than academic quality? What were the EICs thinking when accepting this one?
Sorry, but academics don’t become immune from criticism just because they’re young (I took plenty of it when I was starting out). And writing to the editor is more like tattling.
Seriously, at what age below which publishing assistant professors remain immune from criticism (on a website?) When you join the club of academia, your papers are fair game for criticism.
Not criticizing it would tacitly means she/they had produced a good paper. If you want to explain your thesis, which I think is badly misguided, go ahead, but I get angry when I hear stuff like this.
Regarding treating younger writers with kid gloves:
Einstein was 26 when his most influential papers were published (his annus mirablis)
VonNeumann was 25 when “Theory of Parlour Games”, which started game theory as a discipline, was published
Feynman was 31 when he published his work on quantum electrodynamics
Bohr was 28 when he published his papers on atomic structure
Gauss was 24 when he published Disquisitiones Arithmeticae
Galois was 20 when he published his work on group theory
Dirac was 26 when he published his Dirac equation paper
Heisenberg was 25 when he published his uncertainty principle
Being young is not incompatible with producing outstanding work. Nor is it an excuse for producing junk.
There’s quite a good dog-based author-on-a-leash metaphor for this idea that it’s the editor holding the leash who’s responsible for the scholarly turd on the sidewalk that we all just stepped in. I wonder what Dr. Diamond-Lenow would think of that metaphor.
But I agree with Jerry. The author is responsible and has earned all this scorn. The editors are likely to have thought they were doing the young scholar a solid by publishing it. They probably were not looking to make money: The Journal of Lesbian Studies is a hybrid open access journal, meaning authors can publish for free (with the published article behind a paywall for subscribers) or can choose to pay the open-access fee (with the article out in front of the paywall for everyone). “Queer canine becomings” is indeed behind the paywall, so no money changed hands I guess.
I think you could have wasted your time “analyzing’ (I don’t know if you could perform any analysis on such gibberish), on content that is probably made via AI by a scammer.
Give me a break. Even if it was made by AI it was still published in a scholarly journal, so at the very least it shows how abysmally low the publishing standards are. And if it was made by AI (do you have evidence for that?), it also shows that AI-generated papers can be published. And if the woman is a scammer, well, her department and field will find that out.
In light of that, I didn’t waste my time, even if you’re right. But you make two assertions for which you have no evidence.
As soon as I saw the headline I knew this was going to be an “h/t Luana.”
I feel bad for people like Alan Sokal and Peter Boghossian, who, every time a paper like this gets published, get 100,000 emails asking if its theirs.
(OK, I’ll shut up now.)
What a way to start a Sunday!
Incredible story, paper and professor.
Unhappy with her disrespect of doggies though and I offer to the jury Exhibit A:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
My puppers, “Aussie”! He’s a kissy boy but I don’t like doggie kisses: “NO AUSSIE!”
Play with your dogs, young woke professors – leave serious academic papers to serious non-pronoun people.
D.A. and “Aussie”
NYC
These kinds of papers are an outcome of the design of the system.
We’ve created a system that incentivizes the decision path for both the individual and the university that leads to this type of output.
I wonder what type of career Chloe Diamond-Lenow would have had in an alternative-reality system without “critical studies” curricula.
Two comments: 1. I nearly spit out my drink when I read it would “kill Orwell”.
2. Your article demonstrates perfectly how AI regurgitates text without understanding anything.
Well done.
She was in the faculty list a few days ago but appears to have been removed.
An older archive includes her:
https://web.archive.org/web/20241101191931/https://suny.oneonta.edu/womens-and-gender-studies/faculty-staff
It makes more sense if you’ve read Haraway and understand her concepts of ecofascism and ‘the cyborg.’ Basically, we’re all cyborgs because we can’t function without technology, from the phone in our hands to any of the thousands of ways tech influences our existence. Also, plants and animals are more important than people.
Consider this modern philosophy applied to a real-world problem — training dogs as an instrument of the State and the existence of robot police dogs. Like as if we’d applied Aristotle’s concept of the Virtues to the President’s legal problems as both a private citizen and an enforcer of the State.
Here, queer does mean LGBTQ, but also a challenge to normative ideas around sexuality and gender. So lesbian-trans-feminist is the lens through which we’ll be thinking about how the State uses animals to enforce power. Not sure how, but I’m curious to see if the author can make it work.
For many folks, this feels like gibberish because they don’t understand, contextually, what other philosophy and theory this is in conversation with.
A reminder that humanities works like this one are about reframing and understanding the world, like when those ethics articles come out in Econ journals, but they haven’t collected hard data for it. It’s about presenting an idea for discussion.
Social media isn’t the target audience for this one, so the abstract isn’t contextualized for us.
Your clarification is not clarifying much for me. It just connects disconnected things and has no conclusion that is useful or valuable. The target is other academics, but the author cannot seem to write a single non-jargony sentence, which is a deficiency.
Sorry, but I find this paper a big waste of words and effort. It does not just feel like gibberish; it IS gibberish.
I read Donna Harraway recently when my daughter was studying her and asked for my help in understanding her work. I will admit that Harraway’s work has some, albeit limited, value, but this is just garbage. It says nothing of value and serves only to fill people with scorn and disrespect for academia. It’s pointless intellectual peacocking and a complete waste of mental energy for both the producer and consumer.
For many folks, this feels like gibberish because the categories are nebulous, the arguments loose, the reasoning motivated, the hard data non existent and the conclusions either absurd or blindingly obvious and in all cases useless.