Do people literally think that gender studies classes entail sitting around comparing oppressions and handing out points for whoever finds the most privileged white boy to attack?
… pretty much? Like, not 100% of course but a lot like that.
If so why do they think that?
Have you looked at the syllabus for your school’s gender studies courses? Have you flipped through a gender studies textbook? Have y’all read any gender studies papers outside of “you won’t believe what bullshit they published” articles?
No of course not.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t look at the syllabus for the organic chemistry department either, and yet I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of what that’s about, and when I’ve talked to chemists we don’t talk past each other. Construction engineers/same thing. Business Majors with a minor in Arabic/same thing. Teachers/. Doctors/.
So why do I think that’s what gender studies is like? The same way I know what Organic Chemistry is like: I’ve done a slight bit of reading, have a slight bit of natural interest, and have spoken to people who studied this. I know there’s more to it than dunking on privileged people, but the part of it that affects my life is pretty much all like that.
Only when I am critical of the continental philosophical tradition, and its various derivatives like gender studies, does this idea surface; that you’re only allowed to critique things after dedicating your life to them.
And I have another paragraph I want to write but I don’t know how to write it without sounding either exceptionally arrogant or exceptionally insulting. I’m going to try and I ask you to please interpret it kindly because I don’t actually dislike people who dedicate their studies to the liberal arts, but here it comes:
Things gain traction in the analytical tradition because it is close enough to the truth to be useful. Things gain traction in the liberal arts exclusively because it is fashionable.
The problem I have with this way of looking at it is that gender studies and critical theory generally have a huge, motivated cultural apparatus dedicated to negatively misrepresenting them for political reasons, which Organic Chemistry generally does not (notwithstanding the sour-grapes people who washed out of org chem because of all the memorization and assays and are bitter about it forever). The popular conceptions of politically controversial fields actually are less representative than popular conceptions of more neutral ones, simply due to the fact that wider society’s main interest in those fields is as political battlefields.
Here as anywhere contentious, the answer to “why do people think this bad stuff if it’s not true” is “because they’ve received a predetermined worldview in which these people are their enemies, and due to filter bubbles and confirmation bias they only hear or think about what enemy groups are doing in the cases that most complement that worldview.” Same reason people think of tort law as being full of cases where a no-hoper gets awarded millions of dollars in emotional-hardship damages for papercuts – which of course does still happen sometimes, in the same way as the ridiculous shit from crit theory does happen sometimes.
I only really did lower-level humanities stuff, and I imagine it gets narrower and more ideological at a high level if only because you need to butter up your advisor, but my experience doing humanities and social sciences stuff is that in undergrad teachers mostly want you to be conversant in the major thinkers, frameworks and books in the field, but don’t really care what position you take within that space so long as you’re able to demonstrate a grasp of the subject matter and argument format. A lot of the core texts are just, “here’s all the different theories and people you need to know in this field, here’s the context in which they developed and what they say about each other, here’s a reading list specific to each of them.”
I only ever took one “soft” course where the prof was really pushing a specific ideology – it was pol sci, but I think it was just a bad prof and not the subject’s fault. I’ve mainly seen the bad stuff associated with crit theory happen outside the context of actual classes, like in student interest groups and so forth. We read books with specific agendas, but we usually read books with different agendas in the same course, and we were always encouraged to read them critically. Honestly the wacky SJ stuff is much more something I associate with undergrads who have a shallow grasp of the subject than with the professors who actually work in the field. I’ve heard of professors who pull that shit so they clearly exist, but unless things have gotten much worse in the past ten years (which is possible!), they’re far less common than reputed.
I can’t say much about gender studies because I only ever did the 101-level of it, but I remember it being interesting and inoffensive. The one thing I remember disliking was that I felt it was taking the strict social-constructionist position too seriously, but I argued about that in class discussions and the prof was happy and encouraged me to pursue the subject further, because in a 101-level course just seeming interested and able to grapple with the material is positive.
…it’s also worth remembering that the popular conception of most fields is wildly inaccurate. This is double-plus-true of pure math, but your average Joe’s conception of what it means to study law or psychology or linguistics or [analytic] philosophy is laughably inaccurate. Even if we’re talking about a relatively savvy, college-educated sort of Joe. No reason that gender studies et al should be exempt. Any given individual may or may not have more of a clue than that, but the dynamics of sneering and Dunning-Kruger apply as much as they ever do.
It’s also also worth remembering that your educational experience is likely to vary enormously due to random factors. Your section of Critical Gender Theory 101 has a cool thoughtful rigorous professor who pushes you hard to master the material but doesn’t make ideological demands, the other section has a rabid zealot professor who’s determined to educate you out of your cispatriarchal mind-slavery, and that’s just sort of how things go. Plenty of both kinds in the world. (To some extent they cluster by school and department, unsurprisingly, which makes it harder to notice the variation. But.)
As a default rule, “do not speak whereof you do not know” is wise. Of course, leaning on that too hard turns into the Courtier’s Reply; sometimes there really is a systemic problem with a field, sometimes an outsider really is needed to call bullshit what it is. Ultimately this crashes into the rock of “you cannot solve the important things with simple heuristics, hard problems are actually hard.” But you can make some headway just by trying to do a little bit of research and going looking for the most impressive / legitimately-articulate representatives of the field, rather than just the obnoxious ones who are right to hand.