This article may be of interest. https://quillette.com/2019/09/17/i-b...nstructionist/
A few quotes follow.
If I had known, 20 years ago, that my side in the ideological wars over gender and sex was going to win so decisively, I would have been ecstatic. Back then, I spent many evenings at the pub or at dinner parties debating gender and identity with other graduate students; or, really, anyone who would listen—my mother-in-law, my relatives, or just a random person unlucky enough to be in my presence. I insisted that there was no such thing as sex. And I knew it. I just knew it. Because I was a gender historian.Back then, quite a few people disagreed with me. Almost nobody who hadn’t been exposed to such theories at a university could bring themselves to believe that sex was wholly a social construct, because such beliefs went against common sense. That’s what makes it so amazing that the cultural turnaround on this issue has happened so quickly.I also published an article out of my Master’s thesis, which probably had a wider reach than my scholarly work. This was a fun article called Finding a Place for Father: Selling the Barbecue in Postwar Canada, which looked at the connection between men and barbecuing in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s. (Yes, this is the sort of thing that academics do.) First published back in 1998, it has been republished several times in textbooks for undergraduate students. Plenty of young university students, first learning about Canada’s history, have been forced to read that article to learn about the history of gender—and the social construction of gender.The problem is: I was wrong. Or, to be a bit more accurate, I got things partly right. But then, for the rest, I basically just made it up.
In my defence, I wasn’t alone. Everyone was (and is) making it up. That’s how the gender-studies field works. But it’s not much of a defence. I should have known better. If I were to retroactively psychoanalyze myself, I would say that, really, I did know better. And that’s why I was so angry and assertive about what I thought I knew. It was to hide the fact that, at a very basic level, I didn’t have proof for part of what I was saying. So I stuck to the arguments with fervor, and denounced alternative points of view. Intellectually, it wasn’t pretty. And that’s what makes it so disappointing to see that the viewpoints I used to argue for so fervently—and so baselessly [sic]—have now been accepted by so many in the wider society.In other words, this is not science; it is religion as belief trumps all.You could cherry pick other contextual details. And indeed, in my book, I did just that. I had become fascinated by reading about the modernization of life at mid-century, and so I pointed out all of the ways in which people in the postwar years connected talking about modernity with talking about manliness. It was, as a work of scholarship, fairly elegantly done, if I may say. The problem was, it was also, partly, intellectually bankrupt.
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Originally Posted by RevolverRob
