Gender Studies Got So Unhinged That Texas A&M Shut It Down
Texas A&M University announced Friday that it will be shutting down its women’s and gender studies program. The university’s interim president said the decision was based on low enrollment as well as “the difficulty of bringing the program in compliance with the new system policies.”
He was referencing the fact that A&M courses are no longer allowed to “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” as a result of a policy passed last year by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. (RELATED: The Problem Isn’t That Plato Is Woke)
This, of course, posed a problem for A&M’s gender studies program because the entire field of study is premised on advocating gender ideology.
When gender studies programs first began in the 1970s, they were initially marketed as studying women in history and society. In actuality, however, the field immediately became obsessed with theorizing on the most minute insanities of gender ideology.
That bait and switch is present in the now-removed description of gender studies on Texas A&M’s website: “Women’s and gender studies is a flexible interdisciplinary program devoted to the critical analysis of gender and the pursuit of knowledge about women throughout history and around the world.” (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 270: Rep. Harrison Exposes A&M’s Woke Cover-Up)
You would be hard-pressed to find courses in any gender studies department that actually do what the second part of that description promises: examining the role women have played throughout history. You instead find courses devoted to the “critical analysis of gender.” Social constructs of gender, systems of privilege, embodiment, microaggressions, intersectionality, performativity, identity politics, colonialism, deconstruction, and a bunch of other crackpot theories, such as queer theory and critical race theory, are what gender studies courses are really focused on. The longer the field has existed, the more the boundaries have been pushed, and the more the field has devolved into discussions that are incomprehensible to laypeople.
This is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo nonsense on theories that have spun further and further from reality with each passing year.
To understand just how crazy gender studies has gotten in recent years, take a look at some of the gender studies courses on offer this semester at some of America’s most elite universities.
Princeton University is offering gender studies students a course on “queer rave culture” titled “Raving: Encounters & Collisions in Night/Life.” The course description promises that students will use “dancing explorations” and “collectively imagined and constructed raves” to explore “queer rave culture” as “aesthetic, political, and subjective complex societal networks.” This rave culture, explains the course description, is “situated at the confluence of Blackness, queerness, and transness.” Students are advised that “All dance backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome; a deep desire and curiosity for dancing is required.”
Meanwhile, at the University of Chicago, gender studies students are engaged this semester in a course titled “Sex, Drugs, and Mantras: Tantra and Subversive Religious Practices.” Evidently, the point of the course is to consider whether things such as the chanting of mantras on burial grounds “to gain supernatural powers,” the practice of “erotic yoga to achieve mystical union,” and the ingestion of illegal drugs to “channel cosmic deities” are “merely the irrational behaviors of a superstitious mind” or actually represent “expressions of profound systems of embodied spirituality with sensible motivations.”
At Bowdoin College, gender studies students are this semester studying LGBTQ children’s picture books, young adult novels, and children’s TV shows in a course titled “Queer Youth Cultures: Texts and Contexts.” The course asks students to consider how LGBTQ children’s picture books “reinforce or disrupt normative understandings of youth, sexuality, queerness, and growth.” The course promises: “Through critical, intersectional engagement with fictional works crafted for younger audiences and scholarship in queer youth studies, students will challenge ideas used to conceptualize Western understandings of childhood and adolescence, such as innocence, knowledge, growth, and experience.” (RELATED: Supreme Court Saves Religious Parents From Radical LGBTQ Indoctrination of Their Children)
This is simply not a serious academic field. There is no rigorous scholarship, and there is no truth to be pursued.
The content of gender studies academic journals leads to the same conclusion: This is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo nonsense on theories that have spun further and further from reality with each passing year.
For example, Gender and Society, one of the top-ranked journals in the field, has in recent months published articles titled “The Economic Penalty of Gender Nonconformity Among Sexual Minorities,” “How Mid-Range Trollish Behavior Legitimates Hegemonic Masculinity in Digital Spaces,” “Gender Privilege and Vasectomy Experiences of Childless Men in Chile,” and “How Siblings of Transgender Youth Divest from Family Gender Norms.”
Book publishing in the field is perhaps worse. Tomes released in the past two years in the field of gender studies include Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance, Outskirts: Queer Experiences on the Fringe, The Witch Studies Reader, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire, and Everyday Coercion: Men’s Routine Use of Sexual Coercion Toward Women.
One gender studies professor at Texas A&M, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, bemoaned the university’s decision to shut down the gender studies department in an interview with the Texas Tribune, saying, “We have to keep fighting and standing up for our students’ right to have an education that is critical for the times they live in.” A look at her work, however, shows that the education she offers her students is one they could do without. Lakkimsetti supposedly “brings to light contemporary struggles for social justice … undertaken by sex workers … in India.” To do so, she “deploys Foucauldian lens of biopolitics and postcolonial understandings of the state to understand these contemporary transformations.”
Nothing in the field of gender studies provides anything of value to society, and everything taught in it has the effect of brainwashing students into idiocy.
Every college should be pressured to quickly follow the example of Texas A&M.
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