The Most Insane Academic Papers Ever Written?

"Conceptual Penises" and "Glaciers, gender, and science" are masterpieces of academic lunacy.

One of the first essays I ever published (for the British Salisbury Review) was a report on NYU Professor Alan Sokal’s hoax paper, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which he submitted to the editors of the prestigious postmodernist studies journal, Social Text, published by the Duke University Press. The editors somehow failed to recognize that the paper was a spoof of their intellectual discipline, and they agreed to publish it in 1996.

In addition to being a mathematics professor, Sokal is a great satirist, and his phony paper must surely contain some of the most fantastically unintelligible sentences ever written.

Apparently, inspired by the Sokal Affair, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay recently submitted their absurdist masterpiece, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’” to the cogent social sciences journal, which agreed to publish it. As the authors stated in their Abstract:

Abstract: Anatomical penises may exist, but as pre-operative transgendered women also have anatomical penises, the penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a social construct isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Through detailed poststructuralist discursive criticism and the example of climate change, this paper will challenge the prevailing and damaging social trope that penises are best understood as the male sexual organ and reassign it a more fitting role as a type of masculine performance.

Boghossian and Lindsay did not achieve Sokal’s satirical glory because cogent social sciences is a pay-to-publish journal, and therefore not considered entirely legitimate.

This being the case, the winner of the most preposterous academic paper ever published may be “Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research,” published in the peer-reviewed journal, Progress in Human Geography. Note that the name of the journal makes no sense.

Unlike Sokal, Boghossian, and Lindsay, the authors of the “Glaciers” paper did NOT submit the paper to spoof the journal and the discipline. It was a sincere submission. As they state in their Abstract:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

Again, note that none of the Abstract makes any sense. It was apparently written by people who have spent hundreds of hours exclusively reading total nonsense. The last sentence may be the oddest ever written in the English language.

Woman falls into glacier crevasse while trying to have a more just and equitable human-ice interaction in the context of feminist political ecology