Academia, Politics, Society

Ending “White Heteromasculinism”: Professors Call For Less Reliance On White, Male, Heterosexual, and “Cisgendered” Academics

cgpc20.v024.i04.coverA new study has called for a concerted effort to cite academics of color and greater diversity to make from the hold of “white heteromasculism” on research.  Geographers Carrie Mott (professor at Rutgers University) and Daniel Cockayne (professor at University of Waterloo in Ontario) has identified the reliance on research by white males as a “system of oppression” benefitting “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.” Cisgendered refers people whose gender identity matches their birth sex.

The two academic insist in an article in the journal Gender, Place and Culture that “This important research has drawn direct attention to the continued underrepresentation and marginalization of women, people of color. … To cite narrowly, to only cite white men … or to only cite established scholars, does a disservice not only to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism.”

The 22-page paper, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement,'” argues that the use of straight white males for support only perpetuates their views and excludes alternative views.  They said that their study was motivated by “shared feelings of discomfort, frustration, and anger” over actions of fellow scholars and publication practices in a white male-dominated system of peer review.

Of course, the higher rate of citations of males may reflect the higher numbers of male academics.   According to the American Association of Geographers, men make up 62 percent of its members.  That is changing but could be a major contributors to the higher citation rate since there are twice as many of males publishing.

Mott identified herself as  a “feminist political geographer,” who’s interested in “how resistance movements mobilize to fight against state-sponsored violence and marginalization.”

In fairness to Professors Mott and Cockayne, greater diversity in our faculties have led to valuable work challenging assumptions and perceptions in academic work.  It is important to consider the ever-widening body of research in many fields to counter any bias in analysis.

At the risk of seeming self-serving as an academic who is “white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered,” I find the publication by Mott and Cockayne to be deeply troubling and frankly anti-intellectual.  I never consider (and often do not know the race or sexual orientation) of authors cited in my academic work.  I am interested in their ideas and the depth of their analysis.  That is the great pleasure of working in a field of intellectuals.  We are thrilled by ideas, not identities.  The article suggests that we should start to employ a type of selection process based on identity and race.  That is precisely what so many fought against in academics as we broke down racial and gender barriers.

The suggestion that the value of academic work should now be measured in part by the identity or race or sexual orientation of the author is offensive to our intellectual mission and values.  It shows how some academics are now introducing not just speech regulations but discriminatory practices into universities under the guise of diversity values.  The touchstone of our academic life is the inherent worth of ideas in their own right.  While we all strive for greater diversity of ideas and influences on our campuses, the citation of academic work must remain entirely based on the inherent quality of the underlying research and not the identity of the researcher.

What do you think?

 

235 thoughts on “Ending “White Heteromasculinism”: Professors Call For Less Reliance On White, Male, Heterosexual, and “Cisgendered” Academics”

  1. Demographic profile of current White House Interns-
    “2 Black men, 0 Black women, 34 White women, 79 White men”

  2. I do not believe Mr. Turley has actually read the peer-reviewed article “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’” whose content he nevertheless labels “anti-intellectual.”

    The quotes from the article (and quite a bit of his blog-entry’s remaining content) appear to have been lifted straight out of Kristine Phillips article in The Washington Post, July 16. WaPo, to which he links but does not otherwise acknowledge.

    Neither does he provide a link to the peer-reviewed article, although the WaPo does (https://t.co/zSQHM2FciN).

    Strange, as this blog post is ostensibly about citation practices in academia.

    1. The academic practice that you reference.. you mean…at this blog? I haven’t even seen information updated to correct the conclusions Turley mistakenly drew as part of news-linked posts. And, the deflections related to Trump info. are so over the top, they defy classification.

  3. >It shows how some academics are now introducing not just speech regulations but discriminatory practices into universities under the guise of diversity values.

    This seems to be particularly widespread in Canadian universities, but American institutions are infected also (NYU, Brown, Yale, etc.).

    Advocates of this kind of neo-Marxist, SJW thinking has resulted in the recent passing of Bill C-16 in Ottawa, which states that it is a violation of someone’s civil rights and equivalent to hate speech for Person A to refuse to address Person B by he/she/its preferred pronoun (regardless of how ridiculous and transient that pronoun might be). This is not a law forbidding certain types of speech, this is a law compelling certain types of speech, and just as the term cisgendered is ridiculous and contrived, many of these gender pronouns are absurd in the extreme.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiijS_9hPkM

    Luckily we have the First Amendment in this country, but we have already seen the pushback on free speech on college campuses. I say defund all these advocacy programs; they are not legitimate academic areas of interest, and all they do is sow discord.

  4. 1st they graduate from high school. Then they get a 4 year college degree. Then they hang out for 2 more years and get a masters. Then they hang out for 2 or 3 more years and get a PHD. Then they get a position teaching on campus. All the while they have no idea how people are living in the real world off campus.

  5. The problems with American Academia are;
    GREED, COWARDICE, STUPIDITY AND IGNORANCE

    The main place for blame is the U.S. Zionist media and Zionist U.S. government.

    Have you heard this on any campus or Mainstream Media? Here is a prime example;
    The official U.S. Government & Media 9/11 story is that 2 NYC towers were brought down by 2 airplanes.
    This is a total LIE !
    The Truth is that 3 NYC SKYSCRAPERS WERE DESTROYED BY CONTROLLED DEMOLITION ON 9/11.

    Christopher Bollyn: If the government and media are lying to us about 9/11, it means they are controlled by the same people who carried out 9/11.

    LIES of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are exposed;
    Former NIST Employee Speaks Out On World Trade Centre Towers Collapse Investigation.

    https://youtu.be/RJ_jQgIEnI8

    1. It never fails. You can set your clocks by it. At the end of the month, when those government issued psychotropic meds inevitably run low, the resident tinfoil hat lunatic starts ranting about 9/11 conspiracies.

      1. Petition by 2,887 ARCHITECTS & ENGINEERS
        http://www.ae911truth.org

        They believe in the CONTROLLED DEMOLITION OF THE 3 WTC TOWERS ON 9/11

        “On Behalf of the People of the United States of America, the undersigned Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth and affiliates hereby petition for, and demand, a truly independent investigation with subpoena power in order to uncover the full truth surrounding the events of 9/11/01 – specifically the collapses of the World Trade Center Towers and Building 7. We believe there is sufficient doubt about the official story and therefore the 9/11 investigation must be re-opened and must include a full inquiry into the possible use of explosives that might have been the actual cause of the destruction of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and Building 7.”

    2. “SCIENTISTS, ARCHITECTS, & ENGINEERS now affirm that the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center buildings was an inside job. The leading scientist of Scholars For 9/11 Truth, Dr Steven Jones, has proven that controlled demolition devices were placed within the WTC Twin Towers – and this is what brought the buildings down not the airplanes. According to Fox News journalist Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, Larry Silverstein tried on the afternoon of 9/11 to get approval to demolish WTC 7. Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building.

      9/11-WTC7 Larry Silverstein says ‘PULL IT’ (INSIDE JOB)
      Larry Silverstein has not revealed the name of the fire dept. commander with whom he claims he spoke.

  6. The problem with modern academia is that not many of its occupants have done an honest day’s labor in their sheltered little lives. Perhaps had they spent a summer or two shoveling horsesh*t, they might better recognize it when they encounter it.

    1. ModernMiner – when I first started teaching college classes my mentor used to spend his summers working in the fields as a farm laborer. He said it cleared his head. Personally, I just think he hated being the boss. And it was nice for other people to boss him around.

    2. Unlike the heirs of wealth? What have the Pew heirs and John Arnold, of hedge funds and Enron, done to increase GDP? A national style magazine highlighting “philanthropists” reported Pew Trusts and Laura and John Arnold are funding “community supervision systems and electronic monitoring.”
      BTW-The financial sector drags down GDP by an estimated 2%.

      1. BTW-The financial sector drags down GDP by an estimated 2%.

        Who undertook the estimate?

        1. No response to the reported interest of the richest 0.1% in surveilling you and your neighbors so as to supervise? Evidently, our freedom depends on the ACLU and Democrats, not Trump/Russia supporters. (I must have touched a nerve with the other statement.) A nation of plumbers, welders, electricians, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, doctors, dentists, chemists, etc. can probably barter to create a society. Madoff’s millions- the value?

          1. Linda, if you elect to engage in incoherent free association, no one can converse with you.

            Yes, I noticed that you did not answer my question.

            1. DSS, Linda did not answer your question because she is devoid of facts and almost never provides proof of what she claims?

              1. You make a lot of dumb claims. It is your job to provide reasonable proof for those claims or you should make them. But you do, so don’t complain when people question you and ask for proof.

              2. Linda, the finance and insurance sector accounts for about 7% of gross output in this country (a figure which comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce). Can you possibly explain how a sector of that contextual dimension causes such productive inefficiencies that it induces a 2% deadweight loss in the quantum of value-added in the economy? Just who produced an econometric study which purported to demonstrate that? Where was it published?

                1. The fallacy of your thinking explained through example- Assume the trucking industry suffers a calamity that forces it to operate at 1% instead of its customary 100%, the loss has an impact, i.e. its delivery of goods, that is unrelated to its proportionate share of American industry.
                  In the industry pie chart, finance may account for 7% of resource allocation. The subject being discussed here, is the sector’s productivity.
                  The government produced a publication that measured productivity by industry which was cancelled during George W.’s tenure for the reason that it was not popular with large corporations like those in the financial sector.

                  1. Again, Linda, incoherent word salads have, ultimately, no semantic content. (And you continue to avoid answering the questions put to you).

      2. “BTW-The financial sector drags down GDP by an estimated 2%.”

        This is a generalization without any specifics. Perhaps you can provide some, otherwise the comment is entirely meaningless.

        1. I think her response above indicates she pulled that one out of her rectum.

  8. There is a word at the end of the title– something like “cisgendered”. Explain what the frig that is. Is it like the North Carolina bathroom bill where you must have a dong to go into the men’s room? I have never heard this word before.

  9. Anyway, makes me want to keep voting Republican, this edgy new thing I have started doing recently.

  10. Is there any trash that Routledge won’t publish at this point? A sometimes great academic publisher, but this is something else again.

      1. Hear hear. Joe Wright directed so it will be visually stunning.
        Gary Oldman is one of the best; and he seems to be surrounded by
        English acting elite in the trailer. This and Dunkirk? Tally ho!!

        1. CCS:

          Primo actor, Stephen Dillane, is Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax or as Churchill called him “that buffoon, Edward Halifax.”.The score is by Dario Marianelli of “V for Vendetta” and “Anna Karenina” so that will be top notch, too.

          1. Mespo, I saw Dillane but couldn’t come up with his name (have missed him since his character was killed off on GOT). Thanks for the reminder.
            A feast for the senses, for sure.

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