As reported by Campus Reform, a pair of feminist professors who teach geography — yes, geography — recently wrote in an actual academic journal that certain citations in scholarly articles do nothing but contribute to “white heteromasculinity” because they ignore research by minorities and women.
You just cannot make this stuff up.
Carrie Mott of Rutgers University and Daniel Cockayne made the claim in an article published last month in the Feminist Journal of Geography (I know — I couldn’t believe there was such a publication, either), noting also that citing works can be “a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance” if they are specifically chosen with the intent to promote “those authors and voices we want to carry forward.”
So in other words, scholarly findings by white males are not to be advanced as vigorously as similar scholarly findings by persons of color and women, because if they are, then the author is somehow contributing to the oppression of both.
Campus Reform noted further:
Mott and Cockayne say citation practices are an issue of scholarly concern because whether a professor's work is cited by other scholars has strong implications for hiring, promotion, tenure, and how “certain voices are represented over others” in academia.
“To cite only white men…or to only cite established scholars…does a disservice to researchers and writers who are othered by white heteromasculinism,” they actually wrote, further defining “white heteromasculinism” as “an intersectional system of oppression describing on-going processes that bolster the status of those who are white, male, able-bodied, economically privileged, heterosexual, and cisgendered.”
They also claimed that this ‘oppression’ only contributes to the “marginalization of women, people of color, and those othered through white heteromascline hegemony,” further asserting that “particular voices and bodies are persistently left out of the conversation altogether.”
In an interview with Campus Reform, Mott said she and her co-author wrote their piece after they observed that “white men tend to be cited in much higher numbers than people from other backgrounds.” She said, “we started looking into research that had been done in other fields about similar topics, and wanted to write something specifically for geographers to think about the relationship between knowledge production and identity.”
Mott claimed that women and minorities “have contributed a lot to geographic research,” but they have mostly been ignored by other researchers. That not only holds individual scholars back but it also leaves their potentially unique perspectives out of the larger body of research.
“When it is predominantly white, heteronormative males who are cited, this means that the views and knowledge that are represented do not reflect the experience of people from other backgrounds,” she said. “When scholars continue to cite only white men on a given topic, they ignore the broader diversity of voices and researchers that are also doing important work on that topic.” (Related: Brown University Students Claim The First Amendment Doesn’t Include ALL Speech, Only Views They Agree With.)
As someone who has done graduate-level research, I can say with honesty that I didn’t pay any attention to the ethnicity or gender or sexual preference of the researchers I cited; rather, I looked for the quality and appropriateness of research as it pertained to my thesis topic.
But beyond that, I am also well aware that for some fields of study, maybe most of the research has been done by white heterosexual males, and that if that’s the case, so what, so long as it's accurate?
To suggest that certain research should not be cited just because it was performed by someone with a specific political view, ethnicity, gender and sexual preference is absurd beyond belief. Worse is to assume that citation of “white heterosexual males” is racist or bigoted.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
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