Feministisk teori och genusvetenskap - en frågetråd

1998

We are pleased to announce winners of the fourth Bad Writing Contest, sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature.

The Bad Writing Contest celebrates the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, departmental memos, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from serious, published academic journals or books. Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended self-parody is so widespread.

Two of the most popular and influential literary scholars in the U.S. are among those who wrote winning entries in the latest contest.

Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,” wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize. Homi K. Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.

“As usual,” commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, “this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.”

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Att utröna om det är ett kausalt samband är såklart av yttersta vikt om du skall göra uttalanden om att det ena leder till det andra.

Arguably the most well known and important example of a correlation being clear but caustion being in doubt concerned smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s. There had been a sixfold increase in the rate of lung cancer in the preceding two decades. Nobody disputed that there was a correlation between lung cancer and smoking, but to prove that one caused the other would be no mean feat.

There might be a confounder that was responsible for the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. The increased rate could have been the result of better diagnosis, more industrial pollution or more cars on the roads belching noxious fumes. Perhaps people who were more genetically predisposed to want to smoke were also more susceptible to getting cancer?

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jan/06/correlation-causation

Du kan däremot inte säg att bara för att rökning korrelerar och har ett kausalt samband med lungcancer så speglar även korrelationen mellan kön och lön ett kausalt samband.

Det finns inget vetenskapligt stöd för att kvinna tjänar mindre än män allt annat lika.

Faktum är att utrymmet som är oförklarat, och således kan innehålla en diskrimineringsbit är försvinnande liten, mindre än en procent.