Before us today may be the most pristine example of female privilege since the Lindsay Clancy trial. You have heard of “peer review”, the sad system of guaranteeing banality and curtailing innovation in science. It is capricious, bothersome, and unnecessary. But it is one of the fixed rituals in the famed “scientific method”, and cannot be escaped.
Now an intelligent editor, as in olden days, could pick papers for his specialty journal based purely on his interest in those articles, on the premise, which surely is known and accepted by all—except non-scientists, who have a touching faith in peer review—that inclusion is no guarantee of truth or even accuracy. These old timey editors recognized it’s sometimes good to air even bad ideas, perhaps accompanied by a note, purely to show the range of thought.
But now we have peer review, also known as the Bureaucrat’s Paradise, part of the hilarity which is scientific publishing.
Enter the paper is “Toward a Feminist Ethics of Peer Review” in Afflia by several ladies. The opening words (with my bolding):
Scholars are familiar with the standard peer review form that invites us to check a box, select a rating, or click reject, revise, or accept when we put on our reviewer hats to assess a manuscript that has been submitted to an academic journal. They are such a normative part of the reviewer’s job that we don’t stop to think about it. At a recent retreat of the Affilia Editorial Board, we made space to talk about the review process, articulating that the checkboxes presume a reviewer who is an objective, disembodied expert untouched by power. Further, such forms presume a manuscript that is either competent or not. In this editorial, we trouble these assumptions, contending that the labor of evaluation is a labor of feminist care.
Apart from anything else, this is the first time I have ever seen trouble as a verb. Except maybe that “boil boil” quip by whatshisname. It’s used here as almost a spell, too, conjured in the space the feminists made, an articulating act of mental malice cast upon disembodied experts who hold ideas deemed unacceptable.
This is the feminist burden! This we know for certain, because in the very next sentence we are told it is so: “We distilled this refrain of reviewing as feminist care work from the scholarship of our predecessors.”
And what, pray, is some of this scholarship? Why, the discovery that “the academy’s rituals of gatekeeping reproduce epistemic injustice”. And what is an epistemic injustice?
Saying no to a lady scholar.
I can hear your objection. And so can our feminists:
Critics often charge that feminist review lowers standards possibly because of our partiality towards methodological pluralism.
“Methodological pluralism” means when feelings are permitted to triumph over Reality. Because just you guess who is hardest hit by peer review. Go on and guess before reading further.
…the vulnerability of positionality work falls disproportionately on scholars “who identify as women of color and gender-neutral/nonbinary, queer, and Femme persons of color,” i.e., those for whom articulating positionality means “dredging up painful memories and traumatic experiences associated with being ‘othered’ and isolated in the academy”…
I bet you didn’t see that coming. And did you see that “identify”?
“Peer review generates anxiety, guilt, fatigue, anger, and sometimes joy.” All terrific emotions! But there are even better ones. For instance, even if you have reviewed papers before, I bet you have never done this: “Consider the fatigue that a reviewer experiences from repeatedly explaining why omitting race from a gender analysis is a flaw.” Which is “exhausting”, they tell us, “in a specifically embodied way.”
Are there disembodied ways to explain? Ah, there must be. Experts are disembodied, and they are exhausted with the disembodied. “Feminism requires us to name this fatigue as structural, not personal.”
And have you thought about the feelings of those rejected?
Then there is guilt and the weight of knowing that our decision of even a ‘revise and resubmit’ might impact a scholar’s tenure package. Standard review training does not address this guilt because standard review training assumes that decisions are purely intellectual.
I, and they, saved the best one for last:
And finally, there is anger, the righteous anger of encountering a manuscript that cites thirty men and two women.
I mean, really. Can you imagine anything more outrageous than a paper that cites more men than women? No, you cannot. The hours I’ve spent identifying the genders and, of course, sexual “orientations”, in the bibliography have to count for something. Yes, those “orientations” are important! Because, say our feminists, “treat[ing] ‘gender’ as synonymous with ‘cisgender women'” is just as outrageous as allowing a man to commit epistemic homicide over some lady’s paper.
Oh, how about those awful papers that “uses data gathered without community consent and calls it rigorous”?
Feminist scholarship tells us that women’s screaming fits are good: “Blackdeer (2023) explicitly names rage as a value of decolonial feminism.” Don’t forget “rage can beget solidarity”. What kind of solidarity?
We can channel solidaritous rage into critiquing colonial methodologies and refuse to participate in white supremacist knowledge production by calling in our authors, when able, as critical feminist reviewers, instead of rushing to judgement.
Solidaritous rage, you white supremacist.
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