Satire is a wonderful tool, but what do you do with something like gender studies?  Its craziness accelerates so rapidly that by the time the satire is published, reality has outpaced it.

These folks have figured it out:  Get it to satirize itself.

Their article is titled “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct.”  It’s pure, deliberate nonsense.  But it was submitted and accepted for publication as bona fide scholarship.

If you haven’t come across this before, the authors describe the scam here.

It’s a nice touch that they incorporated text into the article from the Postmodernist Essay Generator.  I’ve had fun with the generator for years.  You can generate new, nonsensical postmodernist essays as often as you like, just by refreshing the screen.

The climate change touch is nice too.  One day at the elevator a colleague and I were chatting about how cold winter was that year.  Tongue in cheek, I offered the explanation, “Global warming.”  Not realizing that I was joking, he agreed.

Alan Sokal on his own classic hoax

The Sokal hoax itself