Scholars: ‘Infect’ White Men With The ‘Virus’ of Feminism

Article here. Excerpt:

'It starts tamely enough. Someone talks passively about the wage gap over dinner. The next week, they retweet J.K. Rowling taking a stab at Piers Morgan. A few months later, suddenly, they’ve changed their major to gender studies and are talking about how men owe them money. The worst part? People around them start to suddenly do the same thing. Anyone who doesn’t is summarily cut out of their life, a relic from their past lives where they lived in ignorance.

If it sounds like succumbing to an illness, right down to the different stages, that’s the point. A 2016 paper that’s currently making the rounds on social media from the Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies, titled “Women’s Studies as Virus: Institutional Feminism and the Projection of Danger,” hypothesizes that women’s and gender studies has an “infectious” structure marked by its ability to “infect, unsettle, and disrupt traditional and entrenched fields.”

Penned by Breanne Fahs and Michael Karger, the essay uses the metaphor of the virus as an “ideal” for feminist pedagogy, and investigates how both gender studies and the spread of actual viruses like HIV and Ebola “produce similar kinds of emotional responses in others.”

The paper looks at gender studies as an “infectious, insurrectional, and potentially dangerous field of study,” and goes on to suggest ideas on how to train male students on college campuses as viruses and reframe the negative stereotypes of feminist professors into positive ones to embrace.

Most of the paper consists of a straightforward retelling of the history of feminism and core feminist theory, highlighting the debates by academics on how to spread their ideology. It describes how gender studies programs were allowed to settle into corporate universities and regenerate themselves through the education of students who manipulate the academy to come under their control.

To counter the struggles feminists face in propagating the ideology, the ideas the authors propose are alarming.'