MrStakhanovite wrote:Anyone else bothered by this?Hamblin wrote:It’s really breathtaking to watch political correctness run amok in the academy. (My favorite example was a session on “Eco-feminism, food and pets.” I’m not making this up.)
Didn't really need to say that, I thought.
I'm curious to know more about this session that exemplified "political correctness run amok." I google'd "Eco-feminism, food and pets" and one of the first results that came up was this paper here. The author says she presented versions of the paper at conferences in April 1990 and June 1990. I haven't read the paper yet, but the title, "Ecofeminism and the Eating of Animals," doesn't strike me as being quite as silly as "Eco-feminism, food and pets." (It may be a silly paper still; I don't know. I won't have time to read it until tomorrow.) Her presentations at conferences were called "Ecofeminism: The Woman/Earth Connection" and "Women's Worlds: Realities and Choices, Fourth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women," also not necessarily silly. This paper was published in Spring 1991. The meeting for the American Academy of Religion was held in November 1990.
Then I did searches for the specific phrase "eco-feminism, food and pets" and "ecofeminism, food and pets." The former only yielded the recent entries from Hamblin. But the latter yielded this:
"Such a phenomenon as this should attract study and attention from the outside world. Has it? On the whole, no. At the recent annual joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, papers were given on topics including "Ecofeminism, Food and Pets," "Howard Thurman and the Civil Rights Movement: Interpreter and Enabler from the Underside of History," and "Over the Rainbow: Utopian Configurations in Hollywood Fantasy Films"--to choose entirely at random from the more than one thousand titles--but nothing, nothing whatsoever, dealt with Mormonism. Not a single session, not one paper, was devoted to the fastest growing major religion in America." ~ Daniel C. Peterson, FARMS Review of Books 2.1, 1990.
And this:
"However, I share your wish that more serious attention were given to the Book of Mormon. Jacob Neusner, the eminent rabbinic scholar, has complained in print about the neglect of the Book of Mormon among non-LDS academics, and he is not alone. Mormonism in general is neglected as a scholarly topic to a surprising degree. Year after year I've participated in the annual national joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature -- by far the largest gathering of scholars of religion (not necessarily religious scholars) in the world. Generally, there are no sessions and few if any individual papers on Mormonism -- I typically present on Islamic topics -- though there are routinely entire panels and sessions devoted to (and I'm not making any of these up) the religious significance of Madonna's music videos; ecofeminism, food, and pets; theological defense of pedophilia; and minutely detailed sociological studies of religious groups with relatively tiny memberships and very ephemeral lifespans. This has long puzzled me, even though, truth be told, sometimes I'm pretty happy that we aren't being pawed over by some of the folks at the AAR/SBL." ~ Daniel C. Peterson on the MADB board, October 2004
So, obviously Hamblin is echoing Peterson here.
I guess what I'd like to know is if there really was a session on "Ecofeminism, Food and Pets" at the AAR and who presented it? Did someone at AAR ape Ms. Adams' research topic? Or did Ms. Adams present at AAR and not mention it in her paper? Or is a session that Ms. Carol J. Adams presented at other conferences being given a silly summarizing title?