I did a series on bullshit fields once. I was thinking more of the evolutionary psychology sort of thing, or the social psychology of the sort that has been so hard to replicate. The Grievance Studies hoax just targeted certain fields, which are also bullshitty in many manifestations, but the authors of the study do not seem to grasp concepts like postmodernism and social constructionism, at least in their strong forms. Yes, there is a strong form of social constructionism that is pretty easy to establish. We can conclude, for example, that the days of the week don't correspond to any fact in nature, but are the product of a social compact. Thursday is socially constructed. The same goes for almost anything that is the result of how humans have decided to construct their reality. There are whole categories of things that are socially constructed, like literature itself. What makes something objectively speaking a poem? The fact that people call it a poem. We can show this because in different periods, or between different literary cultures, the definition shifts.
Where this theory gets into trouble is when it is misapplied to mean that we can call things whatever we want and thereby bend reality to our wishes in arbitrary ways. If gender is socially constructed (which it is) then we can have 500 genders. Not really.
The post by Henry at Crooked Timber points out that other fields have manifestly ridiculous findings that could be parodied just as easily. So why go after some fields and not others? Why pick on the poor gender and queer theory people? I wouldn't leave them out of the general critique of the epistemological weakness of contemporary scholarship, but I would say other fields are also manifestly bad. I was talking to Thomas the other day about management studies. I'm sure I could publish a bullshit business school article that I wrote in 2 hours, once I got a hang of the genre.
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I reviewed an essay for Hispanic Review on a Lorca film script, Viaje a la luna. I was as tough on it as my usual self, and recommended a revise and resubmit. I could tell the person who was writing it knew what he was talking about, and the next version came back and I recommended publication. It ended up being a scholar who knows far more about Lorca than I do, one of the top scholars in the field. I could have just accepted it in the first place, but I prefer A+ scholarship to A scholarship, so I recommended a revision.
In a legit field, you should be able to tell whether someone knows what they are talking about or is bullshitting you. You should be able to distinguish the real thing from the parody.
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Here's another, pretty good thread on it. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1047478400762503169.html
One of the issues isn't as much b.s. fields as interdisciplinarity and worries of readers. I've got this great article on Gloria Anzaldúa I never published, that by now would need updating, and that I really ought to have tried harder to get out when I wrote it.
Here is what happened: I sent it to Signs. That's a general feminist journal, good. It was rejected by a reader who was fairly obviously in English and said she was white, and assumed I, too, was white (or had been given my white name, she seemed so sure) and in English and did not understand the troubles of the Chicanos (it's an appreciative, but not honorific piece, and most work on Anzaldúa is honorific). Said the piece was smart but not publishable because white people are only ever allowed to say Anzaldúa is perfectly lefty and explain why, i.e. show that they understand what she is trying to do. We cannot say the discourse has any blind spots.
On that, a friend said you probably cannot criticize anything A. says because no matter what you will be seen as anti lesbian (I had been seen as anti Chicanx, said the reviewer and the journal, but my friend says that was a screen for the real rule, never criticize a lesbian writer). Maybe that's true. But I figured out that since the piece is a critique of US multiculturalism from the point of view of someone who doesn't do US lit. & can see outside it, and A. is only someone you have to deal with in U.S., the only people who would care or get it would be South American Spanish professors in U.S. who have to deal with Comp. Lit. and U.S. Latinx issues - everyone else either wouldn't need to care, or would not be interested in any objections, at least not from me or anyone with a name like mine. I did actually consider submitting under a pseudonym, to see what kind of reaction I would get then.
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