In September, the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)—the most prominent academic organization in the field—gave an annual book prize to The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, published by Duke University Press. The book, written by Jasbir Puar, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Rutgers University, is a collection of scurrilous, perverse, and sometimes absurd accusations of Israeli evildoing. To Cary Nelson, the decision sounds the death knell for the entire field:
In the 1970s and 1980s the emerging field of women’s studies embodied hopes and goals for transforming humanities disciplines. . . . Of course, . . . faculty members and popular writers sometimes went to ludicrous extremes in contesting “patriarchy,” but academic training and the desire for academic respectability eventually moderated these impulses for many, [although the field] never settled its internal conflict between political and academic impulses. . . .
Now it is clear that politics has won; the NWSA’s political mission will not be qualified by objective standards. The organization is committed to criminalizing and delegitimating the state of Israel. In 2015 it passed the most far-reaching anti-Israel resolution of any major professional association, going well beyond an academic boycott to isolate, and condemn, and do as much economic and cultural damage to Israel as possible. With that, NWSA became officially intolerant of all alternative political opinions. . . .
The NWSA has now crossed a further line in self-discreditation by honoring Jasbir Puar’s December 2017 book. . . . Most anti-Israel [academic] publications focus on debatable propositions. Not Puar’s. You can debate the claim that Israel discriminates against its Arab citizens, but so long as there is evidence of racism among some Israelis you cannot wholly discredit the accusation. Puar, however, makes arguments that can be proved factually right or wrong. They are consistently false. . . .
Why does NWSA’s endorsement and its embrace of faux scholarship matter? Because NWSA members are encouraged to write and teach with a fiercely anti-Zionist bias and train their students to think and write that way. Several other humanities groups, most notably the American Studies Association, have launched themselves down the same rabbit hole.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/jasbir-puar-launches-womens-studies-on-a-death-spiral/