Women’s Studies Deploys Social Constructionism in a Highly Selective and Self-Serving Way: It’s As If Everything They Dislike about ‘Women’ Gets Dismissed as Social Construction, While All the Rest Is the Real Thing

And let’s not forget social constructionism, which figures in all identity studies but plays an especially significant role in Women’s Studies—after all, a key tenet of the discipline is that gender itself is a social construction. But Women’s Studies deploys social constructionism in a highly selective and self-serving way: as Patai and Koertge note, “It’s as if everything they dislike about ‘women’ gets dismissed as social construction, while all the rest is the Real Thing. As for men, most everything about them is not socially constructed, since that would, in some sense, let them off the hook, so men get heavy doses of essentialist attributions while the students imagine they’re espousing a straight constructionist line of analysis.”

Foucault’s notion of hegemony—the claim that power in a democracy like America is more potent than power in a dictatorship because it’s invisible—is also a critical element of Women’s Studies ideology. The irony is that while the power of the U.S. government is not, in fact, a good example of “hegemony” as described by Foucault, many Women’s Studies programs are: on the surface, there’s plenty of pretty rhetoric about women’s mutual support and nurturing and openness to diversity; the underlying reality, however, is one of hard-core ideological indoctrination and enforcement. As one Women’s Studies professor told Patai and Koertge,

“feminist process” in the classroom winds up being . . . a push toward conformism and toward silencing dissent. It’s all done under the rubric of being nice and open, and not being an authoritarian, old-fashioned type of teacher. But this winds up being tremendously more coercive. Because with authoritarian teachers you know they’re being authoritarian, and you can resist. You know who’s doing what to you. But the other way is manipulation, which is far worse than straight coercion, because students are being led someplace without any clarity as to whose accountable for what and who’s leading them there.

You could hardly come up with a more nearly perfect description of Foucault-style hegemony.

--Bruce Bawer, The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (Sydney: Broadside Books, 2012), e-book.