It's hard to say which is melting faster these days, the polar ice caps or the minds of humanities academics. Spoiler: the polar ice caps are not melting, but have record ice levels.
Consider, if you dare, Progress in Human Geography's most unintentionally hilarious publication: "Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research." The very title already sounds like a parody from The Onion, but alas, it's deadly sincere.
Unlike the legendary Sokal Hoax or the later Grievance Studies Affair, this was not a test of gullibility. No, this was the real deal, a paper written by people who genuinely believed that glaciers have something to teach us about gender. Or perhaps that gender has something to teach glaciers. One is never quite sure, which, of course, is the point.
The Abstract: A Blizzard of Nonsense
Here's a sample of what passes for profundity in the modern academy:
"Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied."
Translation: We couldn't think of anything real to study, so we decided to interrogate ice for signs of patriarchy.
Apparently, glaciers have been oppressing women for centuries, perhaps by advancing too slowly, or by rudely melting without consent. The authors proceed to outline a "feminist glaciology framework," as if the only thing preventing scientific progress was the lack of gender quotas among snowflakes.
The Four Pillars of Frostbitten Theory
According to the paper, there are four key components to feminist glaciology:
1.Knowledge producers — presumably the oppressed snow scientists.
2.Gendered science and knowledge — because apparently even thermodynamics has a gender.
3.Systems of scientific domination — that's Newton's fault, obviously.
4.Alternative representations of glaciers — possibly including interpretive dance or intersectional snow sculptures.
And there it is, the full academic formula for turning anything, even frozen water, into a political grievance.
The Strange Case of the Talking Ice
The authors earnestly argue that by combining "feminist postcolonial science studies" with "feminist political ecology," we can achieve "more just and equitable human-ice interactions." One imagines the United Nations soon holding a conference on "glacial empowerment," where activists apologise to icebergs for centuries of systemic thermodynamic bias.
If this sounds deranged, that's because it is. But it's also perfectly normal in certain corners of academia, where the goal is no longer to explain the world but to deconstruct it into incoherence.
Why This Isn't an Outlier
It's tempting to laugh and move on. But "feminist glaciology" isn't a freak accident, it's a symptom of a much wider disease. Entire departments now operate on the same logic: take a neutral subject (astronomy, architecture, accounting), apply a dose of "intersectional theory," accuse it of colonialism, and call it research.
The jargon is the giveaway. Once words like "epistemology," "framework," and "justice" appear in the same sentence, you know you're no longer reading about glaciers, or even science. You're reading theology, the liturgy of the Church of Woke.
The New Ice Age of the Mind
The real tragedy is that these people think they're being profound. They confuse obscurity with insight, density with depth. In truth, this kind of writing is the intellectual equivalent of a snowdrift, vast, cold, and impossible to navigate. Beneath it all, there's nothing solid, just a mush of ideology packed into academic formality.
So perhaps the paper does teach us something after all: that not all melting is supposedly caused by climate change (it is not). Some of it happens in the brain.