Just when you thought Goldsmith’s College couldn’t get any weirder, here’s an academic paper claiming carbon fibre is misogynist. The link surfaced on Twitter after its author got into an online fight with Richard Dawkins, which sounds like the sort of fight you want both sides to lose.
It’s been suggested the whole thing is a Sokal-style hoax, but I’m not sure. Poes Law and all that.
In this paper I am concerned with instances in which carbon fiber extends performances of masculinity that are attached to particular kinds of hegemonic male bodies. In examining carbon fiber as a prosthetic form of masculinity, I advance three main arguments. Firstly, carbon fiber can be a site of the supersession of disability that is affected through masculinized technology. Disability can be ‘overcome’ through carbon fiber. Disability is often culturally coded as feminine (Pedersen, 2001; Meeuf, 2009; Garland-Thompson 1997). Building on this cultural construction of disability as feminine, in and as a technology of masculine homosociality (Sedgwick, 1985), carbon fiber reproduced disability as feminine when carbon fiber prosthetic lower legs allowed Oscar Pistorius to compete in the non-disabled Olympic games. Secondly, I argue that carbon fiber can be a homosocial surface; that is, carbon fiber becomes both a surface extension of the self and a third party mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface that facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies. I examine surfaces as material extensions of subjectivity, and carbon fiber surfaces as vectors of the cultural economies of masculine competition to which I refer. Thirdly, the case of Oscar Pistorius is exemplary of the masculinization of carbon fire, and the associated binding of a psychic attitude of misogyny and power to a form of violent and competitive masculine subjectivity. In this article I explore the affects, economies and surfaces of what I call ‘carbon fiber masculinity’ and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fiber, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he unconsciously attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability. Ph’
nglui Mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
Ok, so I added the last line 
But surely if H.P.Lovecraft was writing today, his equivalent of The Esoteric Order of Dagon wouldn’t be a Presbyterian sect that had gone off the rails, but would be located deep within the humanities department of a second-rate university.
Has the author wandered so far down the postmodernist rabbit-hole that many, many, SAN rolls have been lost?