A journal’s editorial crew conditioned the acceptance of an article on the elimination of two footnotes they stated had been “distracting,” its writer studies. Distracting how? The writer thinks the editors judged the footnotes to be salacious, and thus inappropriate for the journal, although it’s not clear that was their reasoning.
Among the many questions the episode raises are: How do norms of appropriateness perform in editorial judgments? How ought they?
The journal on this case is Mind, the writer is Florence Ashley (College of Alberta), and their article, just lately revealed—sans the footnotes in query—is “What Is It Like to Have a Gender Identity?” Right here’s an excerpt from the summary:
By attending to how folks talk about their gender, we are able to discover various solutions to the query of what it’s prefer to have a gender id. To some, it’s little greater than having a physique whereas others might report it as extra attitudinal or dispositional—seemingly contradictory views. On this paper, I search to reconcile these disparate solutions by growing a concept of how particular person gender id comes about.
And listed here are the footnotes that, Ashley studies, the editors insisted be eliminated to ensure that the paper to be accepted (skip in case you’re offended by vulgarity, mentions of surgical procedure, references to genitalia, or puns):
Ashley stated in a message that the footnotes had been questioned in the course of the peer assessment stage, including:
I wrote a substantive protection in my response to reviewers. Ultimately, they made it clear that the one factor standing in the way in which of official acceptance was eradicating the footnotes and that they wouldn’t publish the paper with them. The official cause was that they had been distracting, however it’s troublesome for me to see it as something aside from prudishness.
Ashley additionally expressed a priority that there’s a danger of “stifling” discourse when “what is taken into account improper is among the higher methods to make some extent, which can occur extra in subfields referring to gender and sexuality.”
In keeping with Thoughts‘s editors, Lucy O’Brien (UCL) and Adrian Moore (Oxford), the editorial crew has a coverage of not publicly commenting on its editorial work in relation to particular papers. It’s an inexpensive coverage, however what it means is that we should not have their facet of the story. So it’s fairly potential that salaciousness was not the problem in any respect. Possibly they had been involved that the lightheartedness of the notes was disrespectful for such a delicate matter. Possibly they deemed the notes’ relevance to the paper’s central argument too tenuous. Possibly they hate puns. Whereas we could also be Thoughts readers, we’re not thoughts readers, so the underside line is that we don’t know for positive.
In any occasion, the purpose of this publish is to not condemn the editors. Even when we assume Ashley is right of their interpretation of the choice, an editor making judgments in accordance with a way of appropriateness that differs from the writer’s shouldn’t be essentially objectionable. Have been an editor to, for instance, insist as a situation for an article’s publication that an writer take away from it a racist joke probably related to however pointless for the writer’s argument, most of us would suppose the editor is performing effectively inside their rights.
Higher than condemning anybody concerned on this can be to getting a grasp of the number of circumstances wherein one thing like a moralistic or aesthetic sense of “what is suitable for this journal” is plausibly the reason for urged or required revisions of a manuscript. Does it occur so much or slightly? Is it kind of frequent in sure subfields of philosophy or on sure matters? Has it occurred to you?
Then we is likely to be in a greater place to evaluate underneath what circumstances, and to what extent, such editorial strain is (or shouldn’t be)… acceptable.
