The Nature academic publishing group—home of some of the world’s most-read and most prestigious scholarly journals, including Nature itself—appears to have opened its gates to the barbarians, signalling a process of activist capture.
Just over a year ago, Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications accepted a submission from Dr. Órla Meadhbh Murray (she/they), asking what “is a feminist queer crip approach to the gut?” When the definitive open access version appeared online late last month, one answer became clear:
I was processing some memories around my gut condition and became overwhelmed with sadness and grief. It felt ridiculous explaining to the (English) therapist what had come up because the only way I could describe it was famine grief. The Irish Famine of the 1800s is of course before my time, but in that therapy session I felt overwhelmed with a grief that felt larger than my own. I made sense of this feeling through the framework of intergenerational trauma and described it as feeling the pain of the famine lingering in my guts.
In other words, the author claims that her/their “crip guts, specifically being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis” prompted an “autoethnographic reflection” which led to her/their non-reproducible findings of a personal direct medical connection to the Irish Famine (1845–1852).
Whereas Nature’s hard-won reputation comes from its adherence to the scientific method, this latest publication is activist and subjective. The author’s advocacy of “queer stoma pride” and “the leakiness of bodies which disrupt boundaries” is ideological and not scientific. She says so as much, with her key concept of “crip guts” (which “disrupt epistemic injustice and apparently challenge Western biomedical models of knowledge production”—our emphasis).
The best known example of using postmodern, leftist, and activist language to force nonsense out through the scholarly presses was the 1996 Sokal affair, which saw the humanities journal Social Text tricked into running a postmodern account of quantum physics. This episode was then echoed during the 2017–2018 ‘grievance studies’ hoax, where one third of the humanities journals targeted were duped into publishing carefully packaged junk, such as “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon.”
One can hope that Murray’s “Crip guts, stomas, and the violence of ‘returning to normal’” is another hoax in the Sokal tradition and not a serious argument.
Either way, it looks like the Nature group is taking seriously what its author calls “a destigmatised collective refusal of normative gut discourse and valuation of crip gut knowing.” The more likely disaster here is the wider problem of activist rhetoric now displacing scholarship in hard science journals, all while normalising “talking about poop at conferences and in journal articles,” apparently. I’ll get a mop.
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References:
1/ Murray, Ó.M. Crip guts, stomas, and the violence of ‘returning to normal’: a feminist queer crip approach to the gut. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 12, 1780 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-025-06091-1
2/ “Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon”. Gender, Place & Culture: Volume 27, Issue, 21–20. (2020).
