Sure can, however when you get a one-trick pony you need to take that with a grain of salt. e.g. Chick Comics are the same. Or Scientology. Or David Icke. Any fairly rigid ideology is less about meaningful analysis of the thing itself, and much more about how they can shoehorn more things into fitting with that group's pre-defined list of conspiracy theories, in the sense of the saying "if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail".
It makes the analysis sort of worthless in telling you almost anything worthwhile about the thing they're studying, but you can learn quite a bit about the researcher's bias by studying their works alongside other non-aligned sources. e.g. if non-gender studies scholars cite a number of factors explaining something but those factors aren't explored whatsoever in gender studies versions, and instead they jump straight to "patriarchal conspiracy" for the explanation, even when that's a more convoluted explanation, you're learning about their biases and thought processes, not the thing being studied. It's similar to how Jack Chick's "Dark Dungeons" is absolutely worthless for understanding anything about role-playing games but you can learn a lot about the anti-roleplaying game hysteria of the 1980s from the piece.
An example here would be a piece I read claiming that dowries were "bride price", a totally different concept. The mistake happened because the author was working from the worldview "traditional society views women as a commodity". Therefore if there's a payment, then it must be to obtain the woman. When it was pointed out by comments that dowries work the other way, the author responded "that's even worse - it implies women are a commodity having negative value". Which is just clearly doubling-down on a misunderstanding due to holding onto a rigid ideological position, even when maintaining that worldview leads to a contradiction. If something has no trade value, then it's not viewed as a commodity. Yet, people still invested in raising daughters, then provided money for them when they married. This is not consistent behavior with the "traditional society views women as a commodity" argument. In fact, dowrys were the female's share of inheritance. Girls obtained their share on marriage - when they left the family, and boys obtained their share on the death of the parents. The main reason to do this was to avoid inheritance disputes between different families on the death of the parents while still providing for all your descendants.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14539842 times)