Social Text

{{for|the software company|Socialtext}}

{{Infobox journal

| title = Social Text

| cover = Socialtext.jpg

| editor = Jonathan Beller, Jayna Brown, David Sartorius

| discipline = Cultural studies

| former_names =

| abbreviation = Soc. Text

| publisher = Duke University Press

| country = United States

| frequency = Quarterly

| history = 1979–present

| openaccess =

| license =

| impact =

| impact-year =

| website = http://www.socialtextjournal.org

| link1 = http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/

| link1-name = Journal page at publisher's website

| link2 = http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/current

| link2-name = Online access

| link3 = http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/by/year

| link3-name = Online archive

| JSTOR = 01642472

| OCLC = 423561805

| LCCN = 79644624

| CODEN =

| ISSN = 0164-2472

| eISSN = 1527-1951

}}

Social Text is a peer-reviewed{{cite web|url=https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/pages/About | title=About the Journal|work=Social Text|access-date=August 10, 2024}} academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, Social Text has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment. Each issue covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture. The journal has since been run by different collectives over the years, mostly based at New York City universities. It has maintained an avowedly progressive political orientation and scholarship over these years, if also a less Marxist one. Since 1992, it is published by Duke University Press.{{cite web |url=http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html|title=Mystery Science Theater |work=Lingua Franca |access-date=2014-12-10}}

The journal gained notoriety in 1996 for the Sokal affair, when it published a nonsensical article that physicist Alan Sokal had deliberately written as a hoax. The editorial board, according to Editor Andrew Ross, published the article as a good faith attempt by Sokal, a well-known physicist, to develop a social theory of his field.{{Cite web |last=Editorial |first=Board |date=1996 |title=Response to the Sokal Affair |url=https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/SocialText_reply_LF.pdf |access-date=September 25, 2024 |website=Physics.NYU.edu}} Ross claims that the editorial board asked Sokal to revise and resubmit his article, but Sokal refused, and so the editors decided to publish the paper as a prominent physicist’s best attempt to develop theory.{{Cite web |title=Lingua Franca |url=http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html |access-date=2024-09-25 |website=linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org}}

The editors of the journal were awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature by "eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist".{{cite web|url=http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig1996|title=The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Winners |date=August 2006 |publisher=Improbable Research |access-date= 15 April 2016}} The journal did not{{cite journal |title=Peer Review |journal=Social Text |date=2009 |volume=27 |issue=3 |pages=169–170 |doi=10.1215/01642472-2009-031 |url=https://read.dukeupress.edu/social-text/article-abstract/27/3%20(100)/169/33667/Peer-Review |access-date=28 April 2023|url-access=subscription }} practice academic peer review, and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.{{cite web| url = http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html| title = Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity| access-date=April 3, 2007| last = Sokal| first = Alan D.| date=November 28, 1994| work = Social Text #46/47 (spring/summer 1996)| publisher = Duke University Press| pages = 217–252}} The Sokal article has never been retracted by the journal.