Is there a difference in academic writing styles between engineering and women's studies? Coming from engineering, when you write a paper, the goal is to be objective and analytical.  We use references and try to define terms for a clear understanding.  The goal at least is to provide facts that support a hypothesis in as unbiased a way as possible.  I think there may be some difficulty in always remaining unbiased, but recently I came across an article that seems to be written like an opinion piece more than a piece of academic work.  After going through it I looked up the author, who is a professor of women's studies.  She writes about robotics being sexist.  Does women's studies have different goals in academic writing than engineering?

To be specific, it is these types of sentences that confuse me on the intent of the academic writing in women's studies:


  Enter HRP-4C, a new-generation gynoid that was unveiled in the spring of 2009 as a body double of and for (or to replace?) the average human female.  


Why would a journal allow the publication of the unsupported rhetorical question "or to replace"?


  The android wears his maker's unfashionable beige shirt, dark trousers and black windbreaker jacket."


Is it professional to call a world-famous robotics researcher "unfashionable", and why is it necessary?


  . . . exact body consists of silver and black plastic molded to resemble a Barbarella-like custome, which accentuates her ample breasts and shapely, naturalistic buttocks."


There is no supporting information of how the square, minutely curved metal is purposefully making the visual the author interprets.  But what I don't understand with this is instead of referring to the robot by its name or the paper, the author continues to refer to it as "robo-Barbarella."

Did I just happen to come across a unique piece of writing, or are there very different styles of writing in academic disciplines?
CS and WS are each concerned with a different kinds of questions, and the language their respective practitioners use simply reflects this difference.

This is familiar to me, given that I've been on both sides of the divide (English Lit as an undergrad minor, cognitive science for my PhD). I got a glimpse of why it exists many years ago when I was in a course with a bunch of Lit Crit majors and we were discussing a certain poem by a certain contemporary poet. The Lit Crit people where pointing at a specific part of the poem and going "Is this an allegory for his lost love? Is this a metaphor for the senselessness of  war?", and so on. Then, in a youthful display of naivety, I said "hey, the guy who wrote this poem is still alive, why don't we try to get in contact with him and ask him what he means?". The lecturer leading the discussion looked at me very sternly and said "that is not the point".

That was very illuminating, I think. I'm sure that the poet in question had something specific in mind when he wrote the poem (and we'll never know what it was because he's dead by now), but the Lit Crit guys don't care about that. The intended meaning of the poem is irrelevant to them, what they care about is the meaning(s) that others might extract from the poem. In the same way, in the passages you quoted, the author doesn't care about the android in and of itself, but rather about how others feel about the existence and characteristics of the android, and how these feelings affect other feelings and beliefs we might have about related issues. That is what allows him/her to make judgments about fashion and other things.

In comparison, people in the sciences care about "objective truth" (for lack of a better term), not about how other people feel about stuff. If I write in a paper "stimulus A caused neurological response B (p &lt; 0.01)", asking about the Marxist/feminist/whatever interpretation of this finding is about as pointless as trying to get to the "objective truth" underlying a piece of poetry.