What you've read sounds like either a fannish piece she wrote drawing on the same sources, an early fannish element, or the fannish bit from a work of feminist scholarship. The work that won the Hugo was a full book. As I said, I've not read it, but the reviews and description of it were of it as a feminist work of history, with perhaps some pop culture analysis at the end.
There's good and bad writing in the humanities, as you know my work travels pretty much across the spectrum these days, but yes, there's a lot of waffly stuff in the humanities and the social sciences, which would be better written at about half or even one third the length, and with a focus on getting the point accross rather than drowning the reader in words.
Science isn't immune, though. One of my cohort at StA CS was a fan of Victorian literature and her heavily mathematical PhD thesis included lines like "And so it is that we have seen..." instead of "Thus,..."