- Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003
- Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Traine... moreBanu Subramaniam is Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Trained as a plant evolutionary biologist, Banu’s work engages the feminist studies of science in the practices of experimental biology. Author of Holy Science: The Biopolitics of Hindu Nationalism (University of Washington Press, 2019) Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity (University of Illinois Press, 2014), and coeditor of MEAT! A Transnational Analysis (Duke University Press 2021), Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowmanedit
Synopsis How did plant sexuality come to so hauntingly resemble human sexual formations? How did plant biology come to theorize plant sexuality with binary formulations of male/female, sex/gender, sperm/egg, active males and passive... more
Synopsis How did plant sexuality come to so hauntingly resemble human sexual formations? How did plant biology come to theorize plant sexuality with binary formulations of male/female, sex/gender, sperm/egg, active males and passive females—all of which resemble western categories of sex, gender, and sexuality? Tracing the extant language of sex and sexuality in plant reproductive biology, we examine the histories of science to explore how plant reproductive biology emerged historically from formations of colonial racial and sexual politics and how evolutionary biology was premised on the imaginations of racialized heterosexual romance. Drawing on key examples, the paper aims to (un)read plant sexuality and sexual anatomy and bodies to imagine new possibilities for plant sex, sexualities, and their relationalities. In short, plant sex and sexuality are not two different objects of inquiry but are intimately related—it is their inter-relation that is the focus of this essay. One of t...
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In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who... more
In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner. The Bernal Prize is awarded annually to individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of STS. Prize recipients include founders of the field of STS, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. In this essay responding to Traweek's Bernal lecture, Subramaniam explores Traweek’s mentorship in her own work as a feminist STS scholar in biological sciences.
Research Interests: Sociology and Mentorship
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms... more
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality’s (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (STS) in the Boston area. The introduction also frames the remarks of the roundtable participants, who speak to drag queens, artificial intelligence, plant life, gender and environmental conservation, and objecthood. Five transcripts or “lab reports” highlight how the figure of the cyborg animates and reinvigorates feminist, queer, and trans approaches to technoscience.
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In the wake of the Ebola outbreak, the editorial board curators of this special section ask three interdisciplinary scholars to reflect on the global pandemic.
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One spring morning in 1995, ecologist Jayne Belnap walked into a dry grassland in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, an area that she has been studying for more than 15 years. "I literally stopped and went, 'Oh my God!' she... more
One spring morning in 1995, ecologist Jayne Belnap walked into a dry grassland in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, an area that she has been studying for more than 15 years. "I literally stopped and went, 'Oh my God!' she recalls. The natural grasslandwith needle grass, Indian rice grass, saltbush, and the occasional pinyon-juniper treethat Belnap had seen the year before no longer existed; it had become overgrown with 2-foot-high Eurasian cheatgrass. "I was stunned," says Belnap, "It was like the aliens had landed." (Enserink 1999)
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Curated and Introduced by Kristina Lyons, Juno Parreñas and Noah Tamarkin
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Labor has been and continues to be an indispensable category of analysis for radical scholars, as evidenced by the proliferation of new terms—“affective” labor, “immaterial” labor, “digital” labor, and so forth—developed to describe the... more
Labor has been and continues to be an indispensable category of analysis for radical scholars, as evidenced by the proliferation of new terms—“affective” labor, “immaterial” labor, “digital” labor, and so forth—developed to describe the asymmetrical relations of capital and labor in and across contemporary settings. This essay traces the recent advent of the concept of “biological” or “clinical” labor, exploring (a) the utility of the concept for radical historians and (b) the utility of perspectives from labor history to the studies of “biocapital” found in recent science and technology studies (STS). Placing labor history and STS in conversation (without presupposing clear or stable boundaries around either field of scholarship), the essay probes the meanings and limitations of the concept of “biological labor” from the vantage points of both fields, drawing in particular on critiques of human exceptionalism generated by scholars in animal studies, critical race studies, indigenou...
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ABSTRACT
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A stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, this book explores how the author's dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of... more
A stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, this book explores how the author's dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. The book reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, the book uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.
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THE ASYMMETRICAL, UNCOMPENSATED LABORS OF ACADEME have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years-well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious "parallels with family life," critics long have observed that... more
THE ASYMMETRICAL, UNCOMPENSATED LABORS OF ACADEME have been the object of feminist scrutiny for years-well before the global outbreak of COVID-19.1 Noting the obvious "parallels with family life," critics long have observed that feminized faculty tend to take on, or to be tasked with, a disproportionate amount of institutional caretaking: non-research and non-teaching functions such as serving on institutional committees, managing admissions processes, writing student letters of recommendation, and advising, mentoring, and counseling students from underrepresented and marginalized communities navigating hostile or indifferent environments.2 Research plainly shows that such caring labor is disproportionately conducted by feminized workers, and increasingly feminized workers of color.3 Advice for how to rectify these inequities, echoing the victim-blaming bromides delivered to overwhelmed housewives, often is reduced to individual behavioral modification, as when "senior female professors" are encouraged to "model self-restraint" for untenured faculty members by "learning how to say 'no. Small regional private colleges with low endowments currently face financial pressures distinct from vocational twoyear colleges, online credentialing programs, or top-tier global research universities;state regulations and revenue streams vary by national and regional context;religiously-affiliated institutions embody entanglements that non-religiously affiliated institutions do not;in the US context, HBCUs, Hispanic-serving institutions, tribal colleges, and predominantly white institutions occupy dissimilar social positions. The broad outlines of that restructuring are likely familiar to most readers of this academic journal: government divestment from public higher education, increased student fees and tuitions, the corporatization of university administration, the expansion of contingent and disposable teaching labor, the focus on education as a "deliverable" for students to "consume," the extension of working hours through 24/7 email availability, etc.8 Take, for example, the United States, where our academic labor is physically located (even as it is Zoom-distributed elsewhere): as recently as three decades ago, 75 percent of working faculty members were tenured or tenure track;now it is roughly 25 percent, depending on how online educators are tallied.9 The new contingent majority often teach, advise, write, and think in highly precarious conditions, commuting weekly, if not daily, between multiple campuses. Exhausting emotional and manual labor can remain inadequately recognized and compensated as long as that labor is effectively naturalized as maternal affection or feminine empathy.17 Already, in the pre-pandemic university, the affective imperative to work excessively out of love (for literature, for science, etc.) provided a means of access to the academic professional's embodied labor power - access shaped, as ever, by hierarchies of race, language, citizenship, gender, sexuality, age, and ability.
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<p>I begin with a central and profound insight of the feminist and cultural studies of science: that nature and culture, science and society, and biology and the social are not binary opposites. Rather, they are co-constituted and... more
<p>I begin with a central and profound insight of the feminist and cultural studies of science: that nature and culture, science and society, and biology and the social are not binary opposites. Rather, they are co-constituted and co-produced. We need to go beyond the idea of nature shaping culture and culture shaping nature and move toward an understanding where nature and culture are seen as inextricably interconnected and indeed as constitutive of each other. Instead of the binary formulation of nature and culture, we should begin thinking in terms of Donna Haraway's (1999) memorable phrase naturecultures. There is no nature and culture, only naturecultures. I use the field of invasion biology as an illustrative case in point. It will come as no surprise to readers of this volume that we live in times of numerous environmental crises, in particular perceived crises of our ecosystems. While there are many sites and sources of the problems that have been identified, one prominent source in the biological and popular literature is that of invasive species. It is argued that some exotic and foreign species are entering the nation, growing and reproducing aggressively and in the process destroying native habitats and landscapes. The central problem is seen as a proliferation of exotic and foreign species, and the solution proposed is the eradication of these species in order to save native ecosystems. As Preston and Williams (2003) sum up: "Invasive alien species are emerging as one of the major threats to sustainable development, on a par with global warming and the destruction of life support systems." Considered as biological "pollutants," invasive species are seen as a major threat (Simberloff 2000) and a costly "catastrophe" for native biodiversity (McNeely 2001). They are seen by the National Wildlife Foundation as a "major threat" to biodiversity, second only to habitat loss and degradation, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has similarly described them as a "major cause" of biodiversity loss throughout the world. Politicians and environmental activists alike call for immediate action (Carlton 1999).</p>
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This is a story about the failure of good intentions in the face of powerful ignorance, resistance, and silence. Among the characters are faculty men and women from a variety of science and engineering disciplines who share a private... more
This is a story about the failure of good intentions in the face of powerful ignorance, resistance, and silence. Among the characters are faculty men and women from a variety of science and engineering disciplines who share a private commitment to encouraging women graduate students. Many of them are reluctant to talk about their interest in helping graduate women for fear of how they will be perceived in an academic culture imbued with a rhetoric of meritocracy, where colleagues may accuse them of lowering "standards of excellence." Also among the characters are graduate women who seek to join the ranks of competent scientists and engineers. These are students who deserve to be encouraged, and who are angry and frustrated by withdrawn and reticent faculty, but who are reluctant to talk about their frustrations for fear of how they will be perceived. They worry that faculty and student colleagues will see them as weak students asking for special treatment. We want to tell ...
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This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality's (GCWS) series... more
This Lab Meeting took place as a roundtable titled Cyborg Manifestations. Hosted at MIT in February 2020, it was part of the Boston-area Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality's (GCWS) series Feminisms Unbound. The introduction maps the history and structure of the GCWS series and highlights how its rigorous commitment to interdisciplinary graduate education fosters feminist science and technology studies (STS) in the Boston area. The introduction also frames the remarks of the roundtable participants, who speak to drag queens, artificial intelligence, plant life, gender and environmental conservation, and objecthood. Five transcripts or "lab reports" highlight how the figure of the cyborg animates and reinvigorates feminist, queer, and trans approaches to technoscience.
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In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a new policy to promote “sex parity” in research. As an extension to the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act which mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials, the... more
In 2014, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a new policy to promote “sex parity” in research. As an extension to the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act which mandated the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials, the new NIH policy will require scientists to include “sex” as a variable in both animal model and in vitro cell line-based research. The end goal is to ensure that NIH funded scientists “balance male and female cells and animals in preclinical studies in all future applications” (Clayton and Collins 2014, 283). The curators of this section asked four interdisciplinary scholars to discuss this proposed policy.
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Introduction to Part 1- Feminism's Sciences
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Angela Willey (2016), Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham: Duke University Press. 216 pp., 9 illustrations. $89.95 (Cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8223-6140-4; $23.95 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-6159-6.
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This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the Institute for Research on... more
This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice.
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We began this collaboration by recognizing two kindred interests: investment in the stories we tell about the status of science in women&#39;s studies and a desire to see women&#39;s studies as a critical locus of meaningful... more
We began this collaboration by recognizing two kindred interests: investment in the stories we tell about the status of science in women&#39;s studies and a desire to see women&#39;s studies as a critical locus of meaningful engagement with science. At the start of our collaboration, we began to debate the status of science in women&#39;s studies, the humanities , and in the culture at large. The claim that science is undervalued in the humanities resonated strongly with Banu, while Angie saw an over-valuation, an automatic respect for science among humanists, mirroring that of the larger culture. 1 Why did we perceive our field so differ-ently? As a scientist teaching in the humanities, Banu bemoans the easy dismissal of science as a resource for feminism and the general lack of critical engagement with science. She is constantly frustrated by rampant science-and technophobia, accompanied by a refusal to explore even elementary aspects of scientific investigation. As someone trained in women&#39;s studies, who began studying science and scientists centrally, Angie encountered a reverence toward science that garnered two frequent responses to her research: first, curiosity and often naive interest 1. We have chosen to use our first names here, as we draw extensively upon and want to highlight traditions of &quot; conversations &quot; in feminist scholarship and collaborative interdisciplinary thinking-together in feminist science studies. The choice marks this talking, debating, explaining, and thinking together as a method where intimacy enables and yields insight.
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Introduction to Part 1- Feminism's Sciences
People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines—from the sciences to the humanities and back—oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species... more
People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines—from the sciences to the humanities and back—oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic studies, post/colonial studies to scientific/biological terminology: native, alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee, founder, resident. In this article, I explore concepts around mobility and “migration” and how the values and political contexts accompanying these concepts circulate across geopolitical and scientific terrains. In extending theories of migration to examining the history of science, I explore the migrations and diasporic lives of concepts.
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People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts. Concepts migrate across disciplines—from the sciences to the humanities and back—oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts. Many terms span species... more
People, plants, and animals travel; so do theories, ideas, and concepts.
Concepts migrate across disciplines—from the sciences to the humanities
and back—oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts.
Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic
studies, post/colonial studies to scientifi c/biological terminology: native,
alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee,
founder, resident. In this article, I explore concepts around mobility and
“migration” and how the values and political contexts accompanying these
concepts circulate across geopolitical and scientifi c terrains. In extending
theories of migration to examining the history of science, I explore the migrations and diasporic lives of concepts.
Concepts migrate across disciplines—from the sciences to the humanities
and back—oft en repurposed to theorize new objects in new contexts.
Many terms span species and disciplines, from human contexts in ethnic
studies, post/colonial studies to scientifi c/biological terminology: native,
alien, local, foreign, colonizer, colonized, naturalized, pioneer, refugee,
founder, resident. In this article, I explore concepts around mobility and
“migration” and how the values and political contexts accompanying these
concepts circulate across geopolitical and scientifi c terrains. In extending
theories of migration to examining the history of science, I explore the migrations and diasporic lives of concepts.
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A conversation with Banu Subramanian about doing FSS in the context of the university and the Women's and Gender Studies classroom.