INTRODUCTION
Science Out of Feminist Theory Part One: Feminism’s Sciences
Banu Subramaniam
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
banu@wost.umass.edu
Angela Willey
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
awilley@wost.umass.edu
In 2012, Sophia Roosth and Astrid Schrader edited a special issue of
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies entitled “Feminist
Theory Out of Science.” Drawing heavily from feminist new materialism,
the issue was devoted to revisiting the annals, practices, and knowledges
of science to produce a revised scientific and more feminist account of
the world. The essays in the volume uncovered a distinctly feminist, and
imaginative landscape in the work of some of the most famous scientists
and sciences of the West, revealing the degree to which social and
historical forces have chosen and drawn on the more regressive elements
of the scientific record. The issue called on feminists to go back to the
“sources” of science to unearth more progressive and feminist
sensibilities, theories, and imaginations. The editors argued that “what
emerges from these diverse essays is an approach to critical thinking that
Subramaniam, B and Willey, A. (2017). Introduction to Science Out of Feminist Theory
Part One: Feminism’s Sciences. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3(1), 1-23
http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312
© Banu Subramaniam and Angela Willey, 2017 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under
a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license
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inhabits, elaborates, and feeds upon scientific theory, holding feminist
theory accountable to science and vice versa.” Roosth and Schrader
describe their project “as an attempt to refigure possible relationships
and traffic between feminism and science,” offering the tantalizing
possibility that other sciences, and other futures were always possible.
As editors of this special issue of Catalyst, we share Roosth’s and
Schrader’s desire to move beyond tired arguments about whether the
humanities and the sciences are “two cultures” (Snow 1959, Lee and
Wallerstein 2016), or more recent debates about “new materialism” in
feminist studies. The provocation for “Science Out of Feminist Theory”
comes in part out of a critique of the “traffic” metaphor and its limits as a
resource for imagining science anew. Traffic has emerged as an
important metaphor for challenging the binary opposition of feminism and
science by suggesting that they are connected by what “travels” between
them, in both directions. Ideas, theories, politics, and language constantly
travel these “two way streets” (Fausto Sterling 1992) between feminism
and science. In reading the wonderfully eclectic assortment of essays in
our double special issue of Catalyst, we suggest that, taken together, the
authors’ visions of “science out of feminist theory” collectively highlight
the vastly unequal and complex terrain on which this traffic traverses.
Indeed, to pay attention to this terrain is to recognize the many potholes,
obstacles, dead ends, detours, accidents, and vehicles driven off the
road.
The fundamental argument that theories and knowledge travel
between feminism and science is by now a foundational claim for feminist
science and technology studies. As a result, over the last few decades,
the field has developed rich accounts of the dense traffic between
science and feminism, and between their proper objects—nature and
culture. Indeed, rather than nature and culture, we now talk about
naturecultures. However, in the move to track naturecultures, we often
elide the unequal status of feminism and science as knowledge projects.
Too often, feminism and science appear as known quantities, startlingly
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monolithic in our rhetoric for all our claims to interrogate their meanings.
The common proposition is that: We are feminists and science is never
us, never what we’re doing. Whether we are admonishing our peers for
not “taking science seriously” (and conversely congratulating ourselves)
or damning science for its part in the violence we see in our worlds,
science is outside of feminism.
Moored in this logic, recent accounts of what we might call
feminist science have called for a shift in feminism’s relationship with
science. Citing a historically antagonistic relationship, they argue that
feminism needs to overcome its old “anti-science” attitudes and learn to
embrace science. There are many versions of this call for re-engagement
(Alaimo and Heckman 2008, Coole and Frost 2010, Grosz 2011, Hird
2004, Wilson 2004; see also Ahmed 2004). As Sara Giordano notes in this
special issue, readings of “anti-science” feminism imagine feminist and
scientific approaches as occupying a power-neutral relationship. Willey
(2017) argues that these accounts narrate a gendered romance, one that
begins with adversity, trudges through hard-won growth, and leaves us
with a newly “science friendly feminism” and “anti-essentialist science”
that might beat the odds yet and wind up snuggling by the proverbial
fire.1 This recent exhortation to feminists to embrace The Institution of
Science is one both of us have found less critical than their authors’
ambitions call for.
As editors, we are suspicious of the invocation of an easy
parallelism between feminism and science, especially one where
feminism is exhorted to sideline critique in order to learn from science, or
to develop a more “affectionate” relationship (Wilson 2004) with it.
Indeed, we can recover feminist genealogies in science, and
scientific/materialist genealogies in feminism, because both science and
feminism have too often emerged as monolithic overdetermined
categories that ignore the heterogeneity within. Perhaps, as
Subramaniam has argued, rather than trying to imagine that we have
buried the colonial and gendered violences of our sciences in the past,
we might instead imagine a scientific future that allows us to live with its
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ghosts—the elisions and erasures of our histories of feminism and
science (Subramaniam 2014).
At the heart of “Science Out of Feminist Theory” is an interrogation
of the term “science.” What do we mean by it? In mainstream
representations, “science” is presented as a cohesive body of disciplines
in the natural sciences that emerged in the west and focused on studying
the natural world with a unique and objective “scientific method.” Science
and technology studies (STS) has long challenged this simplistic reading.
Thomas Kuhn (1962: 42) argued that science was a “rather ramshackle
structure with little coherence among its various parts.” Scholars in STS
have increasingly viewed science as a heterogeneous body of work
created less by coherence and more by historical contingencies. Most
agree that there is no single enterprise of “science” but rather a large
variety of “special studies” that have been grouped together under this
label (Dear 2012).
Of course, as with “science,” “feminism” is not a monolithic term,
either. We have seen a wide variety of analytic frameworks produce a
cornucopia of feminisms—postcolonial feminisms, indigenous feminisms,
women of color feminisms, queer feminisms, socialist feminisms,
ecofeminisms, just to name a few. Most agree that there is no unifying
analysis that all feminists share. Thus, instead of thinking about
“feminism” and “science” as separate and known quantities in
relationship, we want to open up further space for thinking about
feminism as a site for theorizing and reconfiguring the very meanings of
science. Rather than be stuck in the proverbial traffic jam of
interdisciplinary travel, we propose excavating the diverse and eclectic
genealogies and traditions within feminist theories to reimagine what
science is and might be.
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In our CFP for “Science out of Feminist Theory,” we invited
manuscripts that might address the following questions:
* How does feminist theory help us shape the goals of inquiry—
what do we need to know about our world/s? How might we best
study these?
* Are all objects best studied by scientific methods or by the
humanities? Or are some necessarily interdisciplinary objects?
* How might feminist thought help us re-articulate what constitutes
scientific knowledge? What constitutes “usable” or “valid”
knowledge?
* How do we distribute epistemic authority on the proper objects of
science and feminism? How might they be related?
* How can feminist theories (of nature, embodiment, technology,
behavior) be conceived as scientific inquiry? (We welcome case
studies, hypothetical experiments, aligning the language of
feminist theory and science, analyses from feminist theory that
help us rearticulate scientific questions into new questions for
feminism and science)
* Explorations of the “proper “objects of feminist thought and
science
* Theorizing the idea of “feminist science”—Is it possible?
Desirable? What is it?
* What are the forms of scientific inquiry? What kinds of theories,
experiments, methods constitute scientific inquiry? Does critique
also constitute knowledge? How might feminist theory help
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reframe these questions?
* How can feminist theory allow us a more capacious definition of
science as a postcolonial, queer, feminist enterprise?
The essays we received in response to the call did not disappoint.
Indeed, we received many more abstracts than we were able to include
even as the special issue expanded to two. Some aspects of the
submissions were striking. Taken together, they raise some profound and
important questions.
A critical question that emerged was how we understand the
“proper objects” of feminism. In asking “How might scholars generate
critical theories out of scientific ones?,” Roosth and Schrader (2012)
clarify: “‘Feminist theory out of science’ does not imply that feminist
theory emerges from science. It implies, rather, that the world is already
theory all the way down.” We want to express our appreciation of the
struggle to name and describe a project that would help us to think about
feminist theory as a site for theorizing the stuff of the world, what we refer
to here as science’s proper objects. We also appreciate the impulse to
think capaciously about what constitutes “theory.” At the same time, we
want to push back on a persistent conflation of “science” with “the world”
(Willey 2016). Science is a set of disciplines and interdisciplines and their
attendant apparatuses, theories, methodologies, and practices. The
world “all the way down” is its object of study. Similarly, “culture” is
understood as the proper object of study for the humanities, and “nature”
outside its disciplinary bounds. If culture and nature are indeed entangled
(Barad 2007, Haraway 2008), we need methodological tools for
natureculture research. Our project is thus partly a critique of proper
objects (Butler 2004, Willey 2017), animated by the question: what might
it look like to imagine critical theory as a site for knowing those objects
we consider science’s domain (or even as “science” itself)?
Our approach, importantly, comes out of postcolonial science
studies and some of its core insights, including the understanding that
not all systems for making sense of science’s proper objects “count” as
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science. Science is not simply the name for knowledges of nature,
bodies, and other manifestations of microscopic to cosmic physicality. As
western colonial powers expanded, so much of knowledge across the
world was written off as unscientific, backward, pseudoscience, magical,
or more recently categorized as “alternative” or “indigenous”
knowledges. This was precisely done to demarcate the contours of a
“legitimate” “superior” knowledge called “Science.” As postcolonial
studies reinforces, Science was not just mobilized in service of colonial
agendas, but rather materialized through epistemic imperialism at the
heart of colonization. The consolidation of the authority of particular
(European) modalities and vocabularies to tell us who and what we are is
a shared foundation of naturalized Science and naturalized inequality. We
should all be concerned by the fact that while “science” is in fact a
particular set of epistemologies and methodologies, and quite a narrow
one in the scheme of things, it simultaneously occupies a status so
unproblematized that it can be conflated in critical theory with “the world
itself.”
Many scholars have tried to resolve these troubling legacies. One
important strategy in combatting epistemic imperialism has been to
reveal science as we know it as one among many “ethnosciences”
(Harding 2006) and to rescale its authority thus. This redistribution of
epistemic authority has opened doors for thinking about kitchen and
garage experimentalism (Jen 2015), science shops (Weasel 2001),
indigenous materialisms (TallBear 2017), alternate and indigenous
sciences and medicine (Nandy 1980, Shiva 1993, Viswanathan 2006), and
indeed critical theory as sites of scientific knowledge production. We are
quite alert to the risk of reinforcing the epistemic imperialism on which the
idea of ever increasing knowledge accumulation depends merely by
claiming to do science. We are also attuned to the trap of a naïve protonativism or a simplistic politics of authenticity where the past (or some
supposedly subaltern theory or practice) is sometimes unproblematically
valorized. We have each had our own struggles with articulating a sense
that the risks that inhere in claiming science are worth taking and that
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certain possibilities are opened up by going there.
In simple terms, the benefit of this redistribution is twofold: first, to
lessen the power of certain constituencies and institutional formations to
define our problems and their solutions and thus to undermine the sadly
naturalized place of profit in science (Harding 1991, Pollock 2012, Sunder
Rajan 2017); and second, to offer new ways of thinking about the objects,
problems, and solutions that science has studied. We believe that
proliferating sciences has the potential to undo rigid boundaries around
what counts and to make strange those entrenched conventions of
reduction, framing, measuring, categorizing, and decontextualizing
feminists have critiqued in science. Even those sciences least determinist
and most attuned to complexity (Pitts Taylor 2016; Subramaniam and
Willey 2016) fall into these traps—they are endemic to the positivist
epistemologies that produce them and conventionally mark the boundary
between science and myth. As Haraway (1991) argued so famously in
“The Cyborg Manifesto,” we need science, our myth. Science here is
storytelling, not separate from non-science but like those theories that
don’t count, another set of narrative resources for imagining what we are
and might become, for undergirding less violent imaginaries about
human/non-human/planetary futures. We want this proliferation in part to
provide us with a rich array of narrative resources out of which to build
these worlds and the projects that will support them.
Clearly, there is a strong materialist bent to such a project. We
want to participate in readying the ground, if you will, for a materialism
oriented to the undoing of the categories that structure our worlds, the
critique of which is at the heart of critical theory. This is in part a project
of reading critique as “science.” Feminist scholars have done a great deal
of work to trace complex histories of race, sex/gender, sexuality,
reproduction, disability and attendant concepts of beauty, intelligence,
strength, and so on. These histories, we argue, should not be read as
merely “social constructionist,” but rather also for their materialist
valances. If the destabilization of said categories is too often reduced to
the social, the re/turn to “biology” is far too often a return to these
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categories. Willey offers the concept of “biopossibility” as a substitute for
“biology” in queer feminist materialist projects oriented to undoing (Willey
2016). It is a way of exploring the materiality of a phenomenon that
acknowledges that its very intelligibility is historically and culturally
contingent.
We would like to extend that ethic of undoing not just to
entrenched scientific epistemologies, practices, and forms and to the
categories which structure our worlds, but also to the histories that have
made the study of the materiality of things restricted territory. In undoing
assumptions about what science is and what its goals might be, we hope
to open up space for thinking about feminist studies as an institutional
and conceptual space for knowledge-making that can encompass
descriptions and theories of physicality-in-context.
With this vision in mind, we sought submissions with strong critical
orientations and which offered resources for thinking about the stuff of
the world—or what it means to contribute to knowing the stuff of the
world—grounded in feminist thought. We received an exciting and rich
set of essays. Some aspects are worth noting. It was clear that feminist
STS had matured into a field where authors revealed diverse
understandings and commitments to the projects of feminism and
science, yet they shared some theoretical assumptions. To avoid
repetition, we asked authors to take these assumptions for granted. We
also asked them to join us in an experiment to try to implement a shared
lexicon to aid us collectively in holding some important conceptual
distinctions between objects and modes of inquiry. We share all of this
here, because we believe highlighting this continuity suggests some key
insights for the field. Here are the guidelines we developed:
First, we grounded these special issues on a few “givens.”
Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) is now a visible field,
albeit diverse and porous. The contributions of FSTS and STS over the
last many decades have also solidified the claim that science and
scientific knowledges must always be located within their historical,
cultural, and political contexts. There is no neutral “Science” that escapes
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being implicated in various political and social projects; a myth Haraway
calls the “God Trick” (Haraway 1988). By the same token, there is no
unmediated “nature” out there. Anything we might say about the stuff of
the world is mediated by observation, interpretation, and language and
other mechanisms of representation. These assumptions are a starting
place for this volume—we believe these are well-established claims by
now. We have asked all the authors not to rehearse these arguments
again. In particular, we shared with authors our conviction that we do
need more accounts about “how” science is implicated in various
projects, but not that it is.
Second, we noticed that different authors used the terms
“Science,” “science,” “biology,” “body/ies,” “matter,” and “materiality”
differently. To aid the reader, and in the hopes of forging a more precise
working lexicon that might inform methodologies for thinking science out
of feminist theory, we developed suggestions for a consistent usage of
these terms. We have found Sandra Harding’s distinction between
“Science” (capital S) and the world of sciences (lower case s) excluded
from its definition so fruitful ourselves for imagining science out of
feminist theory, we would like to extend that logic here to other
frequently-used terms implicated in this same epistemological resignifying tension. Thus, when we use the words “Science” or phrases
like “the biosciences,” we mean knowledge that is produced through the
legitimizing apparatus of various institutions, approved by reviewers and
published (or legitimated by patents), i.e., this is “official” knowledge.
Someone can produce scientific knowledge in their garage or kitchen, but
not “Scientific” knowledge. For the latter, we use “sciences“—small s,
and plural—to mean knowledges that are scientific by all measures
except that they are not authenticated by the official apparatus of
science. In other words, sciences refers to vast and diverse disciplinary
and extra-disciplinary contributions to knowing our worlds. We aim to
avoid slippages among Scientific disciplines, methods, and practices and
science’s proper objects: i.e. bodies, matter, nature, etc. We can make
these efforts visible by extending the use of capital and lowercase to
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these other terms. Biology is an especially slippery one, as it refers both
to a discipline (hence the “-ology”) and to the “stuff” itself. In our writing,
we suggest that we use the capital-B Biology to refer to the disciplinary
field of Science. Use lowercase-b biology/biological to refer to the
processes of bodily and natural explications. Similarly, “Nature” and “The
Body” refer to hegemonic accounts of particular objects of Science. In
contrast “bodies” and “nature” can be sites that are opened up to more
natureculture understandings. We seek specificity when naming the stuff
of our worlds—from the molecular to the epi-phenomenal—and try to
avoid the disciplining disciplinary traps in which the historic and
persistent division of nature and culture has left us moored. This might
mean extending these logics further to make visible the distance between
the objects as imagined by Science and as opened up by science out of
feminist theory (e.g. “Climate Change,” “The Fetus,” etc.). If authors
invent additional terms, they have defined them in the piece. If they have
used these terms in some other specified way, they have explained
carefully the terms’ referent and the logics behind their usage.
And on the matter of matter/the material/materialism: “Matter” has
emerged as an object for feminist thought in ways that often take for
granted what types of representations give us access to it. Scientific
ways of knowing are consistently presumed to offer more direct and
reliable access to matter, or materiality, than other ways of
knowing. Hence feminist materialism is sometimes undertheorized,
presumptively meaning feminism as a beneficiary of Scientific Data. We
resist this a priori assumption, and encouraged all authors to be specific
about what sort of evidence they are drawing on to invoke matter or to
articulate a materialist approach, and to steer clear of vague claims about
Matter's importance or marginalization in feminist or critical theory,
etc. These types of claims, we believe, reinforce a hierarchy of
disciplinary knowledge-making practices antithetical to the project of
imaging science out of feminist theory. In keeping with the
capital/lowercase strategy, we use “Matter” if we are referring to the
“stuff” as mediated/represented by Scientific Data and “matter” if we are
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advancing some other more capacious definition.
Our aim, we hope it is clear, was not to prohibit nor prescribe, but
to make visible our collective processes in order to generate and
proliferate methodological possibilities for science out of feminist theory.
We see feminist thought as ripe with under-theorized, under-utilized
concepts, lexicons, archives, data, etc. Each of the authors in the two
special issues contributes something valuable to the project of culling
resources that might enable our imagining of new accounts of our
naturecultural worlds and new ways of describing and understanding
those knowledge projects. We—feminist science studies scholars—must
learn to think of ourselves not only as critics or students of science, but
as makers of scientific knowledge. In response to our call, the authors of
these essays do this in diverse ways, opening up new questions,
epistemologies, and methods for doing science and, in so doing,
troubling the concept itself. Out of their combined efforts, we can begin
to imagine feminist studies as a site for kinds of scientific knowledge
production that can transform the political and epistemological
landscapes of debates about a monolithic “science.” What sciences
would we put on our proverbial boots to march for? What worlds do their
varied knowledge projects come out of and lend themselves to
materializing?
This first of our two special issues suggests that something we
might call “Feminism’s Sciences” exist and are ripe to be reckoned with.
Venla Oikkonen’s essay makes a profound contribution to thinking about
the methodological possibilities of feminism’s sciences as experiments in
transdisciplinarity. By reading population genetics alongside queer
theorizations of temporality, she demonstrates how temporality and
belonging can help us to rethink the Genographic Project. Importantly, in
putting these concepts forth as transdisciplinary objects, Oikkonen
models a strategy for putting two epistemologically incommensurate
approaches into dialogue to rethink the a priori assumptions embedded
in each and to yield new natureculture insights. Such an approach
contributes both to “harm reduction” given the pervasiveness of
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appropriations of a neo-Darwinian evolutionism and to the proliferation of
queerer stories about what we are.
Pratistha Bhattarai interrogates what “source code” actually is,
demonstrating how racial and colonial imaginaries are intricately bound
into the logics of algorithms. Her essay follows in the long tradition of
looking behind the numbers and reinforces a central insight of feminist
STS that there is no neutral position, all science, especially and including
numbers are bound within matrices of power. Thinking from feminist
theory, Bhattarai offers a Spivakian lens that allows us to see a path to
developing more deliberative, antiracist algorithms that challenge racist
policies in the guise of neutral science. Bhattarai provides us with a
detailed case study for operationalizing the critical insight that values are
embedded in modes and means of measurement. That feminism’s
sciences might code for our own values is both a literal and metaphorical
provocation.
Chikako Takeshita beautifully weaves in a naturecultural vision by
bringing together feminist critique of representations of reproductive
bodies with recent scientific work on pregnancy and multispecies
thinking. Disrupting the pervasiveness of mother/fetus binary logics, and
at the same time unsettling the a priori gendering of the pregnant body,
Takeshita suggests the model of holobiant creating holobiant as a way of
rethinking pregnancy and upsetting the parameters of feminist debate on
fetal politics. Her contribution powerfully demonstrates how bringing a
feminist lens to scientific data can enable us to develop frameworks to
produce not a normative body but more words, richer vocabularies,
manifold sciences, and thus more capacious forms and understandings
of embodiment.
Harlan Weaver’s essay demonstrates how sites of “science”
function—drawing together bioscientific knowledge alongside thick
descriptions and hands-on affective relationships with pets. Drawing on
theories of intersectionalities, Weaver unpacks the “fuzzy” science of dog
training to reveal racialized dimensions of human/animal interactions.
Locating these interactions within racialized histories of dog-care, Weaver
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reminds us that paying attention to histories and sociologies of the
“objects” of science can help us produce a more reflexive, ethical, and
deliberative feminist science. Weaver’s account of the fuzzy sciences of
feminist shelter work also provides a model for thinking about “fuzzying”
as a way we engage and transform Scientific knowledges in our everyday
lives. This lens opens up space for reading dogs and the humans with
whom they interact as participants in the making of knowledges about
their own nature.
Thinking the “fuzzy” science of the dog training world of Weaver
alongside Sharra Vostral’s historical account of the Science of
menstruation demonstrates the elisions and erasures that render one
unscientific and the second scientific. Vostral describes the campaign of
Our Bodies Ourselves to standardize absorbency rates in tampons in the
aftermath of Toxic Shock Syndrome. Vostral ably demonstrates the
systematic ways that feminists developed innovative scientific techniques
to better measure tampon absorbency to provide data for tampon
labeling. Yet, the total resistance of the tampon industry to these
innovations has resulted in continued imprecision and potentially harmful
practices. This episode demonstrates the continued privileging of profits
over safety. A recent campaign points out that we still do not know the
materials in tampons, and tampon makers continue to resist any
accountability (Rabin 2017). Vostral cautions us to continue to monitor
the many potentially harmful products that continue to shape our lives,
and the importance of feminist STS in recovering these histories. The
piece provides a powerful reminder that it is not accountability to a Truth
ideal, but rather to communities, that renders more reliable empirical
data. Such histories help us to understand not only why Science cannot
be trusted out of hand, but why we need feminist sciences that don’t
“leave biology to scientists” who are not held accountable (Birke 2000).
Sara Giordano challenges feminists to develop a more nuanced
and principled position in challenges to Science. If feminist STS has
revealed anything, it is that that the apparatus of science has been
nourished and shaped by its colonial, imperialist, racist, sexist, ableist
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and heterosexist legacies. She urges us to develop a richer vocabulary
for telling stories of our engagements with science and our affective
relationships to it, accounts that do not succumb to the romance of an
overdetermined privileged Science. Rather, feminists must continue to
build spaces and imaginaries of the sciences. Giordano challenges
feminists to revalue feminist teaching and to approach the work of critical
science literacy as a “re-writing” project that is itself productive of new
scientific knowledges.
Finally, one of the critical insights of feminist science studies is that
genres of writing are epistemological tools themselves and enable and
disable particular kinds of learning and understanding (Subramaniam
2014). To this end, we have embraced Catalyst’s multiple formats to
strengthen the special issues by inviting and incorporating additional
pieces. Through these pieces, we hope to animate the generativity of the
larger project of “Science out of Feminist Theory.”
Michelle Murphy’s splendid plenary lecture at the 4S meetings in
Barcelona in 2016 speaks directly to the larger theme of science out of
feminist theory in asking to what extent embodied knowledge can be “a
form of science and technology by other means?” In chronicling the
cycles of chemical violence, Murphy explores alter embodiment, Alterlife
that is both a site already severely damaged by the ravages of
environmental toxicity but also one with the potential for other
possibilities and futures. As Murphy argues, “Alterlife, as potential,
challenges us to learn with a thick archive and dense present of projects
of resistance and resurgence. It is also an invitation to consider what
infrastructures and concepts have to be dismantled to make room for
another way of being and knowing to emerge.”
In the Interview section, Rachel Lee introduces and curates a
wonderful set of four interviews with scientists doing field and bench
science. Lee’s interviews are encouraging and hopeful about the legacies
of feminist science and technology studies, as well as thoughtful about
the challenges on how to foster greater diversity of personnel and
interdisciplinarity in the sciences. In the interviews, scientists show us
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that some of the key questions that have animated feminists, such as the
importance of interrogating a binary sex/gender system, incorporating
ethics and social justice as an important and legitimate part of science
and scientific thinking, and nurturing a new generation of more diverse
scientists - are all elements that are embraced by some scientists as an
important part of the scientific endeavor. The narratives are rich, complex
and nuanced giving us a window into the challenges of the working lives
of scientists today.
The Lab Meeting format brings together individuals to informally
discuss a common question or project. Here, an interdisciplinary group of
scholars reflect on the Black Lives Matter Movement. The collection is a
wonderful display of the diversity, at times even incommensurable and
contradictory impulses of various (inter)discplines. For example, some of
the scientists in this section use feminism to promote an equity project
focused on the need to recruit and retain more black scientists in the
scientific enterprise. Yet others use their standpoint to critique Science,
and the lack of support for and attention to Scientific investigations into
questions and foci that impact black lives. Yet others take on a more
radical suggestion that living in and understanding black communities
should be central to anti-racist investigations of science. Some of the
authors argue that one cannot just produce health variables, diagnoses,
protocols or solutions based on the experiences of elite white populations
and expect them to serve everyone. There are no unmediated
“variables”— the science/medicine that we need has to emerge from and
ultimately help a diverse groups of populations. Indeed, the scientists and
health activists speak powerfully to how the questions they believe
should be important, are not questions that they can possibly study as
tenure track academics who need funding for their work. The “silences”
as these scholars describe them are chilling. The diverse voices in these
Lab meetings also highlight feminists’ varying trust in the biosciences and
the scientific method to solve “our” problems. For some it is a question of
more resources, asking different questions, and for yet others nothing
short of a thorough rethinking of the biosciences will suffice.
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(1)
In the Critical Perspectives section, six scholars offer us a rich
collection of commentaries on decolonization and decoloniality. In their
wonderful introduction to the collection, Kristina Lyons, Juno Salazar
Parreñas, and Noah Tamarkin insightfully remark that “working against
colonialism, imperialism, and white heteropatriarchal supremacy takes
many languages and vocabularies.” Of particular importance, all the
authors remind us that understanding colonialism was/is not a singular
project. Rather, different continents and countries have very different
histories and it is important that we recognize this heterogeneity in our
theorizing colonial and postcolonial projects. They reinforce the idea of
“interface” as a critical term that allows us to “teeter” on the boundaries
of STS, inside and outside, belonging and not. These analyses coming
out of investigations on the decolonial and decoloniality very much
reinforces the “fuzziness,” the contingency, the partiality, the multiplicity,
the heterogeneity that emerge in the rest of the essays. The importance
of porous borders and boundaries is an important thread that runs
through this collection.
Finally, in the News in Focus section, Mitali Thakor and Stephen
Molldrem reflect on the emerging field of Queer Feminist Science Studies
(see Cipolla et al 2017). Their commentary reminds us of the multiple rich
genealogies by which we could construct a QFSS. Newly emerging fields
are ripe for understanding the complex and fortuitous paths through
which fields emerge, the “thinkers” that come to be celebrated as the
“core,” and the canon that emerges as key. Official histories and
genealogies eventually follow. Claire Hemming’s (2010) wonderful Why
Stories Matter is an important reminder of the importance of the stories
we tell about our disciplines. We would do well to heed Thakor and
Molldrem to develop and teach more rich genealogies for feminist
science studies as well. Rebecah Pulsifer's book review of Teaching with
Feminist Materialisms explores some of the contours of the debates on
feminism and new materialism.
Fuzzying the line between critiquing and
researching/experimenting, asking better questions and posing new
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(1)
“experiments”—thought experiments and wet ones—based on what we
know is wrong, being willing to take risks and be accountable to the
critiques of our peers: this is the work of feminism’s sciences being done
and heralded here. Even as FSTS has developed such a rich
understanding of science as text, we have struggled to read the textual
approaches of critical theory as science. We think there is much potential
here and we invite you to read these two special issues together as a
collective ensemble of scientific theories, interventions, claims and
quandaries. We invite you to mine them for conceptual and
methodological tools to extend the projects of science out of feminist
theory.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Editorial Board of Catalyst for their enthusiastic
support for this special issue. Thanks to our wonderful contributors for
working with us. Our gratitude to David Serlin and Mara Mills for their
insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this introduction. We are also
deeply grateful to Poyao Huang for his superb editorial management of
this double issue. Many thanks to Nora Tataryan, Rianka Singh, Patrick
Keilty, and Michelle Murphy for their superb work in publishing the double
issue. Thanks also to Mara Mills, David Serlin, Poyao Huang and Harris
Kornstein for their extensive editorial work in for this special issue.
Notes
1
See Willey (forthcoming) section titled “A Tale of Two Paradigm Shifts:
Or, the Romance of Anti-Essentialist Science and Science-Friendly
Feminism”
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Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3(1)
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Bios
Banu Subramaniam is Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Trained as a plant
evolutionary biologist, she seeks to engage the feminist studies of
science in the practices of experimental biology. She is author of Ghost
Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of
Diversity (University of Illinois Press 2014), and coeditor of Feminist
Science Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001) and Making
Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (Rowman and Littlefield,
2005). Spanning the humanities, social, and natural sciences, she works
at the intersections of biology, women’s studies, ethnic studies and
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postcolonial studies. Her current work focuses on the xenophobia and
nativism that haunt invasive plant species, and the relationship of science
and religious nationalism in India.
Angela Wiley is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality
Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works at the
interstices of queer feminist theory, feminist science studies, and
sexuality studies. She is author of Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of
Science and the Possibilities of Biology (Duke University Press 2016) and
co-editor of Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (University of
Washington Press, forthcoming). Her current work explores genealogies
of materialism in feminist thought.