Cartographies of Feminist Science Studies

The master’s lab

These are important times for feminist science studies. Feminist science approaches have proliferated in the past decade, as more scholars working in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) have undertaken a broad range of engagements with matter, technology, climate, nonhuman animacy, ecology, toxicity, and embodiment. In recent years, this broadening of scholarly practice has worked in tandem with a proliferation of tenure-track searches in feminist science studies (FSS), as well as the launch of Catalyst, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to feminist engagements with science and technology, and the Feminist Technoscience imprint at University of Washington Press.

Although it can be tempting to narrate this wave of activity as a “turn” from a formerly “science-phobic” or “science-deficient” feminism toward a newly “science-friendly” feminism—one that embraces data and “the body” in new ways—Angela Willey cautions us against this overly hasty reading (Undoing Monogamy). Not only, she argues, does such a move risk erasing the deeper genealogies of feminist science critique, but it also elides a critical engagement with the disciplinary norms and institutional contexts that position scientific data as representing unmediated truth about “the world” and “the body.” Willey writes, “The increasingly axiomatic claim that we (feminists and/or humanists) must engage with ‘science’ in order to bring the material body into our knowledge-making takes for granted that scientific data is the source of uniquely direct knowledges of vital bodies. It is my contention that we cannot productively engage data without explicit attention to the politics of science” (Willey 21; emphasis in original). In fact, Willey’s call to engage with “the politics of science” and to challenge the myth of the sciences’ “uniquely direct” and unmediated knowledge about bodies and worlds is reflected across many of the rising channels of feminist science inquiry, including the articles that comprise this issue.

Along with challenging overly hasty accounts of feminism’s lack of science literacy, and of the institutional sciences’ unique status as bearer of capital-T “Truth,” feminist science scholars have challenged the broader field of WGSS to bring the tools and insights of feminist thought to bear on the worlds that shape scientific knowledge and practice, and to reject what Helen Longino calls the “pernicious” idea of a “value-free science” (60). From examining the norms of scientific professionalization (including the training of women, trans*, disabled, indigenous, and people of color scientists), to unpacking the colonial legacies embedded in hegemonic notions of the “universal woman” and the “universal body,” contemporary feminist science scholars invite us to reconsider the many extant and possible relationships among feminism and science in novel, exciting, and creative ways (Giordano; Harding; Pitts-Taylor; Subramaniam, Ghost Stories; Subramaniam and Roy). They also ask us to examine the contexts of knowledge production in the sciences and, crucially, to reimagine feminist theory as the site for creating more democratic, decolonial, coalitional, queer, and antiracist approaches to scientific inquiry and experimentation (Giordano; Subramaniam and Willey). As Banu Subramaniam notes, inclusion initiatives in the sciences have historically been dominated by “strategies to include women (that) have been governed by uninspired, regimented, and conformist notions about the conditions that foster a career in science” (Ghost Stories 213). These initiatives have largely failed to engage feminist, critical race, disability, and decolonial critiques of the sciences’ extractive relationship to indigenous knowledge, communities of color, embodied difference, and the other-than-human world. And they have done so while attempting to safeguard a “pipeline” of professionalization that associates success with hierarchical, patriarchal, and normative approaches toward scientific inquiry, personhood, and knowledge production—what Subramaniam calls “the spark” in our interview in this issue (Subramaniam, “Moored Metamorphoses”; Fox; Giordano; Subramaniam and Rivers). Sara Giordano reminds us that this process has often placed feminist scientists’ affective attachment to, or “love” of, the institutional sciences in tension with feminist commitments to redistributive justice and analyses of the relationships among power and knowledge production (9–10). And if we examine the sciences’ communitarian elements, including the love of “doing science,” in light of Miranda Joseph’s insight that community functions as a supplement to capital, we can see how the sense of belonging that is mediated by abstract and hegemonic notions of capital-S “Science” serves to shore up and facilitate the same commercial regimes that locate the sciences as sites of multinational investment, innovation, and profit.

The emergence of the March for Science in the past few years offers a neat illustration of the necessity of bringing a feminist critique to bear on the norms and omissions that are naturalized within the practice and reception of the institutional sciences—especially as they pertain to the abstract and hegemonic status of Science as an ostensibly “neutral” vessel of universal truth (Harding).

Defiance for science

As a global movement that seeks to respond to institutional attacks on the funding and democratic applications of scientific research, the March for Science articulates itself as making “a diverse, nonpartisan. call for science that upholds the common good, and (advocates) for political leaders and policymakers to enact evidence-based policies in the public interest” (March For Science, “Our Mission”). The March’s cornerstone event is a yearly set of coordinated, global protests. And the organization has maintained a sustained critique of both the United States’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and of the rollback of environmental justice gains at the US Environmental Protection Agency (“March for Science Statement”). In popular discourse, the March often locates its object of defense as the abstract, hegemonic “Science.” Popular protest signs hosted on the March’s website proclaim “Science Not Silence,” “Science is Real,” and “Defiance for Science,” employing a curious rhetorical strategy that positions the March’s “defiance” in service of an abstract but affectively magnetic “Science,” while leaving intact and unexamined the internal dynamics of hierarchy, extraction, and exclusion that shape the present norms within the institutional sciences, as well as the racializing, colonial, and normativizing histories of violence, extraction, and marginalization that have been crucial to the development of scientific authority and methodology.¹ Despite being a self-consciously political movement, the March’s organizers give little focus to the politics of liberation, equity, decoloniality, and justice beyond supporting for diverse aspirants seeking employment in the institutional sciences. And the March’s attempts to offer a “nonpartisian” response to the fiery rhetoric of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and, more recently, “energy dominance” often manifests as a doubling-down on Science’s rarefied epistemic status as neutral or “value-free” bearer of “truth.”

Despite its present orientation, it is worth noting here that the March for Science initially emerged as something resembling a feminist science gesture. In a tweet published on January 28, 2017, just four days after the national Women’s March of 2017, the March for Science organizers stated “Colonization, racism, immigration, native rights, sexism, ableism, queer-, trans-, intersex-phobia, and econ justice are scientific issues” (Atkin). This initial gesture of structural critique and radical inclusion brought prompt and forceful criticism from senior scientists and bestselling authors Jerry Coyne (U Chicago) and Steven Pinker (Harvard U), who admonished the organizers for critiquing the sciences’ hegemonic and colonial norms. In a tweet published the morning of January 29, Pinker lamented that the March’s organizers’ had “compromised” their goals “with anti-science, PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric” (@sapinker, “Scientists’ March”). Facing criticism from such influential sources, the March organizers removed their initial tweet and gained conciliatory praise from Pinker, who commended them for discarding the “distractions” of their decolonial and liberatory commitments (@sapinker, “Glad to See”). Despite this concession, the diversity statement posted on the March’s website retained a commitment to inclusivity and solidarity, albeit in muted tones. An excerpt from the statement hosted on February 2, 2017, and retrieved using the Wayback Internet Archive, reads as follows:

At the March for Science, we are committed to highlighting, standing in solidarity with, and acting as allies with black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, indigenous, Muslim, non-Christian, non-religious, women, people with disabilities, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex scientists and science advocates. We must work to make science available to everyone and encouraging individuals of all backgrounds to pursue science careers, especially in advanced degrees and positions. A diverse group of scientists produces increasingly diverse research, which broadens, strengthens, and enriches scientific inquiry, and therefore, our understanding of the world. (March for Science, “Diversity”)

Although couched in a more conventional commitment to supporting those “pursuing science careers, especially in advanced degrees and positions,” the statement’s commitment to “standing in solidarity with, and acting as allies with” a broad coalition of stakeholders continued to draw controversy even after the initial 2017 event attracted an estimated 1.07 million participants worldwide (Atkin; Young; March for Science, “The Science Behind”).

At present, little residue of the March’s initial commitment to decolonial, structural, and liberatory critique remains. The March’s current Mission Statement reads, “We advocate for policies enabling equal access to education, scientific careers, and scientific benefits, and work to support increasingly equitable scientific spaces. We amplify the work and voices of underrepresented scientists and members of underrepresented communities” (March For Science, “Our Mission”). Although this revision continues to gesture toward supporting diverse scientists, it discards the organizers’ initial commitments in favor of a moderate, or “nonpartisan,” agenda that seeks expanded access without troubling prevailing norms of scientific professionalization and practice.

This foundational tête-à-tête, and the drawdown of liberatory aims that followed, illustrates both the challenges and the urgency of maintaining a feminist critique of the epistemic authority and political leverage that traditionally trained scientists and their institutions can exert when policing the borders of scientific practice and possibility. After all, we cannot expect the master’s lab to dismantle the master’s research-industrial complex. Nor, for that matter, does that lab have the tools we need to craft feminist and social justice visions of scientific inquiry: visions that reckon with the sciences’ co-constitutive histories of colonialism, militarization, eugenics, extractive economy, asymmetrical development, and the medicalization of difference.

Feminist science futures

In a recent special issue of Catalyst, Banu Subramaniam and Angela Willey challenge us to discard the common-sense notions about the “relationship” between feminism and science, in favor of a naturecultural vision that instead seeks “to open up further space for thinking about feminism as a site for theorizing and reconfiguring the very meanings of science” (Subramaniam and Willey 4). As we experiment with new visions of feminist science, Sara Giordano’s call for developing a “critical science literacy” has much to offer us. For Giordano, a critical science literacy both challenges the institutional sciences’ epistemic authority—by “failing” to reproduce the hegemonic norms of scientific professionalization—and it also reimagines possible relationships among institutional science and racialized, queer, indigenous, and otherwise marginalized communities, which have historically served as sites of extraction and experimentation in the creation of scientific knowledge (Giordano). Building on Sylvia Wynter’s work on the coloniality of prevailing regimes of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom, Giordano describes this critical literacy as working across two axes. The first involves “expanding access to a kind of knowledge that is traditionally kept out of the hands of marginalized groups,” and the second involves “expanding or changing the definition of science to include (feminist/queer/social justice) approaches as part of ‘doing science’” (Giordano 13). Along with sharing resonances with the March for Science’s initial gesture toward decoloniality, liberation, and feminist and queer worldmaking, Giordano’s call for critical science literacy asks us to reimagine the possibilities of feminist and queer science, both as practices of experimentation and as an orientation toward coalition and the redistribution of resources.

If we return to the recent waves of institutional interest in feminist science studies with this context in view, it becomes clear that we are working in a particularly critical and generative moment in feminist science studies. Not, as some might argue, because feminism has “finally” reckoned with the sciences, but, instead, because current trends in feminist science studies are poised to revise and expand the ways that WGSS departments train students, hire faculty, and conceive of the field more generally. As a creative and exploratory orientation toward feminist science-making, FSS asks us to be more ambitious, more creative, more self-reflective, and more interdisciplinary in our praxis. It cautions us to cultivate a more refined awareness of the sciences’ exclusions, horizons of thought, and legacies of violence. And it calls us to consider what it would take, and what it would mean, for FSS to become a core part of undergraduate training in WGSS, as well as what it would mean for WGSS to become a site of training, research, and professionalization for those scientists who “fall out” of the pipeline of professionalization in the institutional sciences. These are some of the questions that inspired this issue, and they are some of the very questions that the articles included here tackle in creative, inspiring, and innovative ways.

The call for this issue solicited work along two axes. The first, more-conventional stream was titled “Gender, Science, and the Practice of Culture,” and it sought work that brought an FSS approach to naturecultural inquiry. The second stream, “Feminist Science Studies and the University Classroom,” solicited “pedagogy and praxis pieces that attend to the goals, opportunities, and challenges of integrating feminist science studies into the gender and sexuality studies classroom” (Rivers). Although there are some pieces here that tend toward one stream or the other, I was delighted to find that the majority of submissions worked across both categories, modeling experimentation in research, pedagogy, citation style, and collaborative inquiry.

The issue begins with Gabriela Méndez-Cota’s compelling account of how decades of structural violence and the apparatuses of neoliberal feminism have given rise to “gender and science” initiatives in Mexico that aim to bring more women in the sciences without troubling the institutional dynamics of knowledge production, unequal access, and structural violence. Along with staging a sustained conversation among cultural studies, Latin American studies, and feminist science studies, her piece closes with a compelling analysis of ongoing collaborations among Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars, citizen stakeholders, and forensic anthropologists, who are charting a new course for FSS in Mexico through their creative and collaborative responses to the structural violence of forced disappearances.

The issue’s second article, authored by Sarah Brown, offers a self-reflective analysis of Brown’s experiences teaching Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar within the scientific, historical, literary, and pharmaceutical contexts of depression studies. Along with offering a creative and innovative approach to teaching depression and The Bell Jar, Brown’s feminist science pedagogy is attentive to clinical histories of diagnosis, treatment, and harm that have shaped popular thinking about depression, and which complicate her students’ reactions to what Brown calls a “post-pharma pedagogy” of feminist science analysis.

Rachel Fox’s work comes next, and in it she brings a feminist science and fat studies approach to analyzing the BBC documentary Obesity: A Post-Mortem. Along with tracing the legal, historical, and cultural conditions of possibility that informed the film’s creation, Fox’s article offers a trenchant examination of the film’s use of scientific and medical authority to abject fatness as an “unnatural” and inhuman state embodiment.

Fox’s article is followed by a conversation between Banu Subramaniam and myself, in which we discuss the current institutional conditions that shape feminist science studies practice in the university. Throughout our conversation, Subramaniam offers her perspective on topics that range from the politics of professionalization, publication, and promotion, to the integration of feminist science practice into the WGSS classroom, including her use of “fictional science” writing as a form of feminist pedagogy.

This conversation is followed by Cyd Cippola’s pathbreaking reflection on the challenges and triumphs of teaching feminist technosciences. Along with locating tinkering and crafting within the broader context of feminist praxis, Cippola’s piece reflects on the development of her feminist technoscience pedagogy. The result is an insightful and engaging work that incorporates examples from Cippola’s lab sessions alongside excerpts from student writing, and that testifies to the importance of practice and failure in the feminist science classroom.

The issue’s penultimate article is an exceptionally creative and ambitious piece, whose coauthors reflect on an institutional collaboration among participants in UC Davis’s graduate course, “Feminist Science and Democracy,” and Sharena Thomas, the director of People’s Community Medics—a community survival organization in Oakland, California that trains community members to serve as first-responders to gunshot wounds. Along with locating People’s Medics within a longer history of black activism, self-determination, and survival, this piece offers a compelling and self-reflective analysis of the challenges and opportunities that characterize the authors’ attempts to leverage the institutional resources of the university toward a coalitional, social justice ends. The result is an analytically savvy and compelling examination of how the science shop model can serve as a feminist vehicle for redistributing medical and scientific knowledge toward democratic and liberatory ends.

This issue’s final piece, by Ashton Wesner, offers a unique account of Wesner’s sustained collaboration with the students and faculty of the jumping spider mating lab at UC Berkeley. Wesner begins by analyzing the anthropocentric and heteropatriarchical framings that dominate popular representations of jumping spider mating behavior in science media. And she moves on to place this popular context in conversation with a series of reading-and-discussion partnerships she developed with the Elias spider mating lab. Along with modeling an innovative approach to feminist science inquiry and interdisciplinary collaboration, Wesner’s piece charts novel territory in feminist practice that engages with questions of queer ecology, interdepartmental collaboration, and genres of scholarly practice and publication.

The breadth of topics and foci in this issue reflect the many and various possibilities that emerge from feminist science research and practice. Along with bringing a feminist lens to the “politics of science,” they model a commitment to feminist futures that seek to understand, in Donna Haraway’s framing, “how things work, who is in the action, what might be possible, and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each other less violently” (7). Taken together, they offer a broad and compelling array of feminist science laboratories to think in and with. And they chart novel directions of inquiry that encourage us to be more ambitious, creative, collaborative, and experimental as we explore the possibilities and futures made visible through feminist science.

Notes

¹ See, for example, Cippola, et. al.; Hamilton, Subramaniam, and Willey; Terry and Urla; Stern; Snorton; Subramaniam, Ghost Stories; Wyer, et al.