Reassembling Gender: On the Immanent Politics of Gendering Apparatuses of Bodily Production in Science

Abstract

Arguing that new feminist materialist work has insufficiently attended to how gender is differently materialized and embodied in practices with non-human others, this article examines ethnographically what genderings come to matter in the knowledge-making practices of mass spectrometry and peer review in a Czech research laboratory. The article returns to Donna Haraway's analytics of the ‘apparatus of bodily production’ and its extension by Karen Barad as a productive device for tracing the situational making and unmaking of gender in specific human–technology assemblages and the sedimenting histories of such intra-actions. Through a triple movement of disassembling, contextualizing and reassembling particular embodiments, the author brings unstable, implicit and absent genderings, and their affective textures, affordances and valuations to the fore, including the corporeal orientations associated with enterprising adrenalin-driven masculinity and denigrated forms of embodiment such as shame and defeat. The article shows how these (de)genderings render present tensions and exclusions in prevailing apparatuses of knowledge production and pose questions of responsibility.

Keywords:

• apparatus of bodily production
• gender
• human–technology encounters
• peer review
• failure
• affect

Notes

1 Earlier feminist materialisms include socialist and Marxist feminist work on women's (re)productive practices, and their centrality for patriarchal and capitalist formations and for entailing alternative possibilities of social organization (see, for example, Delphy 1980; Hartsock 1983; Kuhn and Wolpe 1978), as well as writings on the materiality of writing, affect and masculinist modes of discourse which can work to generate other possible modes of knowing and being (see, for example, Anzaldúa 1981; Irigaray 1985; Lorde 1984).

2 For example, gender is no longer a key word indexed in some of the recent anthologies and monographs (e.g. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Grosz, 2005; Haraway, 2008).

3 The study investigated contexts and cultures of knowledge-production practices in the social and natural sciences from a gender and geopolitical perspective (see www.knowing.soc.cas.cz), and was funded under the 6th European Union Framework Program (SAS-CT-2005-017617).

4 Hirschauer and Mol have posited that the sex of a scientist is differently constituted in situated interactions with other scientists, instruments and disciplines (Hirschauer and Mol 1995: 375).

5 In order to protect anonymity, pseudonyms are used throughout the text.

6 As Marek, the group leader, put it: ‘In science, of course, the general attitude is still that women cannot bring the same performance as men … It's never said, but it's somewhere in the background’ (Interview, 13 August 2008).

7 The Institute's formula for internal evaluation weighted publications by assigning values to journal impact factor and citations adjusted by the position and number of authors and research teams.

8 In a similar vein, Traweek has observed that the enterprising masculinities generated in high-energy physics are haunted by distinct anxieties, such as the fear of losing time or of not continuing to make significant contributions (Traweek 1988).