Metaphorizing Science Studies

Anne Dalke and Liz McCormack
"Moored Metamorphoses"
Tri-Co Science Studies Group, 2/21/11

I. en route to our revised course on
"Gender, Information, Science and Technology,"
we attended a Mellon23 Workshop on "Feminism and Science"
@ Scripps in January,
and garnered (among other things) Subramaniam's 2009 article in Signs,
"Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies"

II. our plan this evening is to use that essay as a way to
a) locate our own shared project and
b) invite you to talk together about
how it applies to (explicates or interrogates??)
work you all are doing in science and science studies

III. we'll close with some metaphorizing, and talk a little
about how/why that might work as a teaching tool
_________
I.  Reading/talking notes for Subramaniam's article
field began w/ theoretical critique of the sciences,
then took off in numerous directions/lack of consensus
sciences have proven resistant to feminist intervention:
still surrounded in clock of "pure science," objectivity,
they claim an" epistemic purity": unbiased, apolitical, value free
her punch line: feminism can change science if it is willing to change itself
she gets to this through three laborious stages:

I. History: "moorings"
1) what it means to be a woman in science
(early, undertheorized work; best efforts in curriculum transformation)

2) fundamental critiques of science (w/ 6 themes:
* questioning presumed objectivity/value neutrality (critique of power, esp. in biological sciences: embeddedness of gender relations, biological determinism, science of difference, entrenched practice of reifying bodily differences)
* raising concerns about the reduction of women's bodies to reproductive capacities
(analyzing the oppressive/liberatory possibilities of reproductive technologies)
* attending to gendered images, language, metaphors (=cultural and visual studies of science)
* challenging boundaries between nature and culture
(re-imagining the world as a system of "naturecultures,"
reintegrating science w/ community, environment, activism)
* examining the scientific-industrial complex
(identifying science's embeddedness in the economy,
tracing the hegemony of science to circuits of global capital)
* raising questions about practice of objectivity,
its ability to produce value-free knowledge
(move to imagining new knowledge grounded in alternate formulations/feminist methodologies:
"situated knowledges, social knowledge, strong objectivity, agential realism")

3) analyzing scientific culture and practices
* Traweek: "the culture of no culture"
* mythology of science a historical, genealogical production
* shaped by colonial expansion, confronting alternate knowledge systems
* all this work nation bound (U.S.-centric context)

II. Present: "metamorphoses"
1) profound loss as field shifted away from women in science 
* move from "pipelines" to "politics" and "power":
* persistent culture of martyrdom in "gender equity projects,"
with the leaks, not the pipe, seen as the problem

2) still grounded in biological sciences
(w/ some focus on consequences of technological innovation)
* limited/problematic ideas of both feminism and science:
both must be understood in the plural
* liberal feminist politics aim to level the playing field,
but systemic inequities are deeper than individual discrimination
* need to better articulate liberatory politics of feminist science studies,
broaden idea of study beyond binary gender formulations
(Karen Barad's account of material-discursive practices)

3) gender still theorized as unproblematic, universal
(w/ few intersectional analyses of race/ethnicity/class/sexuality/nationality/colonialism)
* science naturalized discourses re: group inferiority
* need to understand race and gender as constructed, intersecting, relational
* race erased in macro world of social policy,
as it is made more vivid in micro world as a genetic category
* poised to explicate intersectionality:
how/when did biological categories of difference emerge?
how translated into social categories of difference?

III. Imagines a Future: "unmoorings"
significant move from feminist critiques of science to feminist science studies,
but feminists have not yet embraced the  transformative power of this reconstructive project,
to develop new theories, methodologies, epistemologies

re-cast science and humanities, feminism and science,
not as binary oppositional practices, but stressing
similarities, commonalities, resonances
evolution of sex-gender binary cemented humanities/
science binary in women's studies
women's studies sanctions female ignorance of science:
science a world w/out women; women's studies a world without science:
refusal to incorporate sciences into the core of women's studies

but emergent scholarship in sexuality studies has exploded
the boundaries of sex and gender, biology and social construction,
re-thinking nature and culture not as oppositional but co-constructed
time to move beyond early moorings: the focus on biology,
separation of science culture from knowledge production,
unitary understandings of feminism and science,
reinforced binaries of humanities/sciences, biology/society
women/women's studies scholars need to take on ethical
practices of science, be agents of future knowledge

III. Where our thinking and practice fits in the history/
present/future described by Subramaniam

IV. Where your work fits....?

V. Metaphorizing....
"moored metamorphosis" is Subramaniam's metaphor for both the
development of feminist science studies and her intellectual transformation

what metaphors might you use to describe the field of science studies?
your relation to/transformation in/location in that field?

why we would do this; or,
what it means to think metaphorically

Susan Sontag, in her "Illness as Metaphor" (1978) wrote compellingly about the need for "an elucidation of ... metaphors, and a liberation from them", at least particular ones. What was on her mind was the problem of the constraints on the potentially doable which inevitably arise from the words we use to make sense of things, and the associated limited array of possible actions which the words represent and evoke.

--What is a metaphor?

--What does the word mean (literally)?

bear/with/carry across/

μετά (meta), “‘between’”) + φέρω (pherō), “‘I bear, carry’”)

What does it do (pragmatically?)?

Metaphor talks about a concept by describing something similar to it.



Metaphor & Simile--by Robert Lovejoy
A metaphor has a tenor and a vehicle,
is both abstract and concrete.

Luisana: A metaphor is a story...

 

they can help us learn what we need to teach, and how to teach it...

--our co-writing on this topic:
Metaphor and Metonym
Synedoche and Surprise

Banu's essay, pp. 963-4: "The metaphor of the pipeline has endured as the metaphor in discussions of the recruitment and retention of girls and women in science....metaphors and language are powerful and evocative; they embody dreams and visions. But feminist analysis can also develop an alternate analysis of this metaphor. We could argue that the pipeline metaphor is [not] a good one to describe the ... thrill of discovery and exploration. We could also describe the pipes as long, dark, dingy, impenetrable tubes and masses of metal crisscrossing the terrain of industrial capital. We could describe the pipe as one that contains, constrains, limits, and cuts off the oxygen of the travelers within. Imagining the regimented travels in pipes that give the travelers no agency in their journey, we might start rooting for the leaks and for those who escape the drudgery of of pipe travel. And this, I believe, has been the crux of the difference between the literatures on women in and women/gender and sciences. In one the leaks are seen as a problem, and in the other the problem is the pipe itself...why do we want to encourage young girls and women who find the pipes inhospitable to enter them? Instead, why do we not rejoice at the leaks...? (emphasis added)

UCSC Science and Justice Training Program

Another example: Karen Barad's metaphor "all the way down"
@ SLSA, Indianapolis, Thursday, October 28, 2010, after Karen's talk,
“When Time is Out of Joint,” where she said that
--"we are part of nature we seek to understand"
--"quantum queerness"; "Q=queer=undoing identity"

she got a question about her "negotiating between
microscopic and macroscopic scales:
"is it just a metaphor?? or something more?? Why is it???"
the questioner was "troubled by the convergence
of metaphysical and physical ideas"

this made her furious:
"people are continually trying to enclose what I’m speaking about
w/in the microscopic: a containment of the queerness of it all
(okay for atom to be queer, not the cat)"

“just a metaphor” calls up a conventional understanding of language,
dependent on a belief on “something over there,” separate
textuality doesn’t work that way
Barad's work is another way of thinking about connectivities and disjunctions,
one that problematizes easy inheritances, mixes them up

1) as far as physicists know, there are not two domains, micro- and macro-
Newton’s equations are a good approximation to Schroedinger’s;
but nothing in the universe says the laws change from one domain to the other

2) lots of stuff we thought was too big is now
included in quantum entanglement phenomenon:
birds perceive fields of radiation, etc.
part of difficulty is tracing the entanglement
notion of convergence presumes prior separation;
physics now tell us about what mystical traditions have long known,
about the metaphysics of presence
Bohr: not about disturbance, but entanglement...

See also Chapter 7 of Meeting the Universe Halfway, where
entanglement is a way of thinking about ethics and social justice

Going back to distill and reflect on our own list of metaphors:
what do they say about our sense of our (shared?) project?

What presumptions underlie the metaphors
we use for the intra-action of feminism and science?

How might those metaphors and presumptions
differ from those of our students?

What can we do w/ what we've discovered together?