Mattering

Feminism, Science, and Materialism

Victoria Pitts-Taylor

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479878840
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences.

Part I

Probing New Theories of Matter

1

Matter in the Shadows

Feminist New Materialism and the Practices of Colonialism

Deboleena Roy and Banu Subramaniam

In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe not only that everything can be seen, but also that everything is available and accessible for our consumption. In a culture seemingly ruled by technologies of hypervisibility, we are led to believe that neither repression nor the return of the repressed, in the form of either improperly buried bodies or countervailing system of value or difference, occurs with any meaningful result.

—Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 1997: 16

This work focuses on the “body” and its materiality. What is it? How should we study it? Who should study it? The answers to these questions produce an unsurprisingly complicated and contentious narrative. We are interested in the debates within the feminist studies of science around the materiality of the body, in particular biological bodies, and the “body” of recent work that has emerged as “new materialism.” What, we wish to ask, is feminist about this developing field and how is it new? We argue that while feminist new materialism draws on a specific reading of poststructuralism’s influence on feminist theory and feminist theory’s consequent “flight from nature” (Alaimo 2000), it has perhaps improperly and too quickly buried many of feminism’s old “bodies” and exhumed a new “body” that is not entirely feminist or even particularly new. We are interested in examining the matter that lurks in the deep, dark shadows of the “old” feminist critiques of science of earlier feminisms, the silhouettes of matter being brought forward in the feminist new materialisms, and the glints of attention to matter that have recently surfaced in postcolonial science studies, to argue that while each encounter is valuable, none are sufficient on their own for the project of feminist science studies.

Early feminist scholars of science were centrally focused on biology, primarily on human bodies, and in particular women’s bodies.1 They explored and documented the scientific emergence of “difference” in material bodies and their biological conceptions. These scholars systematically analyzed how the scientific enterprise through experiments, and anatomical, physiological, and behavioral studies came to understand “difference” as being located and originating in the material body. Central to their claims is that scientific institutions have translated political and cultural privilege into biological privilege. In several cases, this emphasis on the political and cultural was also accompanied by efforts to redefine feminism’s relationships to the study of biology and health (Our Bodies Our Selves 1973; Rose 1983; Birke 2000; Murphy 2012). Furthermore, work from this era persuasively shows that hierarchical understandings of bodies were central not only to the colonial project but also to the evolution of science, scientific inquiry, and technologies themselves (Stepan 1986; Schiebinger 1989; Philip 2004; Hammonds and Herzig 2009; Harding 2011). Scientific racism may have served as a building block for the formation and even birth of certain disciplines such as anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, and behavioral sciences. Power, these scholars have argued, is central to the project of science. Given the history of science, we cannot talk about the biological body without science or science without the biological body, and the circulation of power is deeply implicated in both.

Early feminist work on the “biological” body is therefore largely read as a political intervention. By using the disciplinary tools of biology, philosophy, history, literature, anthropology, and sociology, feminist scholars attempted to trace and make partially visible the ontological, epistemological, and methodological assumptions and frameworks that were operating in the production of bodies and our understandings of difference. They explored and documented the scientific emergence of multiple and different bodies shaped by the politics of race, nation, gender, class, sexualities, abilities, etc. This early work in women’s studies is often read as a “critique” of the sciences or the feminist critiques of science. For many reasons (that we won’t go into here), the (inter)discipline of women’s studies has largely remained within the realms of humanities and social science departments, and the vast majority of scholars come from these fields. Therefore, while the critiques revealed the deeply political nature of science’s construction of the “body,” the project of imagining an account of the “body” using feminist biological insights has been underdeveloped (Wilson 1998; Barad 2003; Roy 2007). Biological inquiry and the natural and hard sciences in general, conceived as hegemonic and oppressive forces, have remained marginal to the field of women’s studies through most of its history. The “body” however, especially the female body and the materiality of reproduction, have served as central points of inquiry in feminist studies. We want to suggest, however, that this body, which has been a critical point of departure, when addressed in biological terms, was treated as an object of analysis in very particular ways. For example, the early invention of the term “gender” separated the idea of a biological body or “sex” from the social body or “gender.” Although this separation would now likely be read as indicative of feminist theory’s incapability of directly accessing nature or matter, it has been deeply influential. We propose that the separation between sex and gender has been productive in its own right, generating enormous growth in the understanding of a “socially constructed body,” through its objectification and commodification, and by examining the ways in which bodies and matter are implicated and imbricated in complex social and political networks of representation, commerce, labor, reproduction, sexual violence, and medicalization. In the meantime, feminist scholars of science continued to build an engaged and robust critique (often done by feminist biologists with intimate knowledge of their disciplines) of the accounts of the body produced by the biological sciences, particularly aimed at countering the pervasive claims of biological determinism in fields such as genetics, neuroscience, and endocrinology. This body of work has provided a complementary narrative to the canonical narrative of the social constructions of the female and male bodies.

Over the last two decades, however, some scholars have noted several common approaches or tendencies in feminist engagements with biology and science and have in turn launched a critique of the feminist critiques of science through the new feminist materialism, material feminisms, neo-materialism, or the new sciences. Three main issues animate this critique. First, that feminist scholars have entirely marginalized, even excluded, the sciences from a central focus of the field of feminist studies and from the development of feminist theory. Their claim is that if the sciences exist within the field of feminist studies, they are largely treated as a body of oppressive and hegemonic work to be critiqued. Second, some new materialists claim that feminists influenced by poststructuralist theory have transformed the material body into a “text” that is only to be read, seen, and studied in the abstract, thus creating a lack of critical engagement with the actual “matter” of the body. When the material body did emerge in feminist scholarship, it was most often treated as a “primordial” body—that is pre-language and pre-social—on which society and culture went to work to “socially construct” gendered humans. What therefore emerges centrally within feminist scholarship is a systematic analysis of the social world only, and more specifically, analyses of the ways in which this social world constructs and exploits the female body. Third, scholars of new materialisms note that feminists have extended the sex/gender, male/female binaries in unproductive ways to create new binaries—nature/culture, science/feminism, and matter/text. They argue that the latter are not binaries—nature and culture are not separate, feminism need not be opposed to science, and matter is not the binary opposite of text. They argue that feminists have created fundamentally flawed theoretical tools and methods that reinforce these binaries in unhelpful, unproductive, and intellectually regressive ways.

Scholars working in the tradition of new feminist materialisms are fundamentally interested in producing different kinds of engagements with science, biology, and matter. These scholars have called for and begun an exciting area of work that seeks to redress the fundamental critiques they raised. First, the work engages centrally with science and scientific knowledge. For example, in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), Karen Barad establishes the new ontological, epistemological, and ethical framework of agential realism for thinking through our involvement and relationship to matter by drawing on her expertise in quantum physics. By deploying her theoretical contributions of intra-actions, and new understandings of entanglements and phenomena, Barad’s work has enlivened our engagements with matter. In another example, Elizabeth Wilson in her book Psychosomatic (2004) argues that the soma and the psyche are not different “realities” of the body, but rather that psychic and somatic forces are co-constituted and co-produced. Her new work on “gut feminism” is precisely blurring the boundaries between nature/culture and emphasizing how a feminist understanding of the material body is important, indeed central, for feminist and critical theory. Second, by refusing to relegate the material body to science and the social to feminism, new materialisms attempt to build accounts that do not privilege one over the other. Finally, new materialists have created new ontological frameworks to engage with the sciences and build a body of work that refuses the binaries of sex/gender, nature/culture, and science/feminism.

From our vantage point as feminist postcolonial STS scholars, both trained as biologists, we view the development of new materialisms and critiques of feminist critiques of science with interest and irony because the preceding, now canonical reading of the historical development of feminist thought, also reveals to us the blind spots of disciplinary thought. We wonder, as in the opening quote from Avery Gordon, what can be seen and recognized in this new genealogy that is relevant to feminist science and technology studies? Some of the theoretical gestures of new feminist materialisms have us simultaneously looking back to see what bodies of work have and have not been included in these conversations, and also looking forward to see whether this call to engage with materiality is being followed up with an influx of feminists entering into labs to practice the science they are describing, getting their hands dirty with the matter they wish to know, and participating in scientific knowledge production themselves. An uncritical embrace of modern science that ignores science’s imbrication in systems of power that early feminists raised seems hardly worth celebrating. However, we want to approach the different and previous generations of feminist entanglements with materiality with an openness or what Cecilia Åsberg suggests as being the posthumanist ethic of learning “to re-vision, meet up with and inhabit well the continuums of naturecultures” and “how we organize ourselves scholarly” (2013, 6). These claims of “new” and “feminist” in new feminist materialisms have forced us to reflect on the ways in which disciplines construct their disciplinary objects and analyses, and especially on how the critiques also take particular forms. Therefore, in this piece, we wish to take up two main questions that for us are hovering closely in the shadows, namely (i) how we understand and theorize biology and specific biological bodies; and (ii) how we understand and theorize the materiality of sex, gender, race, sexuality, disability, class, and more. Indeed, each of the three bodies of work—feminist critiques of science, feminist new materialisms, and postcolonial science studies—is rich and has much to offer us. But each given its own historical blind spots and disciplinary development has failed to offer an account that takes science, biology, matter, power, politics, gender, feminism, and history seriously. The project we are interested in pursuing is one that can benefit from making connections between the earlier feminist critiques of science, new materialisms, and postcolonial STS.

Three sets of arguments inform our intervention. First, a different body of work within feminist thought is important here. Feminists of color, third world feminists, lesbian feminists, and working-class feminists among other groups, have, over the last three decades, called into question the notion of the “universal woman” that animates and dominates much of feminist thought. They conclude that the generic woman is usually a western, white, upper-class, heterosexual, and able-bodied woman. By extension, we would like to argue here that if there is no generic “universal woman,” then there can also be no universal or generic “biological body” or “matter.” It is interesting to us that much of the work of new materialisms (although by no means all) recovers an abstract and generic material body, one that is often nonhuman, microbial, molecular, or atomic. As biologists, we recognize the importance of this posthuman turn, yet the hidden and shadowy matters of feminist thought reemerge in these critiques. To us, there can be no decontextualized generic body or matter, be it human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic. Second, colonial and postcolonial studies remind us about the very material bodies of colonialism, in all their contradictory and violent histories. Postcolonial studies of science particularly illustrate how western scientific knowledge was not just a tool, mechanism, or logic, but developed alongside and was thus co-constituted with colonialism, and deeply invested and imbricated in colonial governance and expansion. For example, Evelynn ...