Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology

Maureen McNeil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134065417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology challenges the assumption that science is simply what scientists do, say, or write: it shows the multiple and dispersed makings of science and technology in everyday life and popular culture.

This first major guide and review of the new field of feminist cultural studies of science and technology provides readers with an accessible introduction to its theories and methods. Documenting and analyzing the recent explosion of research which has appeared under the rubric of 'cultural studies of science and technology' it examines the distinctive features of the 'cultural turn' in science studies and traces the contribution feminist scholarship has made to this development. Interrogating the theoretical and methodological features it evaluates the significance of this distinctive body of research in the context of concern about public attitudes to science and contentious debates about public understanding of and engagement with science.

1
I woke up one morning and discovered that I was doing feminist cultural studies of science and technology

My title refers to the Joni Mitchell song Chelsea Morning. It is also an ironic take on the discovery narratives of ‘great men’ in the history of science. More autobiographically it refers to my own relation to the coming together of a set of critical analytical activities under the label ‘feminist cultural studies of science and technology’ in recent years. There is a sense in which I do feel magically relabelled and relocated into a burgeoning new field. When I first started to think about cultural studies of science and technology (in the early 1980s), there were few who would have claimed that this was what they were doing. Now, it seems as if, as the cliché goes, ‘everyone is doing it!’ Certainly I do still retain a sense of wonder about being part of an interesting movement which has, in many respects, transformed understandings of science and technology and provided new ways of analysing their development and significance. My hope is that this book will convey some of that wonder – the excitement – around this new field, while proffering some concrete specification about what cultural studies of science and technology has to offer.

On the other hand, my suspicions about discovery narratives and stories about the spontaneous emergence of academic/intellectual fields are similar. They both effect historical condensations, making it difficult to see the complex processes involved in making both science and the academic fields which study it. Indeed, I was amused on one occasion in the late 1990s to find myself introduced as a speaker who had studied ‘cultural studies of science’ in Cambridge in the 1970s. Amusing though this was, it is important to remember that the self-conscious designation of the field of cultural studies of science and technology is recent and cannot be taken for granted, nor imposed anachronistically. Generally, although social studies of science and technology studies have been concerned with reflexivity and symmetry, there has been relatively little attention given to the history of the discipline (or interdiscipline) itself.¹ This book derives from my interest as a participant in that history. It reflects my curiosity about the history of the practices and perspectives which have constituted cultural studies of science over the past two decades. Thus, I try to identify and elucidate some of the practices and insights which can be clustered under the label ‘cultural studies of science and technology’.

Discovery narratives, in their preoccupation with heroes, genius and magical moments, are rather monolithic origin stories which deny the work and obscure the contributions of a wide range of actors. In contrast, the impulse for this volume is much more genealogical and wide ranging. I have set out to identify diverse contributors and to trace a variety of developments that have been part of the making of cultural studies of science and technology. While I have been concerned to be reflective and analytical about distinctive features of this work, my intention is not to be prescriptive. In this sense, this is a book concerned with how work has been done but it is not a methodology text. Likewise, this is not a book about theory, although I develop theoretical scaffolding for my research projects and engage with a broad repertoire of theories in undertaking these. Rather, this book attempts to investigate some of the working toward and working through of cultural studies of science and technology.

Different versions of cultural studies of science and technology

As I have indicated, until fairly recently cultural studies and science studies were not commonly linked. The proceedings of a conference held at the University of Illinois in Champagne, Illinois, resulted in a key text – Cultural Studies – edited by Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, with a cluster of articles on ‘Science, culture and the ecosystem’ (Nelson, Treichler and Grossberg 1992:21). A 1994 conference at the Center for Cultural Studies at the City University of New York Graduate Center was much more specifically focused on science and technology. Indeed, the volume resulting from this conference, Technoscience and Cyberculture, opens with nothing less than ‘A manifesto on “The cultural study of science and technology”’ (Menser and Aronowitz 1996). A few courses and academic programmes have been labelled ‘cultural studies of science and technology’.² These are some markers of the field which do not, in themselves, constitute founding moments.

Meanwhile, definitions of cultural studies of science have proliferated and range from vague ones which could embrace virtually any form of science studies to sweeping epistemological claims. Joseph Rouse chose to define ‘the term broadly’ ‘to include various investigations of the practices through which scientific knowledge is articulated and maintained in specific cultural contexts, and translated and extended into new contexts’ (Rouse 1992:2). The distinctive element in this definition is Rouse’s highlighting of the work – ‘the practices’ – required in the articulation of scientific knowledge, emphasizing its context dependency. Nevertheless, his definition is, as he notes, broad.³

In contrast, the introductory article (‘manifesto’) in Technoscience and Cyberculture by Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz is quite dramatic in its declaration that cultural studies is ‘the name we give to the transformation of social and cultural knowledge in the wake of an epochal shift in the character of life and thought whose origins and contours we only dimly perceive’ (Menser and Aronowitz 1996:16). In an earlier book, Aronowitz was even more sweeping in his claims for cultural studies, heralding it as the new paradigm for knowledge, which emphasizes (in contrast to the natural sciences) the contextuality of all knowledge claims (Aronowitz 1993: Ch. 7). In this same volume, an established (and now deceased) science studies researcher, Dorothy Nelkin, observed that recently some humanities researchers and social scientists have taken to ‘defining their work as cultural studies of science and bringing to bear their skills in interpreting narratives and discourses’ (Nelkin 1996:34).

Hence, even in this one collection there are very different versions of doing cultural studies of science: from a rather modest ‘add literary techniques to social studies of science and stir’ approach (Nelkin 1996) to a manifesto vision of an epistemological revolution (Menser and Aronowitz 1996). The three recent definitions of cultural studies of science considered here are indicative of the instability of and diversity within this field. Nevertheless, I have chosen them because they illustrate three key dimensions of cultural studies of science and technology: epistemology, methodology and disciplinarity/trans-disciplinarity. These are some, but by no means the only, issues about this field that will feature in the chapters that follow. The preceding definitional forays came from academics working within different academic locations and traditions. As this indicates, cultural studies of science and technology has not neatly sauntered forth from cultural studies departments. Indeed, as I shall suggest in Chapter 2, science and technology studies did not feature prominently in British cultural studies of the 1970s and 1980s (see also McNeil and Franklin 1991; Reinel 1999).

My own autobiographical trajectory took me from the study of history of science as a student in Canada and Britain in the 1970s, into feminist science studies from the late 1970s, and the melding of my work, from the 1980s to the present, into what I would now designate as feminist cultural studies of technoscience. Thus, much of the research undertaken for this book reflects both my own trajectory and the adaptation and transformation of various cultural studies traditions in the study of science and technology. However, this book also registers the hybridity of cultural studies of science and technology as a field. For this field has been shaped by researchers and teachers from many disciplinary and interdisciplinary locations and traditions. Cultural studies is itself a fragmented interdisciplinary and, some would say, post-disciplinary, field. Indeed, Aronowitz (1993) advocates that cultural studies should be ‘anti-disciplinary’. Nevertheless, cultural studies of science and technology has also been fabricated by the contributions of those doing cultural studies within more traditional disciplinary locations: including, for example, English, various other languages and literatures, American and other regional studies. In addition, cultural anthropology and media and communication studies have been significant locations for the development of new modes of research in the social studies of science and technology. Hence, cultural studies of science and technology is a rather ambiguous label in terms of disciplinary locations, affiliations and identities. Moreover, academic disciplines, with their particular traditions and practices, have by no means been the only influence in the forging of cultural studies of science and technology.⁴

It is not my intention to adjudicate definitions here or elsewhere in this book. I use them to register both the uncertainty about the doing of cultural studies of science and technology and the profound questioning associated with it. Instead, this monograph investigates, reviews and critically evaluates the distinctive features of this comparatively new field of scholarship, whilst doing cultural studies of science and technology. I offer my own set of explorations and enactments of cultural studies of science and technology. These take the form of a genealogical tracing of some key moments in the emergence of the field (Chapter 2) and a set of six research projects conceived as contributions to this new field (Chapters 3–8).

Feminist cultural studies of science and technology

My work within the field of cultural studies of science and technology has been further specified as feminist cultural studies of technoscience. This designation registers the key influence on my work within this field and the orientation of this volume. One way of describing this field would be to characterize it as marking the coming together of three relatively new, interdisciplinary fields: feminist studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. Evelyn Fox Keller ([1987] 1999) has described the emergence of science studies and feminist studies as two ‘new’ and ‘parallel’ fields of study in the late twentieth century. Writing in the late 1980s, she explained that

until quite recently there has been virtually no intersection between the two disciplines, just as there has been virtually no interaction between attempts to reconceptualize gender and science – as if the two categories were independent, each having nothing to do with the other. It is only with the emergence of a modern feminist critique of science that the categories of gender and science have come to be seen as intertwined, and accordingly, that the two subjects (feminist studies and science studies) have begun to converge.

(Keller 1999:235)

Subsequently, Nina Lykke (2002, forthcoming) undertook a cartography of the fields of cultural studies, feminist studies and science studies which resonates with aspects of my project and, in fact, a version of one chapter of this book (Chapter 2) was written in explicit dialogue with Lykke’s (forthcoming) mapping.

Lykke’s and Keller’s influential articles have been important resources for my own research projects and I discuss both in more detail in later chapters (Chapters 2 and 4). More generally, they provide me and other readers with perceptive, challenging views of the interactions between cultural studies, feminist studies and science studies. However, this book takes a rather different approach to these interdisciplinary encounters. While both Keller and Lykke consider some of the distinctive features of these fields, their cartographic approach tends to underscore their equivalence. Although it is not possible to engage in an elaborate comparison here, it is also important to register some significant differences amongst these fields. So I shall simply highlight ways in which these new fields are not equivalent, since awareness of these differences has shaped my approach to these interdisciplines. Science studies has a somewhat longer history within the academy, making its presence felt through history, philosophy and some sociology of science teaching and research from the mid-1960s in the UK and North America (see Edge 1995).⁵ In these terms, both cultural studies and feminist studies are newer academic ‘kids on the block’. However, much more important is the fact that both cultural studies (at least in the predominant British version) and feminist studies emerged from key social and political movements of the late twentieth century. In this sense, they are formations that have developed in dialogue with, or at least with reference to, a specific political constituency outside the academy. Related to this is the explicitness of the political identities of these disciplines as they emerged in the late twentieth century.⁶ Science studies as a discipline is not identified with any political movement,⁷ cultural studies as a discipline has a complex and uneven history of diverse political allegiances (see Chapter 2), and feminist studies is quite clearly identified with late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century feminism. Even if these identifications are ambiguous and unpredictable in their impact, they merit attention.

While Keller (1999) addresses the intersections between feminist studies and science studies and Lykke (2002, 2007) extends this to include cultural studies, there have also been some notable examinations of the encounter between feminism and cultural studies that have influenced my own book project. The first collection marking this coming-together was Women Take Issue (1978), produced by the Women’s Studies Group at the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The follow-up collection, Off-Centre: feminism and cultural studies (Franklin et al. 1991b) includes an introductory editorial overview of ‘Feminism and cultural studies: pasts, presents, futures’ in which Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey set out ‘to highlight’ what they consider to be ‘some of the key issues’ in bringing together these two worlds, indicating both ‘overlaps’ and ‘lack of overlaps’ (Franklin et al. 1991a). Sue Thornham’s Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies (2000) offers another interpretation of the meeting of these traditions. These studies of the productive hybridity and tensions between these two political and intellectual traditions that flourished in the last decades of the twentieth century have influenced my efforts in this volume to track and evaluate other patterns of intellectual development. Indeed, as a teacher and researcher at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980–96) and as a contributor to Off-Centre: feminism and cultural studies I was part of this interaction. Of course, these overviews are primarily concerned with the encounter between feminist studies and cultural studies. Nevertheless, both Off-Centre and Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies also bring together feminist cultural studies and science and technology studies, which I shall consider in more detail in Chapter 2.⁸

The framing of this volume as feminist cultural studies of science is designed to foreground the absent presence that has haunted both modern science and, even regrettably, much of the field Keller (1999) designates as ‘contemporary science studies’. In the wake of sec...

Table of contents

• Transformations: Thinking through Feminism
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 I woke up one morning and discovered that I was doing feminist cultural studies of science and technology
• 2 Feminist cultural studies of science and technology
• Part I Making heroes
• Part II Telling stories
• Part III Witnessing spectacle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index