science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies, there is no such thing as a ... ity, culture and biology, subjectivity and embodiment.
Editorial
Feminist technoscience studies
EJWS European Journal of Women’s Studies 17(4) 299–305 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1350506810377692 ejw.sagepub.com
Cecilia Åsberg and Nina Lykke Linköping University, Sweden
Feminist technoscience studies is a relentlessly transdisciplinary field of research which emerged out of decades of feminist critiques. These critiques have revealed the ways in which gender, in its intersections with other sociocultural power differentials and identity markers, is entangled in natural, medical and technical sciences as well as in the sociotechnical networks and practices of a globalized world. As the sociocultural embeddedness of all scientific and technological theories and practices is a basic assumption among researchers within this field, the positivist distinction between scientific theories and their technological/practical applications is taken to be unsustainable. The term ‘technoscience’ is meant to challenge critically this distinction and the ensuing separation of ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ science. For researchers within the overlapping fields of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies, there is no such thing as a pure and politically innocent ‘basic’ science that can be transformed into technological applications to be ‘applied’ in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways at a comfortable distance from the ‘clean’ hands of the researcher engaged in the former. It is a shared assumption of researchers within the fields of STS and feminist technoscience studies that ‘pure’, ‘basic’ science is as entangled in societal interests, and can be held as politically and ethically accountable, as the technological practices and interventions to which it may give rise. The compound word ‘technoscience’ was coined to emphasize this unavoidable link. Following the tradition of, among others, feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway (1997a), we have chosen to emphasize this link as crucial to feminist critiques of science and technology by using the umbrella term feminist technoscience studies for this special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies (EJWS). However, to avoid terminological confusion we should underline that the field is sometimes (including in some of the articles in this special issue) referred to by other names, such as feminist science studies, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, gender and science, etc. Genealogically, feminist technoscience studies is inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, society, science and technology. However, it is important to underline that these studies, together with other kinds of material or postconstructionist feminisms (Lykke, 2008, 2010a), has also transgressed social constructionism, forcefully drawing attention to the ways in which the discursive and material aspects of sociotechnical relations and processes of materialization are inextricably intertwined. This is reflected in the articles on the following pages. They are all, in
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different ways, committed to the technoscientifically mediated processes of materialization and intra-action (Barad, 2003) which take place between discursivity�������������� �������������������������� and materiality, culture and biology, subjectivity and embodiment. Since the start of feminist technoscience critiques in the 1970s, many different kinds of technologies, sciences and popular science discourses as well as sociotechnical and materializing practices have been scrutinized – from new reprogenetics, reproductive and other medical technologies to new media and information and communication technologies (ICT). A diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches has been mobilized for the analysis: cyborg feminisms, cyberfeminisms, posthuman feminisms, queerfeminisms, sexual difference feminisms, postcolonial and anti-racist feminisms, etc. To cover the abundance of different approaches and aspects of science and technology critically explored by feminists committed to technoscience studies is not possible within the given frame of a special issue like this. But we hope that the articles on the following pages will give readers of EJWS some glimpses into this rich branch of feminist analysis and theorizing. The practices and social relations of technoscience go hand in hand with global and local capitalism. Whether we talk, for example, of different kinds of digital divides, unequal (gendered, racialized and class-dependent, etc.) distribution of the effects of climate change or health risks due to environmental pollution, technoscience is implicated in its capacity as a globally omnipresent phenomenon with local adaptations. Many analysts, be they inspired by feminist technoscience studies or other techno-critical research traditions, also underline that technoscience, in partnership with global capitalism, generates major historical transformations, including new ways of conceptualizing what it means to be an embodied human subject in a globalized world. As the articles in this issue illustrate, such new conceptualizations emerge from a diverse range of technoscientific practices such as the pharmacological industries selling us hope in a pill, the subtle work of dieting cultures that de/regulates our consumption and de/increase of body fat in often rather uncontrollable ways, the creation of generic names for drugs and their related bodies as well as genetics deployed for almost anything from the telling of human history by means of archaeology to the production of forensic evidence or the micropolitics of sperm donation and fatherhood. In spite of the omnipresent and all-pervasive social and cultural effects of technoscientific thinking and practices, feminist technoscience studies has remained on the margins of feminist studies, a field generally concerned with the human and social sciences. As a branch of feminist studies, feminist technoscience studies has thus been caught in a paradox. Highly esteemed and internationally acclaimed feminist researchers, such as Donna Haraway, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding as well as Lynda Birke (who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this issue), have given the field a distinctive profile. However, the works of these feminists have often been read more for their epistemological and cultural analytical interventions or postpositivist science critiques, than for their specific analyses of technoscientific practices and semiotic-material approaches to material agency beyond constructionism. Regardless, it is to feminist technoscience studies that we owe much of our recent attraction to the study of things physical, or what has sometimes been called the new material turn (Ahmed, 2008; Hird, 2003), the ontological turn (Åsberg, 2010; McNeil,
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2009), or the postconstructionist turn (Lykke, 2010a). This turn towards the physical in feminist theory owes, as Sara Ahmed (2008) has noted, a debt to early 1970s and 1980s feminist science studies, ecofeminism and critiques of medical practices – as was forcefully articulated by, among others, the famous self-help book Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1971) – as well as the cyborg studies of the 1990s, the human-animal studies and all kinds of posthumanities of the 2000s. Identities have got a lot to do with it. So now, as articulated within the framework of these theoretical positions on our worldly state of ‘becoming with’ (Haraway, 2008) – or in fact always already having been merged with – technologies of gender (De Lauretis, 1987) and self (Foucault, 1977), it is clear that the material turn (as materialist feminism, cf. Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Braidotti, 2002) is a term with diverse genealogies, theoretical affinities and many queer and unexpected moments calling for closer inspection. It is perhaps significant for the current situation of feminist technoscience studies that the aforementioned paradox (simultaneously a marginalized area within feminist studies and a locus for famous innovators of feminist theorizing) is now perhaps under historical deconstruction. This latest phase is marked by the emergence of a strong new platform where younger scholars from the natural, technical and medical sciences, as well as from the human and social sciences, join hands in innovative explorations of relationships between feminism and technoscience. An edited volume with the significant title Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Mayberry et al., 2001) underlines that the field in the 2000s has ‘developed into a mature field, rich and diverse in its goals, theories, actions, activisms, methodologies – its production and effects’ (Mayberry et al., 2001: 5). The editors go on to characterize the current profile of the field as ‘mature’, well developed and established, but they also stress that it is a ‘field in motion’ (Mayberry et al., 2001: 5–6). Although they use the term feminist science studies rather than the ‘umbrella’ term feminist technoscience studies which we use here, we have chosen to quote at length from their list of characteristics of the field, as they aptly capture key issues:
Feminist Science Studies. 1. A field under construction. 2. A body of work that applies feminist analysis to scientific ideas and practices to explore the relationship between feminism and science and what each can learn from the other. 3. A field that explores the intersections between race, class, gender, and science and technology. 4. The effort to work out the implications of ‘situated knowledges’ (knowledges seen as a social activity embedded in a certain culture and world-view). 5. A scholarship in which ‘gender politics are not simply about relationships of men and women but are focused precisely on how to understand agency, body, rationality, and the boundaries between nature and culture.’ (Rouse 1996). 6. A disruption of the dichotomy between scientific inquiry and policy through examination of the connections between scientific knowledge and scientific practices. (Mayberry et al., 2001: 5–6)
Following Mayberry et al.’s (2001: 5) reflections on a ‘new generation’ or new stage of feminist technoscience studies marked by more widespread and integrated conversations
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between feminism and technoscience, this special issue gathers contributions first and foremost from younger feminist technoscience scholars with inter- and transdisciplinary backgrounds. Some of the contributors did their graduate and postgraduate research within the field of inter- and transdisciplinary feminist studies. Others have a background in the inter- and transdisciplinary field of STS. Characteristic for the contributors is also a shared commitment to current key debates in feminist theory as regards bodily materialities, processes of materialization and the entanglement of discourse and materiality. The materialization of differences such as sex, gender and race are key to a set of feminist questions within contemporary technoscience and the topic of Amade M’charek’s article in this special issue. Focusing on the shifting interstices between bodies and their enactment in practice, M’charek, a feminist science and technology scholar and trained geneticist located at the University of Amsterdam, discusses the making of genetic identities such as the imaginary archaeological boy figure of Marcus from Eindhoven. The old humanist ethos, know thyself, echoes through the public rhetoric of genetics today, the assumption being that either ‘genes are us’ or that genetic fragments can provide clues to our (vastly more complicated) human origins. In fact, as M’charek demonstrates, it is not so much the work of genetic fact as the work of a humanist imagination, with its markers of sexual and racial difference, that creates identities – and these genetic identities are made through practices of constantly upholding hierarchical difference relations. A self-imploding node of genetic materiality and genetic discourse, Marcus is produced as a stable referent for a white, healthy- and very ‘Dutch’-looking boy. That said, his body, like all other bodies, is not just the product of discourses, there is always something more going on. Amade M’charek makes use of an analytical technique, developed within the framework of feminist technoscience studies: diffractive analysis (Barad, 2003; Haraway, 1997b: 268; Lykke, 2010b: 154ff.), to start shifting and changing our views on temporality, identity and the materiality of difference. From her analysis new formations and new affinities appear. This creative, or generative, characteristic of feminist technoscience studies is also visible in the article by Cecilia Åsberg, research associate and leader of the Posthumanities Hub at Gender Studies, Linköping University, and Jennifer Lum from the University of California at Berkeley. Åsberg and Lum explore links between scientific lab imagery of fly brains and commercial advertisements for common drugs aiming to mitigate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Due to ageing European populations and an aggressive biopharmaceutical industry (often nicknamed Big Pharma for its intimacy with the structures of global capitalism), drug advertising is a realm providing powerful images of gendered, aged and racialized embodiment. Alzheimer bodies appear in unprecedented ways in all kinds of public settings, creating an image of dementia as part of a technoscientific domain and of, more or less, uncognizant beings whose human quality is in question. As such it is a visual as much as a material realm in need of posthumanist (i.e. a term here indicating a cross-disciplinary insistence on the non-human, as much as the human, forces of life – and death) and feminist accounts of the vision and visuality of technoscience around emerging new subjectivities and old identities that enact the ageing human body. There are many less well-known aspects of the biotech industry on which we rely for innovative medical drugs, pharmacophores (the stepping stones towards new drugs) and the antibodies used for everyday molecular targeting in the science laboratory. One of
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these aspects is the assignment of International Nonproprietary Names (INN, or generic names) for novel biotechnologies, which is regulated by the World Health Organization, and which is intended to smooth translations between various languages and practices. Regulatory processes such as this reflect, and try to manage, the blurring of boundaries between artifice and the natural workings of the human body. As such, these practices of naming biotechnologies play a major part in contemporary reconfigurations of bodies, as shown by Katherine Harrison, originally from Birkbeck College, University of London, and now working as a postdoctoral scholar at Gender Studies at Linköping University. Harrison suggests a novel feminist approach as to how the ‘noise’ generated by scientific uncertainty is written out of these biotechnological naming procedures, along with the bodily abject. In creating her tool for feminist analysis of the biotech classifications, naming practices and their effects, Harrison aptly generates unexpected conversations between Judith Butler’s queerfeminist theories of bodily mattering (Butler, 1993) and the theories of the materiality of media and discourse of German media scholar Friedrich Kittler (1990). Corinna Kruse, a German scholar of science and technology studies, now Assistant Professor in Technology and Social Change at Linköping University, has been doing ethnographic work on the national Swedish forensics laboratory. She explores the ways in which forensics provide us with new feminist understandings of the sex/gender distinction as played out in the material-discursive realm of solving crimes and identifying criminals. Combining inspiration from feminist materialist theory (e.g. Barad, 2003) and methodologies from STS, Kruse shows convincingly that much more than ‘objective science’ is at play in the production of forensic evidence. Such evidence is a product of complex material-technoscientific-cultural practices. She also suggests that a scrutiny of the ways in which small body parts such as DNA stand in for whole bodies in forensics can perhaps, by analogy, generate unexpected new understandings of scientific constructions of sex differences insofar as the latter, conventionally, also, to a large extent, are based on ‘evidence’ from small body parts such as chromosomes and hormones. Theoretically, Kruse’s article is an argument for a mutual exploration of possible synergies across the borders of feminist theory and STS. According to Kruse, current feminist materialist endeavours to conceptualize sexed embodiment as non-deterministic processes could perhaps be enriched by a reflection on analogies to the materialtechnoscientific-cultural practices involved in the production of forensic evidence, while STS analysis, in return, could benefit from more serious commitments to feminist materialist theory. Petra Jonvallen, another feminist scholar of science and technology studies, Assistant Professor at the Unit for Studies of Gender and Technology at Luleå Technical University in the north of Sweden, is also committed to combining STS-inspired approaches with feminist analysis. Her topic of investigation is the ways in which cultural and medical discourses are collapsed into each other when obesity researchers and clinicians try to define how gender, sex, age, class and local environments interfere with the obese body. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at a Swedish obesity clinic as well as on a study of medical literature on obesity, Jonvallen shows how universalizing and stereotyped binary notions of sex differences in terms of the specific locations of fat on obese bodies create problems for researchers and clinicians. Specifically, she highlights how these notions
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make it difficult for these researchers and clinicians to take into account bodily diversities, a multiplicity of intersections and local biologies (the ways in which bodies may be conditioned differently depending on their local environment). Taking inspiration from feminist studies of fatness as a possible platform for resistance, Jonvallen also discusses the potentials of fat bodies to signal gender transgressions. Like other contributors to the special issue, Jonvallen, too, from her specific point of departure in critical studies of medical and cultural discourses on obesity and fatness, argues for an analytical focus on diverse and multiple processes of cultural-biological materialization as an alternative to the fixed and essentializing binaries which still haunt some kinds of medical research and intervention. Critical analysis of new reproductive technologies and the ways in which they are entangled in biopolitical processes of material-discursive de- and reconstructions of gender, race, sexuality, families, parenthood, childhood, power differentials, etc. is a classic sub-field of feminist technoscience studies. Building on this tradition, Stine Willum Adrian, a Danish scholar of feminist technoscience studies, whose graduate and postgraduate research has had a strong focus on feminist materialist approaches to new reproductive technologies, discusses sperm banking in Denmark and Sweden. The point of departure for the analysis is the ways in which the discursive-material practices involved in sperm banking and infertility treatment produce (hetero)normalization, naturalization, stigmatization and exclusion, even though the technologies hold the potential to perform inclusively and to sustain a diversity of new kinds of family configurations, lifestyles, gender and sexual identities. In particular, Adrian pinpoints the paradoxical – and significantly different – narratives of fatherhood and family building that are mobilized at sperm banks and infertility clinics in Denmark and Sweden, two Scandinavian neighbouring countries with comparable welfare state models. Through a narrative analysis of interviews and fieldnotes gathered during ethnographic fieldwork at infertility clinics and sperm banks in the two countries, Adrian grasps contradictions within and between the different narratives and practices mobilized as part of the commodification of sperm – from the Viking myth of virile masculinity at the Danish sperm bank to that of the ‘good and responsible male head of family’ at its Swedish counterpart. The last contribution to this special issue is an interview, conducted by Cecilia Åsberg with one of the European pioneers of feminist technoscience studies, Lynda Birke, Professor at Chester University, UK. Birke’s long-standing work on feminist perspectives on biology and human/animal relationships has been very influential for the development of the field. In the conversation with Åsberg, who, in her own capacity as director of a hub for studies of posthumanities at Gender Studies, Linköping University, has done pioneering work to push feminist analysis beyond an often rather exclusive engagement with human and social science topics, Birke challenges the state of the art of feminist studies, asking for a more profound engagement with the natural sciences. She welcomes the current turn towards feminist materialism and the broader commitment to feminist technoscience studies which seem to be on the agenda today, but she emphasizes also that much more in-depth knowledge about the natural sciences is needed to get to grips with the problems of the biological body from a critical and non-determinist feminist perspective. Birke claims that biology and natural sciences can become important allies for feminism, rather than performing in ways which may perpetuate biological determinism and unjustly legitimate gendered, racialized, sexualized stereotypes and hierarchies.
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We hope that this special issue will make a contribution to push the feminist debate further in the direction of these much needed transdisciplinary dialogues across the borders of human/social/technical/medical/natural sciences. References Ahmed S (2008) Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘new materialism’. European Journal of Women’s Studies 15(1): 23–39. Alaimo S and Hekman S (eds) (2008) Material Feminisms. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Åsberg C (2010) Enter cyborg: Posthumanities and the ontological turn of feminist theory. International Journal of Feminist Technoscience. Available at: www.feministtechnoscience.se/ category/review-pool/. Barad K (2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs 28(3): 801–831. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. (1971) Our Bodies, Ourselves. Boston, MA: Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Braidotti R (2002) Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Butler J (1993) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. De Lauretis T (1987) Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Foucault M (1977) The Will to Knowledge, Introduction to The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Victoria: Penguin Books. Haraway D (1997a) Mice into wormholes: A comment on the nature of no nature. In: Downey GL and Dumit J (eds) Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions into Emerging Sciences and Technologies. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 209–243. Haraway D (1997b) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge. Haraway D (2008) When Species Meet, Posthumanities, Vol. 3. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press. Hird M (2003) New feminist sociological direction. Canadian Journal of Sociology 28(4): 447–462. Kittler FA (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Meteer M with Cullens C. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lykke N (2008) Feminist cultural studies of technoscience: Portrait of an implosion. In: Smelik A and Lykke N (eds) Bits of Life. Seattle: Washington University Press, 3–15. Lykke N (2010a) The timeliness of post-constructionism. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 18(2): 131–136. Lykke N (2010b) Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing, Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality series. New York and London: Routledge: McNeil M (2009) Key note presentation, opening of the Posthumanities Hub, Linköping University, 6 October. Mayberry M, Subramaniam B and Weasel LH (2001) Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation. New York and London: Routledge. Rouse J (1996): Engaging Science: How to Understand its Practices Philosophically. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
