Banu Subramaniam

Resisting Power, Retooling Justice Promises of Feminist Postcolonial Technosciences

This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice.

Fighting the Derpy Science of Sexuality.

The word derp has in recent years entered the urban lexicon. Borrowed from the cartoon‘‘South Park,’’it has come to stand in for the phenomenon where‘‘people keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it’s completely wrong’’(Krugman, 2015). As researchers working in the feminist studies of science and located in the interdisciplinary fields of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and Science Studies, we are continually frustrated with derp-logic in science. As Kuhn pointed out well over a half century ago, one of the striking aspects in the history of science is that theories can endure despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. No example better exemplifies this phenomenon than the various sciences of‘‘difference’’—sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality— wherestudies thatclaimevidenceforbiologicaldifferencesbetween two groups often make the cover stories in scientific journals and popular magazines. In-group variation rarely leads to a re-consideration of a priori categories and studies with negative results do not get the same space, in journals or in the press. The last three decades have seen the emergence of the nowburgeoning field of feminist studies of science and technology (FSTS). Among other insights, FSTS has chronicled the long enduring obsession of Western science and societies with biological difference. It is a veritable game of whack-a-mole—no sooner is one claim of biological difference demolished, when another one pops us. Despite vibrant and now increasingly established fields of Women, Gender, and Queer Studies that have developed sophisticated analyses of sex, gender, and sexuality, and despite proliferating queer communities with visible diversity of genders and sexualities, biological research marches on in itsderpyways. van Anders (2015) powerfully demonstrates sexual science’s problematic grounding in a binary sex,gender, sexuality system that is by now widely discredited across and beyondacademicdisciplines.Shechartsandseeks to reconcilea deep chasm between how research on sex, gender, and sexuality is theorized in the biosciences versus other interdisciplinary fields that study sexuality or narratives of sexual identities and experiences. It is in thiscontext thatwereadwithexcitementvanAnders’ recent article. We should begin by saying that we have been and remain fans of van Anders precisely because of the attention she has paid and brought to the incommensurability of these different disciplinary frameworksas theystand, insistinguponimaginingnewscientific paradigms and practices as an important site for queer feminist work. In developing this newtheory, Sexual ConfigurationTheory (SCT), van Anders attempts to expand our understandings of the terms‘‘sex,’’‘‘gender,’’and‘‘sexuality’’to be bothmoreexpansive andmoreprecise.Asscholarswhoalsoworkacross thesefields, butwhoareprimarily locatedinWGSS,wefindmuchtoadmire invanAnders’workandareexcitedbyitspossibilities.Atthesame time,weareuncertain that thesenewdefinitionsandframeworks are adequate to the taskof radically reconceptualizing thefield. Perhapsmoretothepoint,wethinkthevalianteffort tocomplicate sexualityinthebiosciencesdoesimportantworktoshowthelimitationsofsexual science itself.Webeginherewith the innovations thatwethinkthis theorybringsandthen, inthespiritof intellectual engagementanddialog, concludewith what we see as someof the limitations of this reconciliatory approach. The biggest contribution of SCT is in offering resources for sexual science to conceptualize a non-binary world. While this might sound trivial, it is, in fact, a tremendous feat of theoretical andtranslationalbridge-work.Currently,biologicalresearchworks with a binary sex, gender, sexuality system. There are two sexes, two genders, and two sexualities—sex translates into gender and & Banu Subramaniam banu@wost.umass.edu

The Mating Life of Geeks: Love, Neuroscience, and the New Autistic Subject

In this article, we track the emergence of a new autistic subject, one that is socially inept yet brilliant, earnest yet charming, obsessive yet humorous, arrogant yet vulnerable, and unquestionably worthy of our attention. In contrast to the historic definition of the autist as one lacking the capacity for love, the new autistic subject is enabled and inflected by the gendered construction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and holds the promise of being potentially productive and even (desirably) reproductive. Through an analysis of current trends in autism science (extreme male brains and assortative mating) and shifting narratives about autism and love, we trace how processes of heterosexualization inform the shift from loveless to loving and lovable, and we further explore how such processes produce new forms of exclusions in the name of neurodiversity. We locate ASD as a site for the reinscription and biologization of historical ideas about gender as well as the naturalization of normative heterosexuality. Finally, we argue that it is through this process of normalization via heterosexualization that this new subject emerges, leaving many lost to the queer, to the feminine, or to the irredeemably abject.

Book review: Angela Willey (2016), Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology

Angela Willey (2016), Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of Biology. Durham: Duke University Press. 216 pp., 9 illustrations.

A Discussion on Experiments and Experimentation: NIH to Balance Sex in Cell and Animal Studies

89.95 (Cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8223-6140-4;

Matter in the Shadows

23.95 (Paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-6159-6.