Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies

Subramaniam, Banu

doi:10.1086/597147

Cited by 67 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…In deploying feminism as a methodological framework for analyzing patent ownership, I therefore understand feminism within its analytical movements from gender to power. Banu Subramaniam notes a shift, for example, in feminist science studies “from pipeline to power” (, 963). The gains of liberal feminism have come up short.…”

Section: Feminist Trajectories Of Technicalities and Materialitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Making and Unmaking of Patent Ownership: Technicalities, Materialities, and Subjectivities

Foster

2016

PoLAR

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Feminist sociolegal studies have recently taken up the technicalities of doctrines, documents, and regulations to better understand the law. In an affiliated move, feminist science studies turned to the materialities of theories, practices, and nonhuman organisms to make critical sense of science. These methodological turns focus not on gender, per se, but on precise mechanisms of law and science that structure, reinforce, and reconfigure power and inequality. Drawing on these methodological approaches, this article attends to the technicalities and materialities of patent ownership and benefit sharing in South Africa in regards to San peoples’ struggles over the patenting of the Hoodia gordonii plant. An examination of patent documents, benefit‐sharing agreements, legislative appendixes, and the biology of plants generates an understanding of how patent ownership, rather than being natural or value‐neutral, is a historical and sociocultural process shaping, refashioning, and being inscribed across multiple scales of nation‐state jurisdictions, divergent ways of knowing, and biochemical orderings of plants.

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Section: Feminist Trajectories Of Technicalities and Materialitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It risks ceding the institutional spaces feminism has gained within the academy. It also makes political organizing not impossible, but more challenging (Subramaniam ).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Making and Unmaking of Patent Ownership: Technicalities, Materialities, and Subjectivities

Foster

2016

PoLAR

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“…Those interested in increasing the number of women in the sciences found some success in liberal diversity initiatives as feminist science studies as a field centered more on philosophical questions of knowledge production. Those of us trained as scientists understand these issues as necessarily entangled, seeing the separation, as Subramaniam notes (), as a “profound loss.” This loss is not about a missed opportunity for collaboration but about whether either of these now separate goals of increasing diversity and challenging scientific epistemology can succeed without making connections with each other. For example, social and scientific arguments cyclically reinforce each other so that as long as there is a lack of diversity in the sciences, new scientific research will continue to look for and “prove” the naturalness of sex differences, producing the rationale for a continued lack of diversity (Hubbard ; Spanier ; Fausto‐Sterling ; Jordan‐Young ).…”

Section: Spaces For Feminist Interventionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Feminist science studies scholars have argued that we need not only push for scientists to change their practices but for feminists to engage more with scientific knowledge production, acknowledging the realities of current scientific practice in order to craft relevant, effective critiques (Subramaniam ; Roy ). I offer the politics of enfranchisement as an example of how specificity and nuance can impact the intelligibility of a call for change.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scientific Reforms, Feminist Interventions, and the Politics of Knowing: An Auto‐ethnography of a Feminist Neuroscientist

Giordano¹

2014

Hypatia

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Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide an auto‐ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority.

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“…We also think this amalgam opens space for thinking about what science studies have to offer queer feminisms. What these categorical distinctions that structure our lives and communities share in common is that they have been biologized (Subramaniam 2009)-their treatment too often leaves us moored in a social constructionist versus biological determinist battle of explanatory regimes. Part of what interests us here is what thinking with "the lesbian" might offer to theorizing the at-once political/historical/context-sensitive and visceral/embodied nature of sexuality.…”

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confidence: 99%