Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Feminist Theory Out of Science theory all the way down."Theories are," as Karen Barad writes in this special issue, "living and breathing reconfigurings of the world" (207).Barad offers theory as a form of experiment, to which we might add that experiment is a mode of theory making.The world, it seems, is inhabited by theories of itself.The corals and nudibranchs about which Sophia Roosth writes in these pages, for example, do not simply manifest mathematical theories; they do mathematics.Vicki Kirby concurs, suggesting that bacteria perform the same code-breaking as cryptographers and hackers when they develop antibiotic resistance.Depending on the metaphor, bacteria may also be competent engineers, crystallographers, pharmacists, social organizers, literary critics, and architects (Margulis and Sagan).And as Kirby proposes, echoing Barad, "[W]e are already practicing physics" (204). 1 Feminist science studies is committed to being both "in" and "of" science.That is, writing about science is never separable from the work of science itself.Inhabiting the ecotone where feminist theory meets science studies invites us to suspend divisions between doing science, making sense of science, and simply getting on in the world.Is it, then, simply a matter of choosing one's initial conditions, the right sorts of scientific theories to serve as analytical starter cultures?The relation of theory to method is today under revision, at least in some quarters.Some scholars work by holding scientific theory in tension with critical theory.Operating "athwart theory," they move iteratively between the theoretical and the empirical in order to generate new theories while still acknowledging the dense material reality of theory (Helmreich, Alien and "Nature"). 2"Laterality" or "to-one-sideness" are recently forged tools used to describe and analyze emergent forms of knowledge in a way that is legible to those who speak and act within those discourses (Maurer).Such sideways maneuvers can be both methodological and analytic, as we send relays between the critical and the empirical, the semiotic and the material.Thinking across or beyond, like thinking athwart, invites us to write and think against neat distinctions between theories and things, between matter and method, and to query the analytic constructs we have inherited.In introducing an encounter between feminist theory and science studies, another point of departure would call into question the notion of encounter itself, to ask how we make sense of our own entanglements and partial engagements with creatures, technologies, and other things that furnish our world.A philosopher of mind, Thomas Nagel, once asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" Nagel wanted to know not "what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves," but rather "what it is like for a bat to
Source: differences
Authors: Sophia Roosth, Astrid Schrader
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2331443626