Remember Gywneth Jones's Eve Wars?

Remember my post last month linking to a NY Times article about the problems faced by women and girls doing science? And about how the article discussed the difficulties created by US culture in particular? Browsing the SF Signal's linkpost for today, I came across a piece titled "Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters." (If you want the link, you'll have to go to the SF Signal to find it.) This lengthy rant is a farrago of assertions so confused and irrational that I finally had to give up trying to make sense of. What I did make out, though, is that the post's author, one John C. Wright thinks science fiction is (once again) being threatened, particularly by reviewers who draw a distinction between sex and gender-- on the grounds that it is obscuring the true, essential categories of "masculinity" and "femininity." I gather, also, that he sees the distinction as an attack on culture tout court (not on a culture, but on culture itself).

Here's the nub of his argument:

Anyone reading reviews or discussions of science fiction has no doubt come across the oddity that most discussions of female characters in science fiction center around whether the female character is strong or not.

As far as recollection serves, not a single discussion touches on whether the female character is feminine or not.

These discussions have an ulterior motive. Either by the deliberate intent of the reviewer, or by the deliberate intention of the mentors, trendsetters, gurus, and thought-police to whom the unwitting reviewer has innocently entrusted the formation of his opinions, the reviewer who discusses the strength of female characters is fighting his solitary duel or small sortie in the limited battlefield of science fiction literature in the large and longstanding campaign of the Culture Wars.

He is on the side, by the way, fighting against culture.

Hence, he fights in favor of barbarism, hence against beauty in art and progress in science, and, hence the intersection of these two topics which means against science fiction.

I suspect it's significant that the author's antagonism is directed at reviewers (who are, in his view, apparently only innocent dupes). Whether these reviewers are male or female or both is unknown, since we can safely assume that someone who suggests that innocent reviewers are subject to the corrupting influence of "mentors, trendsetters, gurus, and thought-police" is likely to insist that "he" is a "universal" pronoun. The very idea of a gender-neutral pronoun, of course, would be anathema to someone who believes that drawing a distinction between sex and gender is barbarous. And distinguishing between culture in general and US culture in particular is also probably anathema.  Regarding US culture as merely one of many cultures (and US culture as it currently exists as only one possibility among many) would of course make gender essentialism impossible, since the white heterosexual male of US culture could not then stand for the unmarked universal human such arguments insist he is. 

Why, you may wonder, am I granting any attention at all to such a confused mess of a post written by someone I've never heard of? I suppose it's because I see it as coming from the same place as the more laconic but equally simplistic pronouncements of more powerful speakers who keep insisting that "real girls" and "real women" have only limited capabilities for doing so science and that women/girls who excel at science must therefore not be "real women" or "real girls." What particularly interests me in this case is that it illustrates how visible and more apparent the complications of gender have become in our field than in US culture as a whole. This rant against "strong female characters" is not unusual within the field, of course. (And certainly the attack last summer on NK Jemison was by far more vicious.) But it strikes me as significant that the argument here has shifted from attacking the active presence of women in the field to attacking an acknowledgment of any degree of complexity of gender, making the very idea of gender the enemy of science fiction in particular and culture in general. It is precisely the scenario of Monique Wittig's utopia Les Guérillères.When a translation of that novel was first published in the US, the very idea of separating sex from gender was still new and strange. And so quite a few people reading it didn't understand that the war "the women" were fighting was not against men, but against gender essentialism. (Gwyneth Jones's "Eve Wars" in her Aleutian series offers another version of that war, fought by men and women on both sides of the conflict.)

Have defenders of gender essentialism actually become conscious of the distinction between sex and gender? If so, we might be entering a new phase of the struggle. Changed consciousness about gender isn't necessarily a positive thing. (See the Aleutian series for more on that.) But it is certainly something to think about, especially with reference to certain works of feminist sf.

In the Name of Science, Part 1

An article in a new issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (a special issue subtitled "US Women Writing Race") examines Mary Bradley Lane's 1881 utopia, Mizora: A Prophecy. I remember hearing a few years ago that a new edition of it had recently been published (I think this must have been the 1999 Bison edition), but after reading a review of it in the New York Review of Science Fiction (by Gwyneth Jones, if I'm recalling correctly), I decided to pass on reading it myself. As a utopia, judging by the review, it sounded not just tedious, but awful. Katherine Broad's "Race, Reproduction, and the Failures of Feminism in Mary Bradley Lane's Mizora" pretty much makes the case that the book really can't be considered feminist, though the publishers of the 2000 edition markets the book as "an 1880s radical feminist utopia." Yes, Mizora is a separatist utopia where men do not exist and women have produced a "scientifically" ordered "civilization." But Lane's founding assumption is that perfection is embodied in women who have blonde hair and blue eyes and perfectly healthy bodies. And as Broad remarks, "Mizora is not just about women's abilities to control nature, technology, sexuality, and labor. It is also about women being controlled." (262)

What most interests me in Broad's article is her discussion of the role science and technology play in creating this racist utopia. The most glaring "science" in Lane's utopia is an extreme eugenicist practice supposedly responsible for creating a "perfect" society. Mizora achieved its "perfection" after centuries of eugenic practice: "Crime is evolved from perverted natures, and natures become perverted from ill-usage. It merges into a peculiar structure of the brain that becomes hereditary...The only remedy was annihilation. Criminals had no posterity." As Broad remarks,

In this simplified narrative of historical progression, crime is not an act but a person--the criminal--who disappears along with other social undesirables like men, blacks, and even brunettes. Not surprisingly, the mentally and physically disabled cared for in Looking Backward have no place in Mizora. Scientifically aided and state sponsored evolution works in the name of progress to facilitate the emergence and perpetuity of a superior civilization whose advanced status is determined by the legibility of citizens' biologies and their supposedly corresponding inner pathologies. (258)

Sad to say, the notion that crime is not so much an act but a person comes horribly close to mainstream thought in the US today-- that, at least, is the subtext of current practice (as opposed to the principles of, say, the US Constitution). In short, Lane's assumption is that "criminality" is genetic in origin and found in the genes of brunettes, women of color, and all men.

According to Broad Lane also uses "science" to eliminate poverty and industrialized labor. "Lane achieves egalitarianism only be eliminating the need for laboring classes and the negative associations of low-class and immigrant workers." In Mizora, "cooks are chemists and housekeepers artists who have chosen their highly respected positions through the natural calling of their innate abilities. Once their domestic actities are considered scientific they becme 'respectable', a transformation that simultaneously elevates and undercuts traditionally female activities by granting importance only through scientific validation." (259) This seems less like actual science, though, than job reclassifications. (Spin control!)

But in what sense are any of these techniques "scientific" or "science"-based? It seems to me that science here has become a referent not to a method for producing knowledge, but rather to any set of techniques exerting control over nature and human perception. Lane seems to take science to be nothing more than a set of tools allowing people in power to reshape the world and manipulate human nature and social organization. Utopia is achieved, then, by using such "science" to extrapolate on the basis of one's beliefs.

I should probably note that a reviewer at the SF Site had this to say about Lane's depiction of science:

Lane's portrayal of the Mizoran society's development as largely a result of advancements in science is fairly remarkable. While it ignores any possible detrimental consequences of scientific discoveries, and the issue of unisexual mammalian reproduction is basically ignored, the existence of video-phones, carbon dioxide enrichment of greenhouse crops, and the understanding of food preparation as a form of experimental chemistry are remarkable.

But then he also found the book eminently--and comfortably--"feminist":

Lane's Mizora shows women to be intelligent, cooperative and capable of peaceful productive higher civilization. However, its feminism is in no way strident; men are more ignored and forgotten than hated, and its surface-world female heroine appears largely taken aback by her civilization's barbarity. [...] for women, Mizora will certainly be an interesting look into the mind of an obviously intelligent Victorian woman, and for those other men an interesting cultural and literary landmark of women's literature that at least isn't stridently anti-male.

Hmm. So he doesn't notice the racism, or if he does, it doesn't bother him enough to mention it. But what he does mention is that despite the absence (and exclusion of men) from this "utopia," its "feminism" isn't "strident"! Well Lane's "feminism" doesn't come anywhere near my own notion of feminism, anymore than Lane's view of "science" matches my own notion of science.

Not surprisingly, while I was reading Broad's article, I easily recalled that numerous examples of such "scientific" practices abounded in the 19th century, under the banner of  pseudo-sciences like eugenics (aka Social Darwinism), craniometry, phrenology, etc. But after finishing the article, I realized that we constantly encounter fresh examples of the same kind of thinking today, in the 21st century-- particularly in studies designed to establish that characteristics that conform to entrenched beliefs and attitudes about race, gender, and sex differences are biologically determined and not an artifact of social organization. Obviously we often see this in psychological studies designed to establish race, gender, and sex differences. But we also encounter this in studies of the brain. (Think of how frequently MRI scans of particular areas of the brain center on an obsession with establishing differences between the brains of men and women!)  And of course in the never-ending search for genetic evidence explaining every sort of social behavior as hard-wired. Such differences are presumably what granting agencies want to fund. But considering the limited resources available for research in the sciences that isn't aimed at either building bigger and deadlier weapons or garnering greater profits for multinational corporations peddling chemicals of one sort or another, such a focus is a terrible waste and distraction.

Because culture, not nature, is the problem

Most readers of this blog probably know that Helen Merrick is the author of the Secret Feminist Cabal and maybe even that she was the co-editor of Women of Other Worlds, a WisCon-centered anthology of mixed fiction and criticism published in the late nineties by an Australian press. But Helen is also an energetic scholar with numerous other publications to her name, and in more than one disciplinary arena. At the moment, for instance, she's working on a book about Donna Haraway's work, and that's because she's passionately into Feminist Science Studies.

I've just read a dynamite article of hers (which she actually wrote a few years ago) published in the March/April 2010 issue of Women's Studies International Forum, titled "Science stories, life stories: Engaging the sciences through feminist science fiction." In this article she argues that feminist science fiction has the potential for bridging the "two culture divide" that persists in feminist scholarship-- the divide between the sciences and the humanities. As Helen writes,

[F]ew [feminist scholars] have followed Haraway and Rose's lead in viewing feminist SF as a space of productive convergence between the arts and sciences. Even within the specialised field of feminist SF criticism, there exists a a similar lacunae; most studies to date are firmly grounded in literary criticism with surprisingly little attention paid to the role of the sciences in feminist SF. SF remains an underutilised resource in thinking through some of the problematics of two-culture engagements, perhaps precisely because of its hybridized positioning on the two-culture border.

I find particularly interesting the parallel Helen draws between between feminist science studies and feminist sf:

In many ways feminist SF occupies the same uncomfortable discursive and cultural space as science studies itself-- an uneasy balancing between the two cultures of science and the humanities. Whilst feminist studies of science often employ humanities-based methodologies to examine and critique science, SF can draw on both literary techniques and the language and methodologies of science: creating potentially boundary-crossing "fictions of science." Like many critics in the field of feminist science studies, some SF writers are originally scientists whose feminism impels them to write different stories....And like many humanities-trained science critics, SF authors are often avid "amateur" readers and researchers of science, including [Gwyneth] Jones herself, Nancy Kress, Kathleen Ann Goonan and Nicola Griffith. Such authors share with feminist scientists and science critics a fascination for, and even love of, science....they share the impulse to "both critique and find inspiration with science's bounds."

After discussing the ways in which feminist sf is able to engage with the epistemology and practice of science, Helen then focuses on Gwyneth Jones's Life as "a vital, challenging and complex example of feminist fiction that can draw on its generic positioning and history to 'boldly go' where few realist fictions can," "speaking to two related, although quite distinct, concerns in contemporary feminist engagements with the sciences: the nature of women's work in the sciences, and the integration of the biological and material into our theorisations of sex and gender."

Probably the most fascinating part of the article (for me, anyway), is Helen's drawing on "neo-materialist feminist" theory:

Like advocates of the new materialism such as [Myra] Hird, Life reminds us that "while nature emphasises diversity, culture emphasises dichotomy," and illustrates why the use of biology 'to reify sex dimorphism' should not deter feminists from seeing the natural sciences "as a useful site for critiques of this dichotomy. At the same time, the whole novel and its title can be read as a reminder that the conception of "life" offered by the dominant narrative of molecular biology (or what Jones terms "Stupid Darwinism") is narrow and reductionist. As originary story, such concepts alone cannot explain or represent the complexity, interimplication or "complementarity" of the biological, social, and historical relations between humans and non-humans, on a variety of levels, from molecular and cellular to societal.

The article is available for purchase here, but since it costs $42 (yes, for an electronic file that is eight pages long!), if you want to read it, you will probably want to look for it in hard copy in a library near you. (I'm reminded that a long time ago I was a regular subscriber to this journal-- until it was bought by a multinational corporation and the price of a subscription went up by about a factor of 10.)

"Oh he couldn't really mean that"

Of course I'm way behind on my reading on the internet. So the comments made by Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider on December 6, in advance of their receiving the Nobel Prize in medicine, have been out there for awhile. But I only just saw them, thanks to a link on geekfeminism.com. In an article on MSNBC.com, Malin Rising with the Associated Press writes:

It is the first time two women have shared a single Nobel science prize. Over the years only 10 women have won the medicine prize.

Blackburn said a more flexible approach to part-time research and career breaks would help women continue to advance their careers during their childbearing years.

"I'm not talking about doing second-rate quality science, far from it," she said. "You can do really good research when you are doing it part-time."

Greider added that she especially wants to see measures to get more women onto committees and decision-making positions.

"I think that something active needs to be done to do that because there has been many, many years where there have been women coming in at a 50 percent level, and yet the levels at the upper echelons hasn't really changed very much," she said.

This has been obvious to women academics, not just scientists, for a long time. The typical career pattern often was (and still is) for women to finish their PhDs, have children a couple or maybe five years later, and then return to their research when their children are school age (with all the interruptions that go with have school-age children). In the 1980s & 1990s, at least, the tenure structure refused to accommodate the career rhythms of women who chose to be mothers as well as academics. I had been assuming that academic departments and research institutions generally were a lot more enlightened these days.

Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Carol W. Greider said as many women as men start out in science but are often unable to advance after having children because of a lack of flexibility.

"The career structure is very much a career structure that has worked for men," Blackburn told The Associated Press at the sidelines of a press conference in Stockholm.

Carol Greider's answer to a question in an interview in the October 13 New York Times by Claudia Dreifus takes up a related aspect of gender and the practice of science and the ingrained inferiority-of-women explanation for women's status in the sciences being generally inferior to men's:

Q. MANY REPORTERS HAVE ASKED WHY TELOMERES RESEARCH SEEMS TO ATTRACT SO MANY FEMALE INVESTIGATORS. WHAT’S YOUR ANSWER?

A. There’s nothing about the topic that attracts women. It’s probably more the founder effect. Women researchers were fostered early on by Joe Gall, and they got jobs around the country and they trained other women. I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women because there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men. The derogatory term is the “old boys network.” It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.

When Lawrence Summers, then the Harvard president, made that statement a few years ago about why there were fewer successful women in science, I thought, “Oh, he couldn’t really mean that.”’ After reading the actual transcript of his statement, it seems he really did say that women can’t think in that sort of scientific fashion. It was ridiculous!

I mean, women do things differently, which is why I think it would be important if more women were at higher levels in academic medicine. I think people might work together more, things might be more collaborative. It would change how science is done and even how institutions are run. That doesn’t mean that women necessarily have a different way of thinking about the mechanics of experiments. I think it’s more a different social way of interacting that would bring results in differently.

And then her answer to the following, last question is interesting. It's an answer I think most women would understand, but I'm not sure that more than a few men would:

Q. DO THIS YEAR’S NOBELS MEAN THAT WOMEN HAVE FINALLY BEEN ACCEPTED IN SCIENCE?

A. I certainly hope it’s a sign that things are going to be different in the future. But I’m a scientist, right? This is one event. I’m not going to see one event and say it’s a trend. I hope it is. One of the things I did with the press conference that Johns Hopkins gave was to have my two kids there. In the newspapers, there’s a picture of me and my kids right there. How many men have won the Nobel in the last few years, and they have kids the same age as mine, and their kids aren’t in the picture? That’s a big difference, right? And that makes a statement.

A Look at the Gender-Gap in Math and Reading

The May 30 issue of Science has an article by Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapiezna, and Luigi Zingales titled "Culture, Gender, and Math" that analyzes the gender gaps in math and reading reported in 2003 by the Programme for International Student Assessment in relation to the state of gender equality in particular cultures. They examine the data for numerous countries and with respect to a variety of variables. Their conclusions?

These results suggest that the gender gap in math, although it historically favors boys, disappears in more gender-equal societies. The same cannot be said for how boys score in mathematics compared with how boys score in readings. Boys' scores are always higher in mathematics than in reading, and although the difference between boys' math and boys' reading scores varies across countries, it is not correlated with the GGI (The World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index) index or with any of the other three measures of gender equality. Hence, in countries with a higher GGI index, girls close the gender gap by becoming better in both math and reading, not by closing the math gap alone. The gender gap in reading, which favors girls and is apparent in all countries, thus expands in more gender-equal societies. Similarly, although the gender gaps in all math subfields decrease in societies with more gender equality, the difference between the gender gap in geometry (where the boys' advantage relative to the girls' is the biggest) and arithmetic (where the boys' advantage relative to the girls' is the smallest) does not.

This evidence suggests that intra-gender performance differences in reading versus mathematics and in arithmetic versus geometry are not eliminated in a more gender-equal culture. By contrast, girls' underperformance in math relative to boys' is eliminated in more gender-equal cultures. In more gender-equal societies, girls perform as well as boys in mathematics and much better than them in reading. These findings shed some light on recent trends in girls' educaitonal achievements in the United States, where the math gender gap has been closing over time.

Human Cloning in the Media

This just in: Human Cloning in the Media by Joan Haran, Jenny Kitzinger, Maureen McNeil, and Kate O'Riodan, is hot off the press. This book provides an intensive exploration of recent popular representations of human cloning and genomics and the complex concerns evoked by these, and is a timely contribution to current debates about the public communication of science and a challenging investigation of what is at stake, culturally and politically, in those debates.

This book examines the making of human cloning as an imaginary practice and scientific fact. It explores the controversies surrounding both ‘therapeutic cloning’ for stem cell research and ‘reproductive’ cloning. The authors analyse the cultural production of cloning, how practices and representations play out in the global arena, and its transformation from science fiction to science practice. Case studies are used to illustrate key fore grounded issues:

• the image of the scientist, scientific expertise and institutions
• the governance of science
• the representation of women’s bodies as the subjects and objects of biotechnology
• the constitution of publics, both as objects of media debate, and as their intended audience.

Drawing together the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, with insights from media and cultural studies, this book offers a timely contribution to debates about the public communication of science and the status of scientific truth. This book will be a valuable companion to students on undergraduate courses in media studies, science communication, cultural studies, science and technology studies and sociology.

For more information about this exciting new book, including a table of contents, or to order a copy, go here. It will likely appeal to anyone interested in the relationship between science fiction and science.

Gender and Women in Science and Engineering Technology

On Thursday, Nov. 29, two of this blog's members will be participating in a conference hosted by the Open University and the UK Resource Centre for Women in SET [Science and Engineering Technology], "Moving Gender and SET Research Forward: New Approaches and Practices." Gwyneth Jones will be giving a keynote address about shadowing a scientist and will read from her novel, Life. Joan Haran will also be present, representing a team that recently worked on the representation of women in Science Engineering and Technology in the UK media.

The conference will be held at Horwood House, Little Horwood, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire MK17 0PH. Registration is still open, according to the conference's
website. I'd certainly want to attend if I lived in the UK!