|
> |
Willey, Angela. “Biopossibility: A queer feminist materialist science studies manifesto, with special reference to the question of monogamous behavior.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41.3 (2016): 553-577. ABSTRACT: This essay is a speculative exploration into the uses of a materialism grounded in the epistemological interventions of feminist and postcolonial science studies and queer historicizations of sexuality. It is also a meditation on the materialist turn in feminist theory from a critical science studies perspective. It offers a creative approach to the materiality of embodiment, an approach that is critically alert to the ways in which scientific disciplinary ways of knowing have been constructed as less mediated access to that materiality than humanistic ones. Rather than turning to a materialist genealogy that suggests the importance of science, this essay turns to a genealogy grounded in a queer, feminist, and antiracist vision of the vital body as a source of knowledge and resistance. Reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power” as a biology of the erotic to decenter assumptions about sexuality and human nature that shape the field of gene-brain-behavior research on affiliative behavior in general and on monogamy in particular, the essay elaborates a theory of biopossibility. It offers this notion of biopossibility—the complexly mediated capacity to embody certain socially salient traits and differences—as a frame for a queer feminist materialist science studies approach. |
|
> |
Cárdenas, Micha. “Pregnancy: Reproduction Futures in Trans of Color Feminism.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.1-2 (2016): 48-57. ABSTRACT: The author’s hybrid poetry/bioart project, Pregnancy, presents a vision of trans Latina reproductive futures, based on her experiences of cryogenic tissue banking, aka sperm banking, after having been on hormones for many years. At the 2014 Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, Morgan Robyn Collado stated that violence against trans women of color is a reproductive issue because they are prevented from living long enough to realize their dreams of having children. Trans women of color want more than just to live. Existing literature on transgender pregnancy and family planning focuses almost exclusively on transgender men. Books such as Trans Bodies, Trans Selves focus almost entirely on trans men, while making only the most brief reference to the fact that trans women can bank their sperm. This reproduces a trans-misogynist dynamic in which trans men are highly valued by queer communities and transgender women’s concerns and existence are erased. |
|
> |
van Anders Social Neuroendocrinology Lab (University of Michigan) van Anders Social Neuroendocrinology Lab (University of Michigan) The van Anders lab is a research program focusing on social neuroendocrinology, feminist science, sexulity, gender/sex, and sexual diversity. "Our work provides innovative paradigms, models, and theories for incorporating both evolution and social construction. To do so, we use diverse interdisciplinary methods that include experiments, correlational analyses, longitudinal designs, thematic coding, and more. We see our research as providing ways to do socially situated science that are biologically expansive (not reductionist), biolegible (i.e., to other bioscientists), and informed by lived experiences (critically reflective narratives of the minoritized and marginalized)." |
|
> |
Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. "Neurobiology and the Queerness of Kinship" in The Brain's Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics. Duke University Press, 2016. "In The Brain's Body Victoria Pitts-Taylor brings feminist and critical theory to bear on new development in neuroscience to demonstrate how power and inequality are materially and symbolically entangled with neurobiological bodies. Pitts-Taylor is interested in how the brain interacts with and is impacted by social structures, especially in regard to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, as well as how those social structures shape neuroscientific knowledge. Pointing out that some brain scientists have not fully abandoned reductionist or determinist explanations of neurobiology, Pitts-Taylor moves beyond debates over nature and nurture to address the politics of plastic, biosocial brains. She highlights the potential of research into poverty's effects on the brain to reinforce certain notions of poor subjects and to justify particular forms of governance, while her queer critique of kinship research demonstrates the limitations of hypotheses based on heteronormative assumptions. In her exploration of the embodied mind and the "embrained" body, Pitts-Taylor highlights the inextricability of nature and culture and shows why using feminist and queer thought is essential to understanding the biosociality of the brain." |
|
> |
Willey, Angela, and Sara Giordano. "'Why Do Voles Fall in Love?' Sexual Dimorphism in Monogamy Gene Research" in Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader, ed. by Angela Willey, Cyd Cipolla, David A. Rubin, and Kristina Gupta. University of Washington Press, 2017. "The insights into the mystery that vole research on monogamy purports to offer, we argue, are similarly overdetermined. The story of "love" - in science and the larger culture of which it is a part - is clearly a gendered one. [...] The move to using prairie voles for the modeling of human behaviors marks the consolidation of an implicit cultural consensus about monogamy as somehow fundamental to what makes the human human. We are concerned about the implications of this formulation, especially for women for whom monogamy historically has warranted some explanation. We are thinking here of images of black women as sexually voracious (Collins 2004), Latinas as hypersexual (Arrizón 2008), masculine lesbians as sexually predatory (Hantzis and Lehr 1994), and poor (Figure presented) women, often racialized, as promiscuous mothers of too many children (Collins 1990). As a feminist neuroscientist interested in ethics broadly construed (Sara Giordano) and a feminist theorist and historian of sexuality in science interested in monogamy's role in the production of normal and abnormal bodies (Angela Willey), we are interested in different aspects of this research and its representation in the press. Given the privileged epistemic status of science in our culture, we are both invested in understanding how assumptions about gender and difference more broadly inform its truth claims. We share a strong interest in the role that assumptions about sexual dimorphism play in the production of "a monogamy gene." —Excerpt |
|
> |
Chardronnet, Ewen. "GynePunk, the cyborg witches of DIY gynecology." Makery Chardronnet, Ewen. "GynePunk, the cyborg witches of DIY gynecology." Makery "The Catalan collective GynePunk wants to decolonize the female body. To this end, it is developing first aid gynecological tools, for socially disadvantaged women, refugees, sex workers. But also for themselves." Published June 30, 2015 in Makery. |
|
> |
Takeshita, Chikako. "From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Material Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body." Catalyst: Feminisim, Theory, Technoscience 3.1 (2017): 1-28. ABSTRACT: Across scientific, medical, legal, political, popular, and religious discourses, the “mother” and the “fetus” are regarded as being separated by a physical boundary. Time and time again, feminist theorists have proposed ways to disband the mother/fetus division derived from Cartesian self/other binarism and individualism. The goal of this article is to introduce and explore an alternative ontology of the pregnant body I call the motherfetus. I follow material feminist Karen Barad (2007) in contending that the “fetus” does not preexist as an object with a distinct agency who interacts with the “mother,” but only materializes through what Barad calls intra-action. I argue that the pregnant body can be reconfigured in such a way that the material distinction between the “mother” and the “fetus” disappears. This endeavor entails re-interpreting material “evidences” provided by twenty-first century technosciences while mobilizing the motherfetus as an apparatus of bodily production. Through a lens that insists on rejecting the genetic, immunological, anatomical, and physiological separation of the “mother” and “fetus,” this article will borrow elements from immunology, microchimerism, and the human microbiome to generate multiple incarnations of the motherfetus as a material-discursive product. In the conclusion, I will examine how the motherfetus as a feminist theory can alter the ways in which the pregnant body is dealt with in feminist activisms as well as in scientific studies and medical practices. |
|
> |
Hester, Helen. Xenofeminism. Theory Redux. Polity Press, 2018. Hester, Helen. Xenofeminism. Theory Redux. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018. In an era of accelerating technology and increasing complexity, how should we reimagine the emancipatory potential of feminism? How should gender politics be reconfigured in a world being transformed by automation, globalization and the digital revolution? These questions are addressed in this bold new book by Helen Hester, a founding member of the 'Laboria Cuboniks' collective that developed the acclaimed manifesto 'Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation'. Hester develops a three-part definition of xenofeminism grounded in the ideas of technomaterialism, anti-naturalism, and gender abolitionism. She elaborates these ideas in relation to assistive reproductive technologies and interrogates the relationship between reproduction and futurity, while steering clear of a problematic anti-natalism. Finally, she examines what xenofeminist technologies might look like in practice, using the history of one specific device to argue for a future-oriented gender politics that can facilitate alternative models of reproduction. Read The Quietus's interview with the author, "Doing Gender." |
|
> |
Holly Grigg-Spall's Sweetening the Pill and its critics Sweetening the Pill and its critics Sweetening the Pill: Or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control (Zero Books, 2013), is, in the author's own words, "a pioneer of the perspective shift that brought about the growing movement of women choosing body literacy over hormonal birth control. Ahead of its time, the book pointed to the early rumblings of women’s dissatisfaction with their contraceptive choices. The release of ‘Sweetening the Pill’ was met with controversy (even provoking a petition to have the book banned) and yet, over 4 years on, Holly has seen her outlook and ideas embraced in the mainstream and echoed in current conversations, including those on women’s reproductive health issues, the problem of healthcare gaslighting, sexism in medicine, and male responsibility for pregnancy prevention. In recent years, Holly’s work has been bolstered by largescale, significant studies on the link between hormonal birth control and depression, suicide risk, and breast cancer." However, significant criticisms have followed, including: Lauren O'Neal's "Jagged Little Pill" (The New Inquiry, 2013) |
|
> |
Clare, Stephanie. "Reimagining Biological Relatedness: Epigenetics and Queer Kin." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45.1 (2019): 51-73. ABSTRACT: This essay develops a sideways reading of environmental epigenetics by contesting some of the social and cultural norms that inform epigenetic research. Through this analysis, I seek to demonstrate how multiple communities of belonging—not just those considered family—become embodied. My reading of environmental epigenetics pushes beyond heteronormative understandings of biological relatedness and argues for a more collective—and feminist—understanding of inheritance, one that does not center heterosexuality, homonormativity, or the family and its privatization of care. |
|
> |
van Anders, Sari M., James L. Goodson, and Marcy A. Kingsbury. "Beyond 'oxytocin = good': neural complexities and the flipside of social bonds." Archives of Sexual Behavior 42.7 (2013): 1115-1118. "Everyone loves a love story, so it is no surprise that research on oxytocin (OT) and affiliation has grabbed scientific and popular attention over the past decade. Laypeople and scholars from diverse fields often conceptualize OT and other neuropeptides like vasopressin and prolactin (AVP; PRL) as prosocial, i.e., positively linked to positive social events and states like sexuality, pair bonding, trust, commitment, affiliation, etc. However, there are arguably no neurochemicals that exert unitary and beneficent functions throughout the brain and body, such as uniformly promoting prosocial (i.e., 'good') behavior. In addition, we cannot expect that peptides such as AVP and OT will exert identical effects across species, given that the brain distributions of relevant receptors are species-specific. In this Guest Editorial, we highlight these complexities as they relate to the sociosexual functions of OT. Critical attention to the assumption that 'OT = GOOD' is based not only on the recognition that neurochemicals have effects beyond those we like or focus on, but also on an increasingly large body of literature showing concerning effects of OT administration or correlates (e.g., Bartz et al., 2011; De Dreu, Greer, Van Kleef, Shalvi, & Handgraaf, 2011; see also Miller, 2013). As such, there is reason to pause and rethink some of the basic foundations upon which current OT research is premised, including translational efforts and human experimentation that is ethical and safe. If researchers are interested in an equation that posits OT = GOOD, it is logical and appropriate to design studies that focus on positive outcomes. But it is logically flawed to use this groundwork to conclude that OT = GOOD because studies that only measure positive outcomes (e.g., how good?) will never be able to address alternative outcomes that are undesirable or antisocial." |
|
> |
Gaard, Greta. "Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies." American Quarterly 65.3 (2013): 595-618. ABSTRACT: This essay investigates milk as a material with various meanings and compositions in different historical and cultural contexts. I bring together research from the several disciplinary fields where “milk studies” has already begun: food studies, postcolonial studies, animal studies, feminist studies, environmental justice, animal science, and biology. Using these perspectives, I investigate milk by addressing topics such as breastfeeding/nursing across race, class, and species in US history; US dairy industry production practices, economics, and the biological and behavioral experiences of lactating cows; India’s Operation Flood (also called the “White Revolution”) and its devastating effects on mothers and children, cows and calves, rural poor and small dairy farmers; and the US Dairy Council’s eurocentric and nutritionally unsupported ads promoting milk as the “perfect food.” Influenced by feminist philosophers of science, postcolonial ecofeminisms, and the new material feminisms, I examine the animal sciences research on lactation, oxytocin, and maternal behaviors by juxtaposing them with the biosciences studies of lactating human mothers, hormones, and behaviors: read together, these scientific studies show few differences across lactating mothers of diverse species, yet their findings are interpreted in ways that reaffirm the cultural assumptions of the researchers’ various disciplines. In sum, I argue for bringing together these various disciplinary approaches in a new critical framework, one that is sufficiently inclusive and capable of describing the complex cultural assumptions and material practices articulated through the uses of milk across nations, genders, races, species, and environments. |