Showing papers in "Social Text in 1996"

Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

Abstract: A partir d'une analyse des aspects philosophiques et ideologiques de la mecanique quantique et de la relativite generale, l'A. etudie le developpement scientifique que constitue l'emergence des nouvelles theories de la gravite quantique et en mesure les consequences culturelles et politiques

Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities

Abstract: L'A. porte son attention sur les processus d'internationalisation de l'identite homosexuelle. Il s'interroge sur la nature de l'identite homosexuelle moderne et etudie le lien entre globalisation et identite sexuelle

Bodies, Letters, Catalogs: Filipinas in Transnational Space

Abstract: Transnational space keeps the Philippine economy afloat. The top three exports-electronics, garments, and remittances from overseas contract workers-have consistently been reliable sources of foreign exchange, which sustain the economy especially in times of crisis. The Filipina and her body prefigure this space, moving from work in the home to homework outside the home. Filipinas have been integrated into the circuits of transnationalism in various ways: as sweatshop factory workers in multinational corporations within the national space, and as entertainers, domestic helpers, nurses, and mail-order brides in international spaces. These spatial locations, after all, are artifacts of power relations. The analysis of these various locations remaps the discursive circuits in the oblique enforcement of power that places bodies and nations in a transnational juncture. This article examines the geopolitics of Filipina bodies inscribed in transnational space, specifically focusing on the problematics of the mail-order bride phenomenon as a social and political practice. Advertised mostly for middle-class, elderly white men, mail-order brides embody the hyperreal shopping for the First World male and the hyperreal commodification of women and the Third World. In the past ten years, 50,000 Filipinas came into the United States as mail-order brides. Each year, some 19,000 Filipinas leave the Philippines to unite with husbands and fiances of other nationalities, the majority of whom are in the United States. This article provides a cognitive map of the discourse of mail-order brides, analyzing the marketing mode (catalogs in particular) at the cultural level (race, sexuality, etc.) as well as at the sociopolitical level (economics, development, geopolitics, im/migration). The discourse of mail-order brides in transnational space posits women and femininity as sites of critique and complicity. At the same time, however, the discourse allows for recuperating modes of activity that are a conduit for and circumvention of the mail-order bride businesses and their male

The Aftermaths of Sovereignty: Postcolonial Criticism and the Claims of Political Modernity

Abstract: L'A. examine les consequences de la disparition des empires coloniaux. Il passe en revue les analyses marxistes qui ont etudie ce phenomene. Il envisage les differentes perspectives qui se sont interessees a la periode postcoloniale et s'interroge sur le bien-fonde des approches qui voient dans la periode actuelle l'emergence d'une revolution democratique mondiale ainsi que la fin de l'histoire. Il montre en quoi la notion de modernite politique parait fondamentale pour les partisans du criticisme post-colonial

Who's afraid of postcoloniality ?

Abstract: L'A. examine la notion de «post-colonialite». Il evoque les conceptions de l'imperialisme et du colonialisme developpees par H. Arendt. Il etudie la place du colonialisme au sein du discours liberal en Grande-Bretagne pendant la periode coloniale. Il montre de quelle maniere les anciennes colonies sont devenues le Tiers-Monde. Il analyse les processus d'integration globale et les critiques post-coloniales elaborees vis-a-vis de ce phenomene

Science Is "Good to Think With"

Abstract: shows how the "order of knowledge" has also been the "order of society." When challenges to the social order have arisen, these challenges have also changed the prevailing ways that the production and legitimation of knowledge have been organized, and vice versa: the social order and the structure of a culture's sciences are generated through one and the same social transformations (see, for example, Merchant 1980; Restivo 1988; Shapin 1994; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). This is pretty close to what the antidemocratic right believes: the new science studies, feminism, "deconstructionism," and multiculturalism threaten the downfall of civilization and its standards of reason.1 The latter criticism does not contest that the order of knowledge and the social order shape and maintain each other, but only the way science studies reveals how such science-society relations have worked in the past and operate today, and the proposal in some of these science studies tendencies for more open, public discussion about the desirability of prevailing science-society relations. It is significant that the Right's objections virtually never get into the nitty-gritty of historical or ethnographic detail to contest the accuracy of social studies of science accounts. Such objections remain at the level of rhetorical flourishes and ridicule.

Ten propositions on science and antiscience

Abstract: Au-dela de la diversite de la pensee marxiste de la science et au-dela de son opposition a la conception capitaliste de la science europeenne et nord-americaine, l'A. souligne l'objectivite de la connaissance scientifique en tant qu'elle represente le progres du genre humain. Denoncant les aspects reductionnistes de la science moderne, l'A. revendique l'ouverture de la science aux exclus par un processus de democratisation

Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender

Abstract: Ruth Hubbard Of late, conservatives in science have been railing against social constructionism because it runs counter to the credo that, by its rigorous objectivity, science reveals the Truth about Nature. Fortunately, at the same time, other, more progressive natural and social scientists are deepening the analysis of biases that enter into the ways scientists conceptualize nature and that therefore shape the questions we ask about it and the answers we accept as plausible or true. Built-in biases are usually most blatant (though unfortunately not most obvious) in relation to questions that involve the interplay of biology and society, hence in relation to most questions having to do with human biology and medicine. They are especially prevalent, but also especially well concealed, when it comes to our understandings of sex and gender, since in Western societies sex and sex differences are linchpins of the way we conceptualize ourselves and our culture. Rather than bewail the conservative backlash against modern science studies, I would like to take the opportunity offered by this issue of Social Text to discuss some recent insights into the way the social and biological sciences have constructed sex and gender. In so doing, I accept the usual distinction between these concepts by which sex-whether we are male or female, men or women-is defined in terms of chromosomes (XX or XY), gonads (ovaries or testes), and genitals (the presence of a vagina or a penis-or, more usually, merely the presence or absence of a penis). Gender, specified as masculine or feminine, denotes the psychosocial attributes and behaviors people develop as a result of what society expects of them, depending on whether they were born female or male. However, as Kessler and McKenna and Barbara Fried have pointed out, the concepts of sex and gender are often overlapping and blurred, not only in ordinary speech but also in the scientific literature.1 Thus, note that Money and Ehrhardt's classic, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl, which popularized the distinction between the terms sex and gender, confuses them in the subtitle-Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity-since, surely, conception is too early to speak of "gender identity."2 Not all languages have two different words comparable to sex and gender. The fact that both terms are in common use in English may have encouraged American scientists to try to disentangle the biological aspects

Unity, dyads, triads, quads, and complexity : Cultural choreographies of science

Abstract: Dans la reflexion sur le debat actuel entre rationalite sociale et rationalite scientifique, l'A. souhaite se pencher sur les « prejuges culturels incrustes dans l'epistemologie meme de la quete scientifique ». Elle definit les « choregraphies culturelles » comme les elements gestuels, la tonalite, les rythmes, les textes et leurs details qui creent la difference, qui permettent aux personnes « de meme envergure » de reconnaitre et comprendre la portee du travail presente. L'A. s'interesse dans cet article aux « mouvements » realises par les scientifiques, les ingenieurs et les medecins lorsqu'ils tournent autour de leurs mondes

The Science Wars: Responses to a Marriage Failed

Abstract: Les « guerres de la science », ou l'attaque defensive contre la « fuite de la science et de la raison », sont dirigees contre des etudes recentes qui assimilent la science a une activite influencee par les forces sociales et politiques. L'interet intellectuel pour la science de la part de non-scientifiques s'est beaucoup developpe depuis plus de vingt ans, en partie comme le resultat de la croissante visibilite de la science dans la culture, en partie comme prise de conscience de ses implications sociales importantes. Certains scientifiques considerent cette approche sociale constructiviste comme etant une attaque hostile contre la science et ils repondent agressivement. L'A. s'interroge sur les raisons de ces attitudes defensives, du trouble developpe envers ces approches qui demythifient la science, sur le pourquoi de la problematique d'explorer le fosse entre la verite et la connaissance et de demander « comment savons nous ? ». L'A. apporte des elements de reponse a ces « guerres de la science » dans le contexte americain

The Politics of the Science Wars

Abstract: reason versus unreason. While the language and vocabularies of science are different from those of the arts, the animus is the same: as for those safeguarding culture and science, the barbarians are at the gates. Those who would demystify science by showing it is subject to the same cultural and social influences as any other discourse, no less than critics who excoriate science for remaining silent when its discoveries are recruited for nefarious purposes, are charged with being prophets of (take your pick) unreason, mysticism, anti-Enlightenment, and nihilism, and with being promulgators of a higher superstition. Science controversies are by no means as esoteric as one would think. Consider the bizarre result of an FBI investigation into the identity of the notorious Unabomber who, according to the New York Times, has, in the last seventeen years, "killed three people and injured 23 others" (Broad 1995). An agent appeared at the New Orleans meetings of the History of Science Association in October 1994 and subpoenaed its membership records because the FBI suspected the "bomber is immersed in the most radical interpretations of the history of science." According to the Times report, "professors have begun reconsidering old suspicions, acquaintances and tracts to help solve the crimes." Except for Langdon Winner of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, most of the association members and officials the reporter interviewed were donning their detective hats and Sherlock Holmes pipes or were prone to dismiss the bomber as "marginal" in professional science studies. Winner joked he was disappointed the FBI did not consult him on the case. "I feel left out. It's like being left off the guest list for a really good party" (Broad 1995). Defenders of science such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) write polemics that betray philosophical naivete; others, like the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), are hosting conferences and symposia in which the critical theory of science is represented as a virus that must be

Making transparencies : Seeing through the science wars

Abstract: It is no coincidence the Science Wars have erupted in British and American academic circles close on the heels of the Culture Wars preceding them: they are both about cultural values. The politics of knowledge at stake in both chapters of intellectual change are the same. In both skirmishes, the foundations of scholarly inquiry have been subjected to critique on the basis of their purported universality, formulaic absolutism, and exclusivity. These challenges were inspired by several converging trends. One is the rise of poststructuralist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytic, and postmodern theory. These are the so-called traveling theories identified by Spivak, through which a decentering of many of the givens that previously structured assumptions about knowledge, its objects, and its subjects is effected. The new interdisciplinary fields of feminist theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and queer theory are all areas of contemporary scholarship derivative of a move away from previous conventions of objectivity, neutrality, and canonical tradition. One way to define cultural studies in the United States is simply as the space in which discussions motivated by all the above changes can take place. It is both a popular and a contested arena. In general, the U.S. academy tends to observe strict disciplinary boundaries, whereas in Britain disciplinary boundaries are often more diffuse. In both countries, some disciplines operate as more of a "closed shop" than others. The significant decrease in public funding for higher education in both the United States and Britain during the past ten years has had the tendency to exacerbate tensions between the postand interdisciplinary movements and their more discipline-bound corollaries. All of this has raised the suspicions of traditionalists, who see in the rise of multiculturalism, ethnic and women's studies programs, cultural

The Gloves Come off: Shattered Alliances in Science and Technology Studies

Abstract: Langdon Winner The acrimonious disputes surrounding social studies of science today reflect long-standing disagreements about the character and purpose of inquiry in this field. The publication of Higher Superstition underscores how nasty these quarrels can be, perhaps foreshadowing explosive clashes between the two cultures in years to come.1 One might have hoped spirits less malicious than Gross and Levitt's would have been the ones to bring these conflicts to light. But for those who have followed the development of science and technology studies (STS) over the years, it has been obvious that eventually the other shoe would drop, that someday it would occur to scientists and technologists to ask: Why do the descriptions of our enterprise offered by social scientists and humanists differ so greatly from ones we ourselves prefer? How much longer should we put up with this?

The politics of pragmatism

Abstract: L'A. envisage la signification du pragmatisme sur le plan politique. Il analyse la notion de culture politique, d'histoire culturelle. Il etudie la place des conceptions pragmatiques au sein de la gauche americaine. Il evoque les debats sur ce theme dans ce cadre

A Pornographic Femininity? Telling and Selling Victoria's (Dirty) Secrets

Abstract: L'A. porte son attention sur la feminite ainsi que sur la pornographie. Il examine le statut de la pornographie au sein des societes modernes. Il envisage les representations de la sexualite et de la lingerie feminine qui apparaissent dans les campagnes de promotion commerciale aux Etats-Unis. Il analyse le role des femmes ainsi que la perception de la feminite dans ce cadre

Does Science Put an End to History, or History to Science?

Abstract: Dans le cadre du renouveau du debat opposant les deux cultures scientiste et historique, l'A. presente les deux sensibilites differentes, a la lumiere de la recontre entre la culture japonaise et la science occidentale qui, pendant la Restauration Meiji, a apporte une solution pratique au probleme

Meeting Polemics with Irenics in the Science Wars

Abstract: According to Webster's, a polemic is "an aggressive attack on, or the refutation of, others' opinions, doctrines or the like." In today's academy, professors and students often have cause to be polemic, but seldom have cause to remember that polemic has an opposite.1 Webster's defines that opposite, irenic, as "fitted or designed to promote peace; pacific, conciliatory, peaceful." Recent skirmishes in the Science Wars have seemed to me so polemically bitter on all sides that rather than sending back another volley intended to hurt and destroy, I want to try moving irenically toward common ground. I will do this by discussing a few recent occasions in which I have been involved in the Science Wars. The first was an occasion when

A Few Good Species

Abstract: Andrew Ross If there has been one constant in the history of science, it is the relationship of applied research and technology to military force. Nothing belies the myth of pure science more than the evidence that it has served as the handmaiden of warfare or, in the period of the national security state, as a central component of the permanent war economy that continues to sustain elite interests among the major powers and their clients. We all know about science's utility to the military trade of destruction, but what happens when the military is charged with utilizing science to repair the destructive consequences of that trade? The euphemism of the "peace industry" took on a new life after the cessation of the Cold War at a time when the security establishment, deprived of its staple of Manichaean ideological conflict, turned in the direction of environmental considerations and elevated "environmental security" to the forefront of its global overviews. The result, by no means conclusive, is the outcome of a messy encounter between the functional ethics of ecological science and the institutional mentality of warmaking.

Against the Grain: Organizing TAs at Yale

Abstract: In December 1995, approximately 250 teaching assistants at Yale University undertook a grade strike, demanding that the university recognize the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) as their collective bargaining agent. In mid-January, after the grade strike was well underway, 137 TAs-along with other employees and students at Yale, residents of New Haven, and graduate students and faculty from area universities-were arrested in an act of civil disobedience while protesting the university's selective punishment of three striking TAs. These events garnered banner headlines around the world. Behind the journalistic accounts of a new group of organized workers using innovative tactics at a prestigious, wealthy Ivy League university lies an even more surprising story of individual graduate students struggling to overcome their own personal fears and pushing the boundaries of what they considered to be legitimate action. Many of these TAs came to Yale thinking they had chosen a life of the mind and would never involve themselves in collective

What Is Science Studies for and Who Cares

Abstract: We are, self-evidently, at a moment of aggressive public attack (some call it debate) on science studies. Just as the wars against political correctness managed to deflect attention from the real problems as an entrenched community appealed to democratic virtues while defending privilege, so now well-funded and powerful forces are claiming to be oppressed by the likes of Bruno Latour, Andrew Ross, and Katherine Hayles and are attempting to trash-in the name of reason, truth, objectivity, justice, and the first amendment-people who raise awkward questions. Conferences of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) (in November 1994) and of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS) (May 1995) are symptomatic of an aggression that touches-perhaps dangerously, perhaps only with a rather sad and silly paranoia-on some of the most important issues of our time. While support for all serious intellectual enterprises is being more than threatened by newly empowered anti-intellectual political forces, these organizations are behaving as though the threat to science is really coming from some of the few intellectuals who have taken the trouble to think seriously about it. The excess and silliness of the response may seem the mere pettishness of spoiled researchers used to big-time funding and might well induce in us both complacency and a tendency to enjoy tweaking for its own sake; but complacency or teasing are the last things we need at the moment. Questions about the relations between society and science are among the most important of our time. We need, rather, to be thinking about how our healthy instincts to be oppositional might be channeled in more productive directions.

Cultural politics and black public intellectuals

Abstract: L'A. etudie la culture politique des intellectuels afro-americains. Il s'interroge sur les limites du paradigme de la gauche new-yorkaise. Il examine les influences politiques des intellectuels afro-americains et comparent le role joue par ces derniers, aux Etats-Unis, et celui joue par les intellectuels latino-americains dans leurs pays respectifs. Il souligne la situation de crise qui affecte la politique noire aux Etats-Unis et envisage les problemes sociaux au cœur de la culture politique des intellectuels afro-americains

The Blessed of the Earth

Abstract: Not long after graduate students at the University of Kansas voted to unionize, affiliating themselves with the American Federation of Teachers, I was invited to speak at Kansas on the future of graduate study in the humanities. In the course of my talk, I not only endorsed the unionization of graduate students at KU and elsewhere, but also referred, in passing, to what I called the "bad faith" attempt of administrators and faculty at Yale University to claim that their graduate students were simply students and not also "employees." As long as people are working as instructors or as teaching assistants and being paid for their work, I thought, it makes sense to consider them "employed," to consider their work "employment," and to admit, therefore, that they are in some sense "employees." And if administrators and faculty at Yale or elsewhere want to claim that their graduate students' wages are not "wages" because their teaching (which is not strictly "teaching") is merely part of their professional training as apprentice professors, then it makes sense to call the bluff: take graduate students out of the classrooms in which they work as graders, assistants, and instructors; maintain their stipend support at its current levels; and give them professional development and training that does not involve the direct supervision of undergraduates. Then we'll see how long Yale University can survive without the labor (which is not strictly "labor") of its graduate student teaching assistants. At the time, I thought my support for graduate student unions-in a speech delivered to, among other people, unionized graduate studentsamounted to endorsing candidates after they'd won their elections. To my surprise, however, I learned later that the graduate students were very pleased with my speech, and that some even considered it "courageous." It seems that I had denounced as ridiculous Yale administrators' claims

The Proletariat Goes to College

Abstract: "So we're here in Pittsburgh: Where are the steel workers? Why aren't they here?" This question was raised at the 1995 American Studies Association meeting during a special panel titled "Does Cultural Studies Ignore Class?" The discussion had reverted to the same old left academic angst over whether we are capable of addressing "real people in the real world." Someone suggested that the ASA program committee invite Pittsburgh's steel workers to formally participate in the conference. Next thing you know, scholars in attendance started a litany of testimonials about their own privilege, the need to speak to broader audiences, to participate in the world as public intellectuals, ad infinitum. In the midst of this academic self-loathing, a grad student standing in the back of the room injected a dose of reality by reminding everyone that a "real" struggle was going on at Yale University to unionize teaching assistants and that, as progressive scholars, we should be doing all we can to support their efforts. In other words, don't mourn, organize. The young woman who spoke from the floor that November morning indirectly brought home another lesson. If you're looking for the American working class, you'll do just as well to look in hospitals and universities as in the sooty industrial suburbs and smokestack districts. And they are more likely to be brown and female than they are to be the good old blue-collar white boys we're so accustomed to seeing in popular culture. The combination of immigration and the transformation of work from manufacturing to service, from decent-paying full-time work to low-wage part-time and temporary work, means that the employed working class is increasingly female and Latino, black, and Asian American, and its main employers are hospitals, universities, food processing plants, food services, and various retail establishments. Sweatshops are making a huge comeback, particularly in the garment industry and in electronics assembling plants, and homework (telephone sales, for example) is growing. Most of us know firsthand that universities (as well as hospitals) make up one of the largest sectors of the service economy. Universities, after all, employ a vast army of clerical workers, food service workers, janitors, and other employees whose job it is to maintain the physical plant, not to mention fulland part-time faculty and researchers. In 1991, for instance, colleges and universities directly employed 2,662,085 workers-a figure

The Nation of Islam and the poetics of black (counter)modernity

Abstract: L'A. porte son attention sur l'organisation «Nation of Islam» qui, aux Etats-Unis, regroupe de nombreux afro-americains. Il se demande en quoi cette organisation tend a mettre en lumiere la poetique de la contre-modernite noire. Il montre comment elle envisage les causes de l'alienation des afro-americains. Il souligne le caractere ambivalent de la modernite dans ce cadre. Il analyse de quelle maniere les partisans de la «Nation of Islam» concoivent, sur le plan historique, les relations entre juifs et noirs, l'Holocauste

Dispatches from the Science Wars

Abstract: Let us begin with a fact or, at any rate, a finding. Other matters could be adduced to support the line of reasoning I have in mind, but it is better to keep focused for now on the following: it has been found, by "science," that for about thirty to fifty years, sperm counts have been declining, in both numbers and motility, among men in industrialized countries. Recent studies from Paris indicate that the decrease amounts to about 2 percent per year during the last two decades. A 175-page report from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency presents the evidence, along with certain interpretations, to be discussed below. Other reports from Scotland and Belgium point in the same direction. These in turn support a 1992 finding by Elizabeth Carlsen, based on a historical analysis of sixty-two separate sperm count studies. The findings are correlated with others: a marked rise in testicular cancer among young men as well as congenital anomalies of the male reproductive organs; a rise in associated problems among women, especially breast cancer; and similar deterioration among wildlife, including panthers, alligators, birds, bats, turtles, and fish.1 There are a number of possible responses to this information. The most obvious would be to inquire as to the causes of these phenomena, their implications, and potential remedies. This would be shadowed by an elementary extrapolation: at the rate of a 2-percent decline a year-and there are reasons to believe that the rate will accelerate-the reproductive capacities of higher animals, at least in certain areas and perhaps across the globe, will at some point sink below a threshold of sustainability. In the meanwhile, an increasing number of beings are going to suffer in one way or another, and an increasing number of genetically damaged organisms are going to be launched into the ecosphere. Thus, if the processes to which these studies are calling attention continue, drastic conclusions for the future of complex organisms on earth are to be drawn. For it would appear that a kind of systematic poisoning is inexorably destroying the genetic legacy of a billion years of evolution. But let us not be too hasty. The preceding paragraph used conditional and subjunctive modes for more than conventional reasons. That the aforementioned extrapolation takes place is itself based on a number of assumptions, namely:

The politics of working-class chicano style

Abstract: L'A. s'interesse a la culture populaire des americains d'origine mexicaine. Il evoque la situation de cette communaute, dans ce pays, et montre que ses membres sont concus comme des «bruns», c'est-a-dire qu'ils sont envisages dans une position «raciale» intermediaire entre celle des noirs et celle des blancs. Il presente un nombre de donnees collectees dans des chansons populaires ainsi que dans des films americains. Il analyse la representation des mexicains qui s'en detache. Il evoque la personnalite de F. Fender, un chanteur d'origine mexicaine. Il s'efforce de mettre en lumiere les traits principaux de l'esthetique mexicaine-americaine

A Short History of Unionization at Yale

Abstract: As we take up the union struggles of the 1990s, we have something to learn from our history. I cannot tell the story of unionization at Yale in detail, but I want to recall some of its highlights, so that we can all keep them in mind. Along the way, I will also offer some observations about how Yale is governed and about labor in the academy. In 1938, George Butler, a Methodist minister in New Haven, wrote a report on working conditions at Yale. In what he said then in his account we can recognize similarities with the continuing struggles of the 1990s. Among the comments that Butler made were these: