Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity

297 Pages·2014·14.34 MB·English

by  Banu Subramaniam

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The Science of V ariaTion and
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Banu Su Bramaniam
Ghost Stories for Darwin

Ghost Stories
for Darwin
The Science of Variation
and the Politics of Diversity
Banu SuBramaniam
uniVerSiTy of illinoiS PreSS
urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
© 2014 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949573
Contents
PrefaCe. The Red Queen Runneth:
On Interdisciplinarity................................vii
aCknowleDGmenTS.............................. xiii
inTroDuCTion. Interdisciplinary Hauntings:
The Ghostly Worlds of Naturecultures ................. 1
ParT i. GenealoGieS of VariaTion:
The CaSe of morninG Glory flowerS
1. Thigmatropic Tales: On the Politics and Social
Lives of Morning Glories.............................27
2. A Genealogy of Variation: The Enduring Debate
on Human Differences...............................45
3. Singing the Morning Glory Blues:
A Fictional Science .................................. 70
ParT ii. GeoGraPhieS of VariaTion:
The CaSe of inVaSion BioloGy
4. Alien Nation: A Recent Biography .................... 95
5. My Experiments with Truth: Studying the
Biology of Invasions .................................125
6. Aliens of the World Unite! A Meditation
on Belonging in a Multispecies World................142
ParT iii . BioGraPhieS of VariaTion:
The CaSe of women in The SCienCeS
7. Through the Prism of Objectivity: Dispersions
of Identity, Culture, Science ......................... 159
8. Resistance Is Futile! You Will Be Assimilated:
Gender and the Making of Scientists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
9. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Revisiting the
Question of Women in the Sciences..................200
ConCluSion. New Cartographies of Variation:
The Future of Feminist Science Studies............... 223
noTeS.............................................229
referenCeS....................................... 235
inDex ............................................. 271
PrefaCe
The red Queen runneth
On Interdisciplinarity
“well, in our country,” said alice, still panting a little,
“you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run
very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“a slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “now,
here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to
keep in the same place.”
—lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
Traversing liminal spaces, traveling the hallways of academia, at the borderlands
of disciplines . . . Almost there, but never quite. Meandering, half mesmerized,
half muddled, always mumbling. Dare I speak? Almost there, but never quite.
Almost a scientist, yet a feminist; almost a feminist, yet a scientist; almost a
native, yet an alien; almost an alien, yet a native; almost an outsider, yet inside;
almost an insider, yet outside . . . Almost there, but never quite. A life held cap-
tive in oppositions. How did I get to this tantalizing, much celebrated place,
the home of the oxymoronic feminist scientist, this magical place of perpetual
motion . . . nowhere, yet everywhere all at once?
This book has been many years in the making. The ideas have percolated,
soaked, and marinated in the ethos of inter- and multidisciplines. It has been
enriched by thoughtful and wise collaborators. It has been nourished by pa-
tient and generous colleagues. It has been ruminated over, meditated upon,
and then reimagined and transformed multiple times. In many ways, this is a
selfish project. This is the book I was looking for when introduced to women’s
studies while in graduate school in biology. While there is a lot of great work
PrefaCe
in feminist science studies, from the vantage point of an experimental biolo-
gist, nothing ever satisfied. I hoped someone would write it, but no one has.
Believing that there was a genuine gap in the literature, I decided to continue
this book project. It has been exhilarating and humbling to imagine a border-
less academia while being housed and employed by a disciplined academy. I
am well aware of the ways in which disciplines become necessary, sometimes
in productive ways for the tools and scholarship they enable and at other times
in unproductive ways when they limit or bind knowledge through institutional
and intellectual structures.
And yet I have to remember the serendipitous paths that brought me here.
It all began when I got on the plane at the Bombay Sahar International Airport
on a warm, still August night, with visions of donning that revered white lab
coat amid a sea of white-skinned, white-lab-coated male scientists studying
the proverbial white male rat. The visions and dreams of white lab coats and
white male scientists were so shaped by a postcolonial education that paraded
the triumphs of dead white men that the incongruity of a large brown woman
in a sea of white men scarcely occurred to me. Indeed, without the slightest
sense of irony, I spent my early years working under a giant poster of Charles
Darwin—my role model and idol.
I had crossed the oceans wanting to be a scientist. It had been comforting
to imagine an intellectual life free of national, cultural, and social norms of
gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. It seemed the ideal place for the tomboy, the
third-worlder, the woman. Yet it was precisely the cultural and social norms of
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality that came to be the most demand-
ing factors in my pursuit of science. And so I knocked on the doors of women’s
studies in an attempt to understand my growing alienation.
For a while in graduate school, my training in evolutionary biology and
women’s studies remained exciting but separate and mutually exclusive. My
doctoral work was on morning glory flower color variation. Even with my grow-
ing interest in women’s studies in graduate school, the worlds of nature and
culture remained totally separate. My graduate school life in biology was filled
with morning glories and theories and experiments, but for studying culture
and politics I had to travel, literally, from west campus (which housed the sci-
ences) to east campus (which housed women’s studies). While women’s stud-
ies dealt with questions of biology, they were almost exclusively grounded in
women’s bodies or gendered representations of scientific objects.
This bifurcated existence continued for a few years until I found myself
having coffee one day with a colleague in women’s studies. The exact moment
when I suddenly saw a bridge between my two worlds is one that remains
viii
The red Queen runneth
vividly etched in my memory. A mentor (and now a treasured friend and col-
league), Mary Wyer, asked me about my doctoral work. Usually colleagues in
women’s studies would respond with an “Oh, how interesting” and quickly
change the subject. But Mary wanted to know more and I eagerly explained. I
talked about morning glory flowers and the puzzle of their many varied flower
colors. I explained my experiments to test whether variation in flower color
was indeed maintained and which evolutionary mechanisms might explain
their maintenance. She listened with interest and when I finished, she nodded
her head with what seemed like perfect comprehension: “Oh,” she said, “you
work on diversity!”
This may seem obvious to some, but to me it was a momentous revela-
tion! For the first time, someone had bridged for me the worlds of nature and
culture, bringing together two parts of my academic life that had been until
then discrete and separate. When I say “discrete and separate,” I mean that in
every way—geographically women’s studies and biology were on two different
campuses; intellectually they shared no common courses, texts, journals, or
magazines; institutionally and socially there was no interaction between the
two. My circle of friends in each were different, my experiences and memories
never overlapping.1 The very sights, sounds, smells, and textures of everyday
life in each domain seemed unique, different, and distinct. To be sure, feminists
did study science—but I never encountered a single one of them in my science
department or work. And to be sure some of the scientists were feminists—
but I never encountered a single one of them in my women’s studies classes or
research. To build a connection, I would have to do it myself. Now, suddenly,
my colleague—by hinting that the ideas of variation in my doctoral work in
biology was connected to terms such as diversity and difference in women’s
studies—helped me construct a bridge between the two. I knocked on the
doors of women’s studies looking for an alternative to the sciences. What I
found was a rich set of theories that helped me understand my own alienation
within the culture of science and reenergized me as a scientist. These theories
were (and still are) powerful, providing a view of science as a set of historically
derived practices and cultures that shape our study of nature. Thus, I began
examining the genealogy of primary concepts in my subdiscipline, discipline,
and, indeed, science itself. I began exploring how cultural practices and beliefs
enter into scientific hypotheses, language, and theories despite the best inten-
tions of individual scientists. I now realize that culture, politics, and discourse
are inextricably intertwined in our understandings of nature, especially how
scientific conceptions of gender and race profoundly shape the lives of those
of us who are women, “foreign,” and of color. Life has never been the same!
ix