Feminist Technosciences
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In the early 2000s, as India was emerging as a global superpower, a key development project off the southern Indian coast was thwarted by intense opposition. The construction of a new shipping canal angered Hindu nationalists who sought to protect what they saw as the land bridge built by Hanuman and his monkey army in the Indian epic Ramayana . Environmentalists also protested against the canal, claiming that it severely threatened a fragile and globally important ecosystem. As the controversy grew, the religious and environmental arguments converged, reflecting the evolving relationship between science and religion that marks the hypernationalism of the contemporary Hindu right.Through this case study and others, Banu Subramaniam demonstrates the limitations of the «universality» of science, to reveal how science in postcolonial contexts is always locally inflected and modulated. Evoking the rich mythology of comingled worlds, where humans, animals, and gods transform each other and ancient history, Subramaniam demonstrates how Hindu nationalism sutures an ideal past to technologies of the present by making bold claims about the scientific basis of Vedic civilization and deploying this narrative to consolidate caste, patriarchal, and Hindu power. Moving beyond a critique of this emerging bionationalism, this book explores the generative possibility of myth and story, interweaving compelling new stories of fictionalized beings like the avatars of Hindu mythology into a rich analysis that animates alternative imaginaries and «other» worlds of possibilities.
Molecular Feminisms
�Should feminists clone?� �What do neurons think about?� �How can we learn from bacterial writing?� These provocative questions have haunted neuroscientist and molecular biologist Deboleena Roy since her early days of research when she was conducting experiments on an in vitro cell line using molecular biology techniques. An expert natural scientist as well as an intrepid feminist theorist, Roy takes seriously the expressive capabilities of biological �objects��such as bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants�in order to better understand processes of becoming. She also suggests that renewed interest in matter and materiality in feminist theory must be accompanied by new feminist approaches that work with the everyday, nitty-gritty research methods and techniques in the natural sciences.By practicing science as feminism at the lab bench, Roy creates an interdisciplinary conversation between molecular biology, Deleuzian philosophies, science and technology studies, feminist theory, posthumanism, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. In Molecular Feminisms she brings insights from feminist and cultural theory together with lessons learned from the capabilities and techniques of bacteria, subcloning, and synthetic biology to o er tools for how we might approach nature anew. In the process she demonstrates that learning how to see the world around us is also always about learning how to encounter that world.
Gender before Birth
In the mid-1990s, the international community pronounced prenatal sex selection via abortion an �act of violence against women� and �unethical.� At the same time, new developments in reproductive technology in the United States led to a method of sex selection before conception; its US inventor marketed the practice as �family balancing� and defended it with the rhetoric of freedom of choice. In Gender before Birth, Rajani Bhatia takes on the hypocrisy of how similar practices in the first and third worlds are divergently named and framed.Bhatia�s extensive fieldwork includes interviews with clinicians, scientists, biomedical service providers, feminist activists, and international tech advocates, and her resulting analysis extends both feminist theory on reproduction and feminist science and technology studies. She argues that we are at the beginning of a changing transnational terrain that presents new challenges to theorized inequality in reproduction, demonstrating how the technosciences often get embroiled in colonial gender and racial politics.
Figuring the Population Bomb
Figuring the Population Bomb traces the genealogy of twentieth-century demographic �facts� that created a mathematical panic about a looming population explosion. This narrative was popularized in the 1970s in Paul Ehrlich�s best-selling book The Population Bomb, which pathologized population growth in the Global South by presenting a doomsday scenario of widespread starvation resulting from that growth. Carole McCann uses an archive of foundational texts, disciplinary histories, participant reminiscences, and organizational records to reveal the gendered geopolitical grounds of the specialized mathematical culture, bureaucratic organization, and intertextual hierarchy that gave authority to the concept of population explosion. These demographic theories and measurement practices ignited the population �crisis� and moved nations to interfere in women�s reproductive lives. Figuring the Population Bomb concludes that mid-twentieth-century demographic figures remain authoritative to this day in framing the context of transnational feminist activism for reproductive justice.