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- Convenors:
-
Andrea Núñez Casal
(Spanish National Research Council (CSIC))
Sam Fernández Garrido (Universidad de Granada)
María J Santesmases (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC))
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
Exploring past, present and speculative futures in STS at the intersections of theory and practice, this panel rethinks the relations and traffics between feminisms and biologies. We encourage submissions that make evident experimental engagements of critical thinking with biology.
Long Abstract:
Over the past decade, under the influence of emerging areas in contemporary biology such as the human microbiome, epigenetics, circadian biology, or the exposome, the intertwining of the biological and the social has become an intrinsic part of current scientific debates and practices. While the biosocial has become a key theme in STS and cognate disciplines, these debates often occupy liminal and dispersed spaces within feminist technoscience and queer studies. This panel intends to fill the gap in interdisciplinary and pluralistic feminist debates and experimental engagements with bioscientific theories and practices. The panel is thought of as a collective and emancipatory effort through which to problematise, rethink and (re)articulate the complex and intrinsic interrelationships between the social and cultural and the biological with an emphasis on biologies beyond Euro-American frameworks and with special attention to how and to what extent social experiences (lived experiences, transgenerational transmission), particularly those involved in social categories of difference (race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, nationality), are captured, transformed, (re)produced, and mobilised in contemporary biosciences. We ask: how do scientific theories and practices of biology and biomedicine influence cultural critique? how might we co-generate critical theories from biological theories? How does feminist STS gain relevance to intervene and co-create other ways of doing and transforming the biosciences, its applications, and its unintended consequences?
This is a combined format open panel. We welcome contributions that are aligned with retaining other modes of knowing and practices of being-in-the-world, of cohabiting the earth, against the erasure of data that truncates the production of linear and seemingly "objective" scientific knowledge. Embodied experiences, subaltern knowledges, inter/multispecies coexistences and interdependencies are some of the many examples through which we want to explore and reformulate the (re)production of plural, situated and emancipatory knowledge in feminist biosciences.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Fernanda Wester (Universidade Estadual de Campinas) Daniela Manica (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Long abstract:
The male body has been taken by biomedical and scientific perspectives as a parameter of universality. Even though there is a diversity and variety of bodies, sexes and genders, menstrual blood is associated with bodies perceived as feminine. Despite the many advantages of working with mesenchymal cells derived from menstrual blood, scientific publications using menstrual blood account for only 0.25% of articles of the area (MANICA et al, 2022). Our research questions the extent to which cells, animals and patients are marked by gender in scientific experimental practices, as these results have suggested.
Narratives about menstrual blood cells provoke the field of biology into the blind spot of the neutrality of knowledge, objectivity and the irrelevance of scientists' bodies in scientific making. In this paper, we present a podcast series, aiming to discuss possible feminist perspectives for the scientific production of stem cells, stressing the way in which the sexual difference of cells is mobilized in experiments and clinical trials.
Exploring the language of audio through the podcast, and science communication as a politically situated approach, we produce a feminist narrative that provokes the making of biomedical research. We will bring an analysis of scientific publications on stem cells and data from interviews with scientists, questioning gender and race biases in cell choices and research protocols.
Taylor Riley (University College London)
Short abstract:
Drawing on STS scholarship and ethnographic research with longitudinal birth cohort participants, the paper considers the transfer of the placenta from individual to institution, the transformations that take place therein, and the value of 'placental thinking' in biomedical research participation.
Long abstract:
One of the quintessential images brought to life by researchers and participants of ALSPAC, a regional birth cohort study that has been running since 1991 in the greater Bristol area of the UK, is that of buckets of placentas. Considering the placenta as an emblem of the gifting of biological samples from longitudinal medical research participants to scientific organisations and affiliated researchers in the UK, this paper discusses the placenta’s multiple transformations before, during, and after this transfer. These transformations—from cells into organ, into human by-product often quickly classed by hospitals as waste, into generous gift facilitated by research bureaucracy, into object of inquiry, and into liminal archived matter existing between this state and that of waste which it had previously avoided—reveal unique insights into the cultural construction of the feminized body, the social and biological reproduction of bodily labours, and medical ethics around placenta classification, transfer, and ownership. I ask, how might other states of placental existence and other placental transformations outside of the biomedical structures often governing them challenge and interrupt these characterizations and processes? The paper draws on feminist biologies and STS scholarship, alongside in-depth interviews with participants who have gifted their placentas through birth cohort participation, to frame ‘placental thinking’ as a model for engaging with biomedical research practices and with the studied body and its ever-transforming parts.
Malin Ah-King (Stockholm University)
Short abstract:
As an evolutionary biologist and gender researcher, I have studied the controversy among evolutionary biologists over what sex differences are and what causes them.
Long abstract:
Controversies over sex differences abound and biology is often used to assert essential sex differences. Yet, even evolutionary biologists disagree over what sex differences are and what causes them. This project aims at understanding how and why this controversy over sex differences emerged.
The last decades of biological research have revealed an extensive variability in sex and sexual behavior among animals. However, interpretations of this variability diverge between those biologists that consider the sexes as fundamentally different, emphasizing different sizes of egg and sperm as the basis for male and female patterns, and other biologists that highlight the variability of the sexes due to social and environmental influences, hence the dynamics of sex differences. But the controversy cannot be simplified to a matter of nature or nurture, there are many different sources of disagreement. I have interviewed researchers involved in the controversy and analyzed publications to identify the different lines of conflict, as well as what formed the researchers’ divergent situated knowledges.
As an evolutionary biologist and gender researcher conducting this feminist science study, I reflect on the impact of my positionality as an insider and outsider for my knowledge-making process.
Madeleine Pape (University of Lausanne)
Short abstract:
This paper considers how women athletes are epistemic actors who shape the regulation of eligibility in sport. I argue for practices of feminist dialogue that get beyond "scientific" debates about sex-related biology, break down expert/lay dichotomies, and allow for meaningful exchange.
Long abstract:
A significant body of feminist sociology of sport scholarship has focused on how eligibility rules for women’s sport are rooted not in "biology" but in the ideological commitments of policymakers and the experts who guide them. This scholarship has shown that architects of such eligibility rules––whether applying to transgender women or women with intersex variations––have not succeeded in finding a definitive trait to settle the boundary of the female athlete category once and for all: from genitalia, to chromosomes, to testosterone levels, the bodies of women athletes have proven unruly. Such work has had less to say about the policy role of women athletes, and particularly the unregulated majority: women athletes whose bodies are considered to uphold cisgender, binary norms. However, recent policy decisions concerning eligibility for women’s sport suggest the opinions voiced by women athletes can be influential. This paper considers the role of women athletes as epistemic actors who shape the regulation of eligibility in women's sport, and particularly the unregulated majority: the women whose bodies are seen as upholding the cisnormative, binary system of sporting competition. Using a historical case from the 1990s, and drawing comparisons with the present moment, I show that there is a longstanding need to develop practices of feminist dialogue that get beyond "scientific" debates about sex-related biology, break down expert/lay dichotomies, and bring the "unregulated majority" into policy discussions in ways that allow for meaningful exchange, particularly with the trans women and women with intersex variations impacted by eligibility rules.
LUCÍA EXPÓSITO-CÍVICO (University of Granada) Laura Florez (Graduate Institute of Geneva)
Short abstract:
Our proposal consists of a dialogue session (30 minutes long) about our STS research contexts: the forensic techniques used in the exhumations of mass graves in Spain and Colombia. From feminist perspectives, we critique the bioscientific and colonial aspects that permeate scientific practice.
Long abstract:
During the "COST Action: Unearthing traces of contemporary European conflicts: Materiality, Memory and Technology" in 2023 autumn, we discuss research questions from the postcolonial feminist perspective in forensic sciences. Our arguments coincided on highlighting the urgency of a polyphonic and interdisciplinary forensic narrative to challenge scientific theories in relation to mass graves. Specifically, we focused on the critique of genetic identification, the consideration of materialities and the idea of reparation.
In times of making and doing transformations, our critical reflection aims to 1) claim for a postcolonial feminist perspective applied to the techniques and procedures in forensic fieldwork and 2) deepen in feminist genealogies that ground bioethics and territory as interspecies cartography. We would explore the conceptual and practical possibilities of this proposal engaging our fieldworks and drawing on recent works by other feminist researchers that focus on ‘traces around human remains’ (Crossland, 2013), ‘colonial effects of the forensic turn’ (Robledo Silvestre, 2019) and ‘the affect and care theories in forensic spheres’ (Olarte-Sierra y Pérez-Bustos, 2020).
This contribution rethinks forensic methodological approaches from subaltern academic institutions situated in contexts of war and impunity. Through a dialogue between two fieldworks on mass graves in Southern Spain and The Pacific Coast of Colombia, we interrogate how postcolonial feminist epistemologies might create other ways of doing and transforming the forensic sphere as a bioscience. Especially, reflecting on genetic identification processes and their consideration of DNA in relation to the concept of reparation.