Paper short abstract:

This paper examines life history writings of feminist scientists to argue that they have leveraged specific affective and relational moves in response to contradictory pressures of scientific subjectivity, and have reconstructed responsibility towards science by participating in political critique.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reads autobiographical writing by feminist scientists to analyze how their affective and relational histories have leveraged feminist critique to reorganize the intellectual culture of their respective scientific fields. Feminist scientists Evelyn Fox-Keller and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein were born fifty years apart on opposite coasts of the United States. Yet, they are united by their autobiographical accounts of scientific education and training. Both authors, Keller in Making Sense of My Life in Science and Prescod-Weinstein in The Disordered Cosmos, write about their formative pedagogical encounters in a double affective register. One, an intoxication and love for science; another, an expansive feeling of loneliness in their scientific communities. Both scientists point to their ambition and intellectual drive in producing this affective register–tendencies that they like(d) about themselves that are then suppressed or denied recognition in the masculinist intellectual culture of their science departments. Both end up making interdisciplinary career moves and arrive with some delay to a feminist (in Prescod-Weinstein’s case, Black feminist) consciousness, that produces feelings of solidarity and renewed commitment towards science. What affective, relational, and political-economic moves did they make so they could effectively do their life’s work? What aporias and discordant pressures are present in their coming-to-feminist consciousness stories? This paper utilizes psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and Deborah Britzman to open up the aporias and contradictions of becoming a feminist scientist, building on the longstanding concern in feminist science studies of foregrounding affective and relational making of scientific subjectivity.