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Paper short abstract

Barbara McClintock’s affectively-charged research is a ‘founding parable’ of feminist STS, representing a way of doing science differently. This paper interrogates the significance of recent retellings of this parable, wherein affect is not seen as marginal but integral to scientific practice.

Paper long abstract

Evelyn Fox Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism, has become a foundational text within and beyond feminist STS. In particular, Keller’s argument—that it was through attentiveness, affectivity, and intimacy with her research material that McClintock was able to produce ground breaking research—became central to feminist critique. In this paper, we interrogate recent retellings of this parable, wherein affect is seen not as marginal but integral to scientific research, and increasingly used to justify existing practice and the status quo. We proceed in four steps. First, we establish a feeling for the organism as a key parable in STS. Second, We discuss Keller’s analysis of McClintock, within which the cytogeneticist is understood as epistemically distinct from her colleagues. Third, we detail the ‘Stengers-Despret shibboleth’: a high-profile body of scholarship that took up McClintock’s work in order to evidence that it is possible to do science differently (and ethically). Finally, we examine a contemporary body of work that understands McClintock’s affectively-charged approach as socially and historically normal. We argue that this contemporary deployment of McClintock re-asserts the ethical radicality of this parable (affectively-charged science is good science) whilst making a quite different epistemological argument (McClintock was not unusual; much of science is affectively charged). We conclude by arguing that this reading of McClintock is ill-equipped for dealing with the bioscience in an age of increasingly biological fascism and argue for a re-reading that once again challenges scientists to do things differently.