Abstract
In this broad-ranging analysis of images of women and girls in science and technology in literature, television, and film, Colatrella (p. 8) seeks to “map the terrain of cultural imagery in which science and technology appear as gendered pursuits.” Her analysis concentrates primarily on fiction: novels, short stories, myths, fairy tales, film, television, and children’s media. She argues (p. 3) that these materials “help shape our understanding of individual achievements and instruct us about social norms and cultural values.” Her chapters consider linkage between gender, femininity, feminism, sexuality, race ethnicity, and social class as she explores representations of women and girls as laboratory scientists, users and inventors of technology, detectives and criminals, and medical healers. Colatrella is professor of literature and cultural studies at Georgia Institute of Technology and codirector of its interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology. Her approach is primarily that of a literary critic, but she is conversant with the social science literature on women and science and efforts to improve the status of women in science and technology fields.
Colatrella finds considerable consistency across time and media resulting in largely negative portrayals of women who engage in science and technology. Scientific and technological competence typically is envisioned in opposition to femininity, and especially motherhood. Women who use science frequently do so for evil and manipulative purposes (e.g., Snow White’s stepmother concocting potions in her lab), and women who dabble in science usually are portrayed as dark-skinned and dark-complected and/or sexually ambiguous. She shows how fictional portrayals reflected the social science of their day, such as fictional women criminals embodying the physical characteristics that criminologists such as Lambrusco linked to deviant proclivities. In more recent eras, fictional portrayals of women scientists—largely on television—take the form of what Colatrella terms the “Babe Scientist”: a technically competent, (hetero)sexual, and extremely attractive woman scientist whose personal life is in shambles. These representations update familiar themes about incompatibilities between femininity and scientific proficiency. Other contemporary narratives display women using technology to further relationships and romance (e.g., Meg Ryan’s characters in You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle).
Despite the prevalence of these gender-stereotypical narratives, Colatrella shows that in all eras there have been counternarratives. These typically take one of two forms, reflecting tensions between essentialist and equality themes in feminist thought. Some employ role reversals, where women compete successfully with men in conventional applications of science and technology. Others cast women as using their supposedly “natural” intuitive sense, in combination with scientific logic, to achieve a desirable outcome. The latter theme is particularly prevalent in accounts of medicine, an applied science linking scientific competence and caring. Colatrella uses as an example the film Lorenzo’s Oil, based on a true story, in which a mother develops scientific expertise to fight for unconventional medical treatment of her seriously ill child. One of the most encouraging aspects of this analysis is the discovery that contemporary books and television shows for children provide more diverse, and less gender-stereotypical, narratives than do media aimed at adults. Although sexist images still appear in children’s media, there also are stories of scientifically and technologically competent girls and boys who are attractive, likable kids. However, Colatrella gives little attention to video games and materials available exclusively on the Internet. Such media occupy increasingly large shares of children’s time, and their gender portrayals tend to be sexist and violent.
This well-researched book should have appeal for an interdisciplinary group of scholars, and it would be a useful supplement for courses on women and science, sociology of culture, or media. It is more persuasive as literary criticism than as social science. Colatrella does not develop a well-articulated theory that would satisfy most social scientists about how these cultural narratives affect individual attitudes and behaviors or institutional practices. The book draws substantially from the author’s previously published works. Even with revised chapter introductions and new framing chapters, the flow of the book is not as smooth and coherent as it might be. Colatrella avoids much consideration of science fiction, on the rationale that there has been considerable prior scholarly writing about it. This is a reasonable decision given an already broad scope for the book, but it limits her consideration of counternarratives, since science fiction has been well ahead of most literary genres in challenging conventional linkages among gender, race, sexuality, science, and technology. Nonetheless, Colatrella has written a timely and provocative book that provides both a platform for generating social scientific inquiry and a resource for thinking about effective strategies to increase gender equality in science and technology.