Abstract
As a scientist trained in molecular biology and neuroendocrinology, Deboleena Roy’s book, Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab, is a truly transdisciplinary contribution to science and technology studies (STS) through a feminist lens. I use the term “transdisciplinary” as opposed to “interdisciplinary” deliberately. Roy discusses the interdisciplinary nature of her research in the introduction, using the metaphor of “stolonic processes of developing new shoots and extending horizontal stems that grow above ground” (5). She describes her philosophical and feminist intervention as part of the continued dismantling of the deterministic and essentializing tradition in the relatively insulated world of laboratory science. Similar to a plant stolon, this book reflects a critical feminist approach to STS that uses philosophical concepts to reach and spread into a constellation of interventions. Roy engages deeply with literature across disciplines, making her work genuinely “transdisciplinary.”
The author’s intention is to offer multiple critical feminist pillars in support of postcolonial and decolonial projects within laboratory science. Roy uses research mostly by scholars focused on postcolonial and decolonial projects, demonstrating another facet of her putting theory to praxis. The foundation of the book, about the role of molecular feminism as a potentially transformative intervention, is anchored to Deleuze and Guattari’s book, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987). Her call to conceptualize the scientific production of knowledge as a process of “becomings” is based on the epistemological origins of the unit of analysis, the molar versus the molecular unit of analysis. This philosophical anchoring provides Roy with a basis to explore the ultimate nonhuman, the molecule, as an ultimately feminist project.
Throughout the book Roy discusses in-depth molecular processes, like in vitro methods for using “cell machinery in order to amplify estrogen receptor DNA” (145), and for social scientists like me, who have extremely limited knowledge of molecular biology, her scientific narratives are accessible and fascinating. Even for those who aren’t familiar with philosophy of science, in which Roy couches much of intervention, she uses metaphor to animate the nuanced connections that comprise her feminist STS approach.
This work is primarily within the fields of feminist theory, philosophy of science, and STS, but its relevance to social science, especially Sociology, shines throughout the book, with assertions like “Sunder Rajan’s argument can be read to suggest that to discuss bacteria as writers, readers, and modelers, is to also discuss them in a contextual relationship—one that is structured by the domains of the life sciences and capitalism” (124). This quote is from the first of three types of cases the author uses to exemplify the role of feminist science in the lab. In this first case, she focuses on bacterial life as a microcosm for fallacies about sex and gender that remain pervasive in our biological conception of these socially contingent categories. In the second case study, she explores cloning, making the controversial claim that types of cloning projects offer potential as feminist science.
In the third case of in vitro incubation, Roy explores what seems to me the most central questions to her call for feminist science—what is “life” and what is it to be human “life.” You would assume that the chapter on cloning would speak more directly to existentialism, but by focusing on a laboratory medium that simulates life processes (as opposed to studies using animals, or in vivo methods) Roy is able to interrogate the laboratory as an arena for life on a molecular level. Therefore, in this chapter, she interrogates the lab as an arena where broader social forces, such as patriarchy and neoliberalism, dominate the manufacturing of knowledge.
In the conclusion, Roy connects her intervention to social movements literature through Minnite and Piven’s (2016) chapter on horizontal organizational structures in urban mobilizing. This most explicitly serves as the author’s call for feminist science as a means to embolden and dismantle the cognitive mechanisms through which laboratory production reflects and maintains hegemony. This, in particular, is where the book leaves open areas for further exploration, especially in ecofeminist traditions. The book is also relevant to social science scholars teaching courses like Environmental Sociology and Social Studies of Science, where students explore the role of scientists in social movement mobilization, especially with regard to the causes and outcomes of science done hegemonically, and science that is not done at all. Specifically, I’m thinking about the urgency for science to focus on addressing climate change and alternatives to fossil fuel production that aren’t based on the potential for those alternatives to be commodified. Molecular Feminisms is an important contribution demonstrating the need for postcolonial and decolonial perspectives both inside and outside institutions producing what we assume is “objective” scientific knowledge.