Abstract
Angela Willey begins her book with one of my favourite quotes by Avery Gordon, ‘We need to know where we live in order to imagine living elsewhere. We need to imagine living elsewhere before we can live there’. These two strands—critical engagement with the present, alongside a joyful, playful, yet ethical imagination of the future—is what Willey brings together so brilliantly in this book. She calls the two strands of her book ‘the politics of science’ and the ‘possibilities of biology’. The two strands are woven together skilfully into a naturecultural tapestry that reveals the intricate and intimate histories of science and society and nature and culture.
Despite the proliferation of interdisciplinary work in recent times, most scholars’ engagements with the disciplines can better be described as multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, that is, they bring together multiple disciplines into the same frame, rather than bring them together to produce something new. Through these works, we realise that the interstices of interdisciplinary thought rather than narrow fissures, more often, resemble giant chasms that prove difficult to cross. In multidisciplinary works, the contours of disciplines are clearly visible. In contrast, good interdisciplinary work point to the limitations of disciplines in answering particular questions. Willey belongs to a new generation of feminist science and technology scholars who are crafting methods and methodologies for new forms of interdisciplinarity, teaching us the limits of disciplinarity and the fertile path of working ‘inter’ disciplines. Willey’s work is truly interdisciplinary, producing through her engagement of myriad disciplines and methods something innovative, novel, radical and integrative.
Willey’s interdisciplinarity has a wide reach—engaging the biological sciences (from studies of animal behaviour to genomics), queer studies, feminist studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies and anti colonial thought. This wide reach of interdisciplinarity is only matched by her equally ambitious methodology—theory, ethnography, laboratory studies, rhetoric, history, historiography, cultural theory, along with a wonderful analysis of comics. Willey displays a stunning repertoire that does not disappoint in its insights. By the end of the book, she has crafted new epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies for what she calls her dreams for a ‘dyke science’.
The focus of Willey’s book is on ‘monogamy’—tracing its enduring historical reach, its political moorings in particular cultural formations, and how scientific and social formations have consistently shaped the institution of monogamy to become a fundamental feature that undergirds civilisational logics of race, colonialism and slavery. Willey exemplifies a naturecultural method. She travels where the naturecultural strands of monogamy take her—through the archives of ‘global sexual science’, to the foundational logics of Christian monogamy, to laboratory studies that are in search of a ‘gene’ for monogamy, an ethnography of vole research, the utopic claims of feminist polyamory, Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, Alison Bechdel’s comic series Dykes to Watch Out For that imagines engaged lesbian communities, and the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn.
In this eclectic and delightful tour of what might seem like unlikely sites, Willey pauses at each to examine closely their connections in the story of monogamy. Each of these is organised into a chapter of the book. In Chapter One, ‘Monogamy’s Nature’, she explores colonial sexual science to reveal how the ‘fruits’ of monogamy and nonmonogamy are borne through the circulations of colonialism and Christianity. In Chapter Two, ‘Making the Monogamous Human’, Willey explores the laboratory studies on voles that are behind claims of a gene for monogamy. In a brilliant ethnography on voles, she challenges any easy claim of what the voles are ‘actually’ doing. She reveals how laboratory studies in ‘operationalising’ their studies into narrow variables and behaviours, misidentify vole behaviour and obscure the vibrant social lives of voles. If humans are not monogamous, perhaps we are biologically polyamorous? In Chapter Three, ‘Making Our Poly Nature’, Willey challenges the claims of the utopic visions of polyamory by revealing its problematic racial and scientific topography. As she argues, ‘If our aim is to destabilize monogamy-centric culture, we do not need more scientific evidence that non monogamy is natural. We need more nuanced analyses of the naturecultural production of monogamy, in which scientific pronouncements are often implicated. In addition to critiques of naturalizing poly discourse, we need alternatives to this mirroring effect; another way of seeing monogamy’. (93). In Chapter Four, ‘Rethinking Monogamy’s Nature’, she uses Bechdel’s comics to explore rich, ethical and loving relationships that are possible outside of the monogamy and nonmonogamy binaries. As Willey argues, ‘In this ethical world, longevity is not the province of sexual romantic love’. Other arrangements, sexual love, romance, friendships and loving communities are possible. In Chapter Five, ‘Biopossibility’, Willey uses Lorde’s work to outline how one might work on science and politics and nature and culture, given the complex and entangled histories of nature and culture. In using Lorde’s extensive vocabulary of our erotic capacities—touching, listening, thinking, talking, moving and building—Willey opens up the imaginations of ‘biopossibility’. She uses Lorde to upset the idea that ‘human nature is monogamous or nonmonogamous (or pluralistic with regards to non/monogamous “difference”) and in so doing lends itself to a rethinking of the privileged status of science in the turn to materiality’ This is not because sciences don’t offer feminists ‘resources’ but because ‘engagement with data cannot generate a “dis-organisation” of the categories that organize our lives here monogamous and promiscuous, social and asocial’. For this, Willey argues, we need ‘queer feminist imaginations and the critical work of making intelligible’.(139)
Willey is particularly adept at explicating monogamy’s ability to shape not only patterns of naturalised coupling but also the biological underpinnings of categories of sex, gender, race and sexuality. In Willey’s able hands, we are able to track and follow how biological and evolutionary logics have shaped the world we live in. Who is smart? Who is violent? Who is civilised? Who is nurturing? Who is faithful? What seem like ‘commonsense’ or ‘obvious’ within our cultural contexts are now rendered to be the monstrous formations they are, steeped in histories of racism, misogyny, colonial logics and white Christian supremacy. This is indeed a book for our times.
While the book is fundamentally about exploring monogamy, to me Willey’s fundamental contribution is in charting a new path for the field of science and technology studies where we engage in more complex studies of biology and culture and science and politics. For anyone who does interdisciplinary work, disciplinary reentrenchment is familiar territory. Exemplified in the ‘science wars’, science and technology scholars are forever open to charges of ‘anti-science’, and biological scientists to charges of essentialism and biological determinism. By now in the field of feminist science and technology studies, it is widely accepted that we need to move beyond the binaries of nature versus culture, science versus politics. ‘Monogamy is not either biological or cultural and historical; neither is it simply both’, Willey argues, and it is insufficient to move from them as oppositional categories to think of them alongside each other, or through each other, or with each other or both together.
Rather, Willey insists that the histories of monogamy reveal to us how both ends of the binaries are problematic, because they claim to be oppositional. ‘Nature’ is considered a unique realm, devoid of culture, and ‘Culture’ an oppositional realm devoid of nature. Willey’s work follows many other scholars in arguing that nature and culture are fundamentally co-constituted. She carefully takes all sides to task, challenging the naturalising of monogamy, alongside any claim of the promises of polyamory. As she argues, ‘If the science of sex and love lends itself to naturalizing stories about both monogamy and polyamory and a dyke ethics provincializes both within an economy of belonging that values friendship and community, how do we think about the nature of monogamy’ (p. 121). Willey’s lasting contribution is in both providing us a methodology as well as a useful term ‘biopossbility’ that helps us to revisit old stories in new ways. In tracing the histories and politics of monogamy, Willey shows us that the histories of nature and culture are so intricately interwoven that they constitute each other. Ideas and concepts can only be ‘naturalised’ if they have the power of scientific and political formations behind them. The thoroughly interdisciplinary methodology, alongside ethical and joyful visions of a ‘dyke science’ give us all a new way forward, where we do not make easy scapegoats of disciplines, but interrogate and integrate our various disciplines through our deeply naturecultural worlds.