Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity

Description

In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. As she shows, the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field. Banu Subramaniam is an associate professor of women, gender, sexuality studies at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, and a coeditor of Feminist Studies: A New Generation and Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. Preface. The red queen runneth : on interdisciplinarity -- Introduction. Interdisciplinary hauntings : the ghostly worlds of naturecultures -- Part I. Genealogies of variation : the case of morning glory flowers. Thigmatropic tales : on the politics and social lives of morning glories -- A genealogy of variation : the enduring debate on human differences -- Singing the morning glory blues : a fictional science -- Part II. Geographies of variation : the case of invasion biology. Alien nation : a recent biography -- My experiments with truth : studying the biology of invasions -- Aliens of the world unite! A mediation on belonging in a multispecies world -- Part III. Biographies of variation : the case of women in the sciences. Through the prism of objectivity : dispersions of identity, culture, science -- Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated : gender and the making of scientists -- The emperor's new clothes : revisiting the question of women in the sciences -- Conclusion. New cartographies of variation : the future of feminist science studies.