With a life story that is relevant to her choice of research subjects, Banu Subramaniam has shared bits of autobiography in many of the papers she has published. In a 1988 article in Women’s Review of Books, she explains that her movement into the liminal space between academic disciplines, “… all began when I got on the plane at the Bombay Sahar International Airport on a warm still night ten years ago, with visions of donning that revered white lab coat amid a sea of white-skinned, white-lab-coated male scientists studying the proverbial white male rat.” (1)Feeling a growing sense of marginalization in her doctoral program at Duke University, she decided to take courses in the department of women’s studies—from which she eventually earned a graduate certificate, in addition to her PhD in zoology-genetics. Rather than leading her away from evolutionary biology, the tools that Subramaniam acquired studying feminist critiques of science allowed her to return to her home department in a more engaged and political manner.
Since then, she
has practiced and advocated a science that is activist, liberatory, and
progressive. Such a science is still entirely committed to producing knowledge
about the natural world, but with the awareness that this world—and this science—is
embedded in society and culture and that this embeddedness must be explicitly
recognized and discussed. Early evidence of this orientation can be seen in
Subramaniam’s 1998 paper, co-authored with Mary Wyer, “Assimilating the Culture of No Culture
in Science: Feminist Interventions in (De)Mentoring Graduate Women.”
For this project, three groups (men and women faculty; women graduate students;
and women faculty and graduate students) met separately over the course of ten
months to discuss their experiences in academia. The attitudes revealed are
startling, and the results slightly disheartening. The authors conclude that
“to truly transform the educational experience for graduate women, we need to
deconstruct a ‘culture of no culture’”—that is, the ideal of the objective and
decontextualized scientific researcher—“and name the interpersonal
interactions, behaviors, and rules that govern this culture.” (2)
Subramaniam’s
writing is exhilarating to read not only for the range and depth of her ideas
but also for her enactment of these ideas in a remarkable variety of styles.
Three papers published in 2000 excellently illustrate this point. Published in Evolution,
"Balancing Selection on a Floral
Polymorphism" describes an experiment to determine the
mechanism by which flower color polymorphism is maintained in the common
morning glory. She and co-author Mark Rausher planted five plots, with proportions
of dark, light, and white flowers varying from those observed in natural populations.
After monitoring the changes in gene frequency for a generation, they were able
to show “the first direct evidence indicating that selection acts to prevent
the elimination of the white allele.” (3) The paper nimbly describes
their experiment and analysis, giving a clear example of balancing selection at
work.
Published in
the same year, yet entirely divergent in tone, is “Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents:
A Metanarrative on Science and the Scientific Method.” Here she
tells the tale of the courageous girl Snehalatha Bhrijbhushan, who travels from
“deep within a city in the Orient” to “the land of the kind and gentle people.”
Here she enters “the Building of Scientific Truth,” which lies within “the Land
of the Blue Devils” (mascot of Duke University). After a traumatic interview
with “the mirror” (embodying “the collective consciousness of all the Supreme
White Patriarchs”), Sneha decides to enter “the Great Washing Machine” and
subject herself to its “Seven Detergents.” To see their effect, you must read
the story—but be warned: Subramaniam will implicate you directly by putting
before you three alternate endings to the (tragic) tale.(4)
Subramaniam’s
third paper from the year, “Archaic
Modernities: Science, Secularism, and Religion in Modern India” (Social
Text) begins with an evocative jumble of dream fragments, ranging from a
filmic depiction of a mysterious Western illness entering India, to squabbles
in the corridors of American academia, scenes of religious fervor, school-board
renunciations of evolution, and extensive home remodels based on the science of
energy flow. These fragments deftly introduce the paper, which explores the
rhetoric of religious nationalists in contemporary India, comparing the country
to the secular India where Subramaniam grew up. She ends this paper with
another dream, less fragmented and more hopeful than the others: "I dream
of a world where the project of building a progressive, antiracist, feminist
politics within the social institutions of science and religion becomes
possible.” (5)
These three
early papers provide a good introduction to Subramaniam’s body of works, which
has grown in scope yet retained a connection to many of these same themes. Her
current research focuses on xenophobic responses to invasive plant species and
on how the resulting emphasis on border policing diverts resources away from
habitat preservation. Her first publication on this problem was “The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections
on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions.”(6) This essay also appeared
Making Threats: Biofears and
Environmental Anxieties (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), which
Subramaniam co-edited with Betsy Hartmann and Charles Zerner. More recently,
she and co-author Karen Cardozo related invasion biology to Said’s Orientalism,
Deleuze and Guattari’s “assemblages,” and Haraway’s “naturecultures,” in “Assembling
Asian/American Naturecultures: Orientalism and Invited Invasions” (Journal
of Asian American Studies, 2013).
Subramaniam is
currently finishing work on a book, to be titled “A Question of Variation:
Race, Gender and the Practice of Science,” which will deal with these and other
issues. What makes this book (and all of Subramaniam’s work) so unique is that
she actually practices the science—in this case, performing field and lab
studies of Southern California’s flora and soil—while simultaneously attending
to the contexts of language and history from which the science cannot be
separated.
This
interdisciplinary practice is in line with Subramaniam’s view that “women's studies
programs must make it a goal to produce a scientifically and technologically
proficient group of students and faculty who are not relegated only to the role
of ‘critics’ (important though this is) but are also members of the scientific
enterprise, producing knowledge about the natural world, a world that is deeply
embedded in its social and cultural histories.”6 Subramaniam has
been heavily involved in this project through her participation in feminist
science studies. She co-edited a foundational volume of the field, Feminist Science
Studies: A New Generation (Routledge, 2001), and has also published
more reflective papers, such as “A Conversation on Feminist Science
Studies” (Signs, 2003) with Evelynn Hammonds, and “Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective
Essay on Feminist Science Studies” (Signs, 2009)."Banu's work has been inspirational to myself and my graduate students," says Rachel Lee, who invited Subramaniam to speak at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women on November 5th. "She is an intrepid experimenter in both the scientific and writerly domains following the example of feminist STS trailblazers like Donna Haraway."
--Devin Beecher
Beecher is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. His research focuses on the intersections and spaces between literature and medicine.
--
Notes
1. Subramaniam, Banu. 1998. “A
Contradiction in Terms.” The Women’s Review of Books 15 (5): 25.
2. Subramaniam, Banu, and Mary
Wyer. 1998. “Assimilating the “culture of No Culture” in Science: Feminist
Interventions in (De)mentoring Graduate Women.” Feminist Teacher 12 (1): 25.
3. Subramaniam, Banu, and Mark D.
Rausher. 2000. “Balancing Selection on a Floral Polymorphism.” Evolution 54
(2): 691–95.
4. Subramaniam, Banu. 2000. “Snow
Brown and the Seven Detergents: A Metanarrative on Science and the Scientific
Method.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 28 (1/2): 296–304.
5. Subramaniam, Banu. 2000. “Archaic
Modernities: Science, Secularism, and Religion in Modern India.” Social Text 18
(3 64): 84.
6. Subramaniam, Banu. 2001. “The
Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions.”
Meridians 2 (1): 37.
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