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2 ■ Roots and Routes The Making of Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience MAUREEN MCNEIL F or many of the readers of this volume, the term “cultural studies of technoscience ” may be rather familiar. Until fairly recently, however, cultural studies and technoscience studies were not commonly linked. This chapter is concerned with the trails that have constituted the “cultural turn” in science and technology studies. There have been some conferences and publications that can be cited as markers in the emergence of this field. For example, the proceedings of a 1990 conference at the University of Illinois led to the publication of Grossberg, Nelson, and Treichler (1992), with a section on science, culture, and the ecosystem. A 1994 conference at the Center for Cultural Studies at the City University of New York was much more specifically focused on science and technology. The volume (Aronowitz et al. 1996) that emerged from this conference opens with nothing less than a “manifesto” on the “cultural study of science and technology” (Menser and Aronowitz 1996). Definitions of cultural studies of science have themselves proliferated and range from vague ones, which could embrace virtually any form of science studies, to sweeping epistemological claims. Rouse (1992: 2) chose to define the term “broadly” so as to “include various investigations of the practices through which scientific knowledge is articulated and maintained in specific cultural contexts, and translated and extended into new contexts.” The distinctive element here is Rouse’s highlighting of the work—“the practices”—required in the articulation of scientific knowledge, and his emphasis on its being context-dependent. Menser and Aronowitz (1996: 16), by contrast, are quite dramatic in their declaration that cultural studies is “the name we give to the transformation of social and cultural knowledge in the wake of an epochal shift in the character of life and thought whose origins and contours we only dimly perceive.” Aronowitz (1993: ch. 7) is even more sweeping in his claims for the field of cultural studies, heralding 16 it as the “new paradigm” for knowledge, which insists (in contrast to the natural sciences) on the contextuality of all knowledge claims. Nelkin (1996: 34), an established (and now deceased) science studies researcher, observes that some humanities researchers and social scientists have recently taken to “defining their work as ‘cultural studies of science’ and bringing to bear their skills in interpreting narratives and discourses.” Hence even in a single collection (Aronowitz et al. 1996) there are very diªerent versions of “doing” cultural studies of science, from a rather modest “add literary techniques to social studies of science and stir” approach (Nelkin 1996) to a vision of an epistemological revolution (Menser and Aronowitz 1996). The three recent definitions of cultural studies of science cited here are indicative of the instability of and diversity in this field. I have chosen them because they illustrate three key dimensions of cultural studies of technoscience: epistemology, methodology, and disciplinarity/transdisciplinarity. It is not my intention to adjudicate these definitions but instead to register the uncertainty about the doing of cultural studies of technoscience, and the profound dimensions of the questioning that this list suggests. Against this background, I am interested in tracking some moments in the emergence of the field and reflecting on its contours, its orientations, and its political significance, particularly for feminism. The exploration of cultural studies of technoscience presented in this chapter is to some extent in dialogue with the related project undertaken by Lykke (2002; see also chapter 1, this volume). Lykke maps feminist cultural studies of technoscience as an implosion of the overlapping fields of feminist studies, cultural studies , and science and technology studies. The present chapter, by contrast, is a genealogy that traces some patterns of emergence in analytical practices over time. I want to investigate specific developments involving feminist influence in and shapingof theemergingfieldof culturalstudiesof technoscience.Moreover,Iamoªering here only my own “partial perspective” (Haraway 1991b) with a genealogical accountfocusingprimarilyonAnglo-Americanresearch.Myhopeisthatmyaccount of some bits of the coming into life of feminist technoscience in Anglo-American settings will encourage reflections about other ways in. DIFFERENT ROOTS AND DIFFERENT ROUTES As the preceding brief review indicates, cultural studies of technoscience means diªerent things and may involve diªerent activities. It is nevertheless possible to Roots and Routes ■ 17 saysomethingaboutsomeroutesintothistransdisciplinarydomain.Inthischapter, I consider approaches coming from five diªerent Anglo-American disciplinary/ interdisciplinary roots and routes: 1. Cultural anthropology 2...

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