Constructing Whiteness: Popular Science and National Geographic in the Age of Multiculturalism

In some arenas of mainstream science studies, all too often questions that explore the relation between scientific practices and everyday life, popular culture, economic relations, ideologies, and distributions of power continue to be deemed of little immediate relevance to the activities of scientists and thus are deferred, or even dismissed for methodological reasons. Take, for example, the following quote by Bruno Latour:

After three chapters there has not been a word yet on social classes, on capitalism, on economic infrastructure, on big business, on gender, not a single discussion of culture, not even an allusion to the social impact of technology. This is not my fault. . . . It is because [scientists] know about neither [society or nature] that they are so busy trying out new associations, creating an inside world in which to work, displacing interests, negotiating facts, reshuffling groups and recruiting new allies. ¹

Most of these issues never return as full-fledged objects of study in Latour’s work. Recently people have begun to recognize that what is involved here is not simply adding a new angle to the study of scientific practices, but rather viewing these practices as an interlocking dynamic, such that one cannot properly theorize, say, the production of knowledge within scientific practices without reference to a range of critical issues, such as cultural discourses of sexuality and race.

In what follows I examine the specific example of the intersection between science and popular culture in order to consider how science together with its photographic as well as cinematic record makes its objects within its own discourse, and the positions—national, racial, sexual—from which these discourses are spoken. I draw on various documents from the National Geographic, an institution through which American science and popular culture became identified together. ²

There is a whole subfield in cultural studies, an area called colonial discourse studies (in which I am situated), that has also only recently taken into account the workings of gender. ³ Although earlier texts in this interdisciplinary field, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s collection Nation and Narration, have widened the field of colonial discourse in the past decade, what is absent from their theory is an understanding of the way that the politics of imperialism and nationalism are tied to broader questions of gender. ⁴ This essay makes an intervention by foregrounding these connections in the way that it links recent scholarship on gender and ties these issues to those of nationalism, colonialism, and popular culture within specifically the U.S. context. It takes its departure in feminist scholarship’s interest in analyzing gendered and racial constructions of science, but in so doing it broadens the question of gender to include racialized models of masculinity and nationalism. I will argue that while recent work in mainstream science studies is challenging the entrenched view that science and visual representations are produced somehow “beyond” or “above” the social world, ⁵ it is also important to extend such recent analysis to include scholarship that takes into account differences of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and so on.

Now, in confronting the legitimacy of other grand narratives, such as that of “science,” which have often silenced women and minorities, feminist scholarship has put emphasis on the issue of the “location” of the critic, as a pragmatic way to retain some grounding as the older, more universalizing narratives come under scrutiny. Adrienne Rich, for example, uses the term “the politics of location” to insist on the situated nature of experience. ⁶ Others, such as Caren Kaplan, use the concept of “deterritorialization” as a description of identity which is understood in relation to a territory from which one is displaced and with which one continues to negotiate, if only to dismantle it. ⁷ Writing more directly about the field of science studies, Donna Haraway recommends that feminists work from their own embodied perspectives in order to produce what she refers to as “situated knowledges.” ⁸ These three women’s located analysis of the current workings of discourse has put emphasis on two important...