Preface

These essays originated in a conference on the intersections between science, gender, and cultural studies that was held at UCLA in April, 1993. Our intention was to arrange for a provisional forum in which some of the participants to these three fields ( which often overlap and sometimes refer to each other) could explore and discuss possible areas of interaction and shared agendas.

The conference’s cross-disciplinary orientation reflected also our diverse academic backgrounds (history of science, literary studies, anthropology of science). To those of us based in science studies, the conference was also a way of promoting a di sciplinary hybrid that could tentatively be called “cultural studies of science.” While we did not have (and did not want to have) any narrowly-defined agenda or manifesto to attach to this interdisciplinary label, we felt that the issues, concerns, and a pproaches in which we were interested spanned the spectrum of science, cultural, and gender studies. Others, standing in the space between cultural and gender studies, felt that staging a conversation between these fields had been made urgent, on the one hand, by the interventions of technosciences in the lives of citizens (particularly by computer technology, genetics, and medicine), and, on the other, by our present climate of institutional retrenchment. The latter has placed university administrators a nd departments under pressure to refrain from committing resources to interdisciplinary programs whose agendas are nonetheless featured prominently by humanities institutes and in publishers’s lists.

The conference was, we think, a successful collective performance. It showed both the possibility of dialogue as well as the necessity of operating sometimes laborious translations between these fields. While most of the partic ipants we talked to during and after the conference seemed quite appreciative of the environment that was constructed through the meeting, their individual assessments of the areas of relevant dialogue and tensions among these three fields differed in way s that often reflected disciplinary backgrounds.

The same differences in emphasis and interpretation emerged among the three of us as we were assessing whether we could “black-box” the conference to present a somewhat structured statement about the direction in which the interaction between these fields was likely to proceed. We quickly realized that we could not. What seemed more interesting was not to produce yet another volume that tries to make a “point,” mark a “direction,” or establish a “field,” but rather to continue the discussion that ha d just begun. The desire was not to stake yet another set of disciplinary claims and territories (masked as “interdisciplinary”), but rather to question them. Although the conference was about located knowledges, we do not believe that academic discipline s necessarily provide the most interesting tools for locating oneself. Indeed, staging this conversation will perhaps contribute also to making visible and problematizing those disciplinary positions from which we analyze the organization and effects of s cientific practices in different cultural and historical contexts.

Because we see this conversation as a timely one, we also thought that it should not be delayed by the generally slow pace of academic publishing. A special issue of Configurations—a new journal that has been quite open to the range of issue s and cross-disciplinary concerns we were trying to address—seemed the best tool to disseminate these materials effectively. By doing so, we hope to reach some of the people who may want to join this conversation-in-progress that we hope will have some i mpact on the cultural and institutional landscapes in which we will locate ourselves in the near future.