Australian Women's Book Review: Online

Hecate's
Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434
Editor:  Barbara Brook
Contributing Assistant Editor:  Katie Hughes
Photomontage:  Set in Stone, Adele Flood

Volume 12, 2000

Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media edited by Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk, Routledge.

Reviewed by Jane-Maree Maher

As the editors point out, the title of this collection draws the reader's attention to the intellectual and cultural rubric so dominant in Western Enlightenment discourses whereby science is seen to "tame" nature. Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media seeks to unsettle the comfortable assumptions around the production of scientific knowledge that are implied in such a rubric. For the editors, "science acts as a screen for the hopes and fears of communities" (2). Wild Science explores the many ways in which these processes of screening and projection occur. It also examines how concepts such as gendered identity, commonly seen as "cultural", cross over into and influence the formulation of the "scientific". The collection includes essays critically examining the most recent scientific explorations of the genetic structures of the brain, reflections on scientific data as refracted in popular television shows, and articles that explore the consciousness of both medical practitioners and patients with disease. In its examination of projects such as the Visible Human Project alongside analyses of clinical interventions into HIV treatments and breast cancer representations, the collection considers how science and embodied experience intersect. The "wilding" of the discourses of science, culture and the media is engaged and successfully carried through in the methodological and disciplinary diversity in Wild Science.

The collection begins theoretical constructions of the body in Catherine Waldby's consideration of the Visible Human project, moves through clinical practices such as the practical and legislative status in the US of medical abortions, and ends its journey in the science studies classroom. At this juncture, it examines the status of science studies journals through Slack and Semati's deconstruction of the Sokal affair and its implications for cultural studies more generally. It is at this point that the significance of the collection is revealed as both contents based and structurally implicated. Slack and Semati examine the ways that the Sokal affair dramatises "crises of legitimacy" and the ways in which science studies in particular are seen to be caught up in these crises. They ask, "what acts of philosophical and cultural repression permit belief that studying culture is any simpler than studying science?" (223). This question resonates with the other essays of the collection.

In her article "David Suzuki's The Secret of Life: Informatics and the Popular Discourse of the Life Code", Janine Marchessault opines that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein achieves its ongoing relevance in the "refusal to oppose essence to construction or nature to history" (55). In Wild Science, the address to disciplinary borders sets in motion oppositions between the cultural and scientific realms of knowledge and critique. Rather than acting solely as a critique of clinical, scientific and discursive practices, Wild Science offers a series of narratives examining how context, locality and situation construct and unsettle medico-scientific knowledges of the body. The diversity of material and methodologies practically engage the non-reductive approach that the authors hoped for in their title. At the same time, there is a significant unanimity of voice as the contributors argue against the potential reductions entailed in certain scientific methodologies and paradigms, and this unanimity forms the basis of the collection's strong and substantial contribution to feminist science studies. The cohesion and strength is evident in the rigorous explorations of the intersections and border crossings of scientific knowledge, cultural frames and language that are evident in all the essays.

The impetus to reduce complexity and difference in scientific discourses and representations of the human body is explored in a variety of cultural and discursive locations. From Kathy Davis' entertaining account of Dr Pygmalion's biography to Lisa Cartwright's examination of some of the more confronting media explorations of living with breast cancer, the tools of literary criticism, cultural critique and linguistic analysis are employed. These analyses work to challenge popular and prevalent representations in both the social and scientific domains. The exploration of scientific projects such as the Visible Human Project and the Human Genome Project offer engaged and thoughtful constructions of the relationship between discursive constructions and genetic codes as they operate in the making of scientific knowledge.

The interdisciplinary nature of many of the essays in Wild Science is clear. One example is found in "The Language and Literature of Life: Popular Metaphors in Genome Research" where Jose van Dijck explores the metaphor of "code" as it functioned in early representations of DNA. Her consideration of the modes of communication that are engaged in these representations of "code" demonstrates the enduring valence of literary formulations inside the hard scientific explorations of genetic structure. Van Dijck argues that while the metaphor of genetic code has taken on the appearance of computer codes, the meaning and explanations remain trapped inside rigid codification that does not adequately explore the multi-directional flows of information, both biological and cultural. Thus, literary tropes such as metaphor are used to offer a thoughtful examination of how the cultural field constructs meaning in medico-scientific discourses.

The intertwined development of communications technologies and medico-scientific knowledge forms the basis of the collection's appeal to media. This intersection offers readings of characters and representations on the television as well as examining how paradigms of the computer and the new socioeconomic spaces of the Internet are structuring and being structured by the production of various visual and virtual scientific knowledges. The various arguments posited that the new technologies are often used to present older surviving models of the body carry persuasive force and allow for a critical approach to scientific discourses of innovation. Angela Wall's essay entitled "Mothers, Monsters and Family Values: Assisted Reproduction and the Aging Natural Body" discusses technological advances in fertility treatments that offer some liberation from the constraints of fertility in the aging female body. She also notes that this technological advance does not necessarily disturb the prescriptive media presentations of precisely those women whose needs are addressed by the technologies. Aging women taking up these technologies, in Wall's view, are still caught outside images of the suitably maternal and run the risk of being seen as "monstrous". "The promise of something new mixed with the threat of everything staying the same" (179) is a promise that is foregrounded and explored throughout the collection.

Critical approaches by Waldby and Marchesssault examine the pursuit of ever more nuanced and minute representations to human "life" and body though the Human Genome project and The Visible Human Project. They argue that this project may result in a narrowing of the vision and complexity of the information offered, rather than an extension. In Waldby's terms, the determination to codify the body in the Visible Human Project, to remove the eternal problematic of the fleshy depths of the corporeal, results in "the elimination of heterogeneity and differentiation", rather than the representation of plurality (35). The effect of this construction of the body on the Internet is standardisation that simplifies the living body inside the frame of the corpse. Janine Marchessault argues that the operation of "codes" that have been rejected and transformed in linguistics persists in the biological sciences. Programs such as David Suzuki's The Secret of Life, in her view, then transfer these reductive understandings into the popular domain.

This collection offers a valuable and contemporary resource for those interested in cultural studies, science and the media. In its diversity of methodological approaches and its review of both the intellectual and pedagogical conditions in which these studies are situated, it offers a cogent contribution to the field. It does this through its individual contributions and its productive location and consideration of the terrain. The only question that arose for this reader was why feminism is located as one of the secondary terms in the title. The collection offers compelling evidence that the frame of feminist inquiry under which the diverse methodologies and positions operate is one of the few critical locations with adequate flexibility to explore the dense and often hidden connections that operate in the interactions between science, culture and the media.

These connections are especially evident in Lisa Cartwright's article, "Community and the Public Body in Breast Cancer Media Activism", which offers an analysis of breast cancer representation in both mainstream and alternative press. The article is illustrated with pictures of women post mastectomy. These images are both confronting and empowering. And it is in viewing these pictures inside a collection of such breadth of content and context that the reader becomes aware of the social, political and intellectual stakes of science studies. These images powerfully demonstrate that there are at least three overlapping frames that are engaged by feminist interventions into the matrix of the media, science, medicine and cultural discourses. The first is the embodied experiences of women's lives. The second is the epistemological and social challenges facing medical and scientific knowledges in the construction of conditions and the delivery of services. And the third is the intersection of these knowledges with the discourses of critique and question developed in the humanities disciplines. Wild Science resolutely refuses to disengage these issues. In so doing, it both enacts and explores its central contentions about how these relationships mutually construct the cultural terrain of illness, the body, science and the media.

I recently read a review of a collection of essays that argued that the strength of the collection, namely its diversity, was also its weakness, as the coherence of its intellectual endeavor was somewhat diluted. In Wild Science, the diversity of the collected essays is indeed its strength and this does not suggest the corresponding weakness. The variety of approaches and fields of engagements offer a complex, yet compelling picture of the inter-related and multiply inflected discourses and contexts in the cultural study of science. The collection also makes telling points about the cultural construction of science. Many of the essays emphasize that the exchange between cultural studies and scientific endeavor is multi-directional. They argue persuasively that to consider this critical exchange as only operative in one direction is to ignore the plethora of ways in which scientific projects, visions and approaches are inflected by cultural metaphors and social determinants. Rather than diversity diluting the force of the central arguments of Wild Science, the strength of these arguments is intensified in the variety. As the arguments offered by Van Dijck and Waldby in their essays in the collection show, the pursuit of ever more specific and unified means of representing scientific knowledge and the body does not always result in a clearer picture. Allowing space for the heterogeneous, the excessive and for difference may reflect a fuller and more complete picture. The mapping offered by Wild Science performs such a task and offers a strong argument that feminist critique with its many possible permutations is particularly suitable for such an endeavor.

Hecate's Australian Women's Book Review

ISSN 1033-9434		Editor: Barbara Brook Contributing Assistant Editor: Katie Hughes *Photomontage: Set in Stone, Adele Flood*
Volume 12, 2000

Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media edited by Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk, Routledge. Reviewed by Jane-Maree Maher As the editors point out, the title of this collection draws the reader's attention to the intellectual and cultural rubric so dominant in Western Enlightenment discourses whereby science is seen to "tame" nature. Wild Science: Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media seeks to unsettle the comfortable assumptions around the production of scientific knowledge that are implied in such a rubric. For the editors, "science acts as a screen for the hopes and fears of communities" (2). Wild Science explores the many ways in which these processes of screening and projection occur. It also examines how concepts such as gendered identity, commonly seen as "cultural", cross over into and influence the formulation of the "scientific". The collection includes essays critically examining the most recent scientific explorations of the genetic structures of the brain, reflections on scientific data as refracted in popular television shows, and articles that explore the consciousness of both medical practitioners and patients with disease. In its examination of projects such as the Visible Human Project alongside analyses of clinical interventions into HIV treatments and breast cancer representations, the collection considers how science and embodied experience intersect. The "wilding" of the discourses of science, culture and the media is engaged and successfully carried through in the methodological and disciplinary diversity in Wild Science. The collection begins theoretical constructions of the body in Catherine Waldby's consideration of the Visible Human project, moves through clinical practices such as the practical and legislative status in the US of medical abortions, and ends its journey in the science studies classroom. At this juncture, it examines the status of science studies journals through Slack and Semati's deconstruction of the Sokal affair and its implications for cultural studies more generally. It is at this point that the significance of the collection is revealed as both contents based and structurally implicated. Slack and Semati examine the ways that the Sokal affair dramatises "crises of legitimacy" and the ways in which science studies in particular are seen to be caught up in these crises. They ask, "what acts of philosophical and cultural repression permit belief that studying culture is any simpler than studying science?" (223). This question resonates with the other essays of the collection. In her article "David Suzuki's The Secret of Life: Informatics and the Popular Discourse of the Life Code", Janine Marchessault opines that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein achieves its ongoing relevance in the "refusal to oppose essence to construction or nature to history" (55). In Wild Science, the address to disciplinary borders sets in motion oppositions between the cultural and scientific realms of knowledge and critique. Rather than acting solely as a critique of clinical, scientific and discursive practices, Wild Science offers a series of narratives examining how context, locality and situation construct and unsettle medico-scientific knowledges of the body. The diversity of material and methodologies practically engage the non-reductive approach that the authors hoped for in their title. At the same time, there is a significant unanimity of voice as the contributors argue against the potential reductions entailed in certain scientific methodologies and paradigms, and this unanimity forms the basis of the collection's strong and substantial contribution to feminist science studies. The cohesion and strength is evident in the rigorous explorations of the intersections and border crossings of scientific knowledge, cultural frames and language that are evident in all the essays. The impetus to reduce complexity and difference in scientific discourses and representations of the human body is explored in a variety of cultural and discursive locations. From Kathy Davis' entertaining account of Dr Pygmalion's biography to Lisa Cartwright's examination of some of the more confronting media explorations of living with breast cancer, the tools of literary criticism, cultural critique and linguistic analysis are employed. These analyses work to challenge popular and prevalent representations in both the social and scientific domains. The exploration of scientific projects such as the Visible Human Project and the Human Genome Project offer engaged and thoughtful constructions of the relationship between discursive constructions and genetic codes as they operate in the making of scientific knowledge. The interdisciplinary nature of many of the essays in Wild Science is clear. One example is found in "The Language and Literature of Life: Popular Metaphors in Genome Research" where Jose van Dijck explores the metaphor of "code" as it functioned in early representations of DNA. Her consideration of the modes of communication that are engaged in these representations of "code" demonstrates the enduring valence of literary formulations inside the hard scientific explorations of genetic structure. Van Dijck argues that while the metaphor of genetic code has taken on the appearance of computer codes, the meaning and explanations remain trapped inside rigid codification that does not adequately explore the multi-directional flows of information, both biological and cultural. Thus, literary tropes such as metaphor are used to offer a thoughtful examination of how the cultural field constructs meaning in medico-scientific discourses. The intertwined development of communications technologies and medico-scientific knowledge forms the basis of the collection's appeal to media. This intersection offers readings of characters and representations on the television as well as examining how paradigms of the computer and the new socioeconomic spaces of the Internet are structuring and being structured by the production of various visual and virtual scientific knowledges. The various arguments posited that the new technologies are often used to present older surviving models of the body carry persuasive force and allow for a critical approach to scientific discourses of innovation. Angela Wall's essay entitled "Mothers, Monsters and Family Values: Assisted Reproduction and the Aging Natural Body" discusses technological advances in fertility treatments that offer some liberation from the constraints of fertility in the aging female body. She also notes that this technological advance does not necessarily disturb the prescriptive media presentations of precisely those women whose needs are addressed by the technologies. Aging women taking up these technologies, in Wall's view, are still caught outside images of the suitably maternal and run the risk of being seen as "monstrous". "The promise of something new mixed with the threat of everything staying the same" (179) is a promise that is foregrounded and explored throughout the collection. Critical approaches by Waldby and Marchesssault examine the pursuit of ever more nuanced and minute representations to human "life" and body though the Human Genome project and The Visible Human Project. They argue that this project may result in a narrowing of the vision and complexity of the information offered, rather than an extension. In Waldby's terms, the determination to codify the body in the Visible Human Project, to remove the eternal problematic of the fleshy depths of the corporeal, results in "the elimination of heterogeneity and differentiation", rather than the representation of plurality (35). The effect of this construction of the body on the Internet is standardisation that simplifies the living body inside the frame of the corpse. Janine Marchessault argues that the operation of "codes" that have been rejected and transformed in linguistics persists in the biological sciences. Programs such as David Suzuki's The Secret of Life, in her view, then transfer these reductive understandings into the popular domain. This collection offers a valuable and contemporary resource for those interested in cultural studies, science and the media. In its diversity of methodological approaches and its review of both the intellectual and pedagogical conditions in which these studies are situated, it offers a cogent contribution to the field. It does this through its individual contributions and its productive location and consideration of the terrain. The only question that arose for this reader was why feminism is located as one of the secondary terms in the title. The collection offers compelling evidence that the frame of feminist inquiry under which the diverse methodologies and positions operate is one of the few critical locations with adequate flexibility to explore the dense and often hidden connections that operate in the interactions between science, culture and the media. These connections are especially evident in Lisa Cartwright's article, "Community and the Public Body in Breast Cancer Media Activism", which offers an analysis of breast cancer representation in both mainstream and alternative press. The article is illustrated with pictures of women post mastectomy. These images are both confronting and empowering. And it is in viewing these pictures inside a collection of such breadth of content and context that the reader becomes aware of the social, political and intellectual stakes of science studies. These images powerfully demonstrate that there are at least three overlapping frames that are engaged by feminist interventions into the matrix of the media, science, medicine and cultural discourses. The first is the embodied experiences of women's lives. The second is the epistemological and social challenges facing medical and scientific knowledges in the construction of conditions and the delivery of services. And the third is the intersection of these knowledges with the discourses of critique and question developed in the humanities disciplines. Wild Science resolutely refuses to disengage these issues. In so doing, it both enacts and explores its central contentions about how these relationships mutually construct the cultural terrain of illness, the body, science and the media. I recently read a review of a collection of essays that argued that the strength of the collection, namely its diversity, was also its weakness, as the coherence of its intellectual endeavor was somewhat diluted. In Wild Science, the diversity of the collected essays is indeed its strength and this does not suggest the corresponding weakness. The variety of approaches and fields of engagements offer a complex, yet compelling picture of the inter-related and multiply inflected discourses and contexts in the cultural study of science. The collection also makes telling points about the cultural construction of science. Many of the essays emphasize that the exchange between cultural studies and scientific endeavor is multi-directional. They argue persuasively that to consider this critical exchange as only operative in one direction is to ignore the plethora of ways in which scientific projects, visions and approaches are inflected by cultural metaphors and social determinants. Rather than diversity diluting the force of the central arguments of Wild Science, the strength of these arguments is intensified in the variety. As the arguments offered by Van Dijck and Waldby in their essays in the collection show, the pursuit of ever more specific and unified means of representing scientific knowledge and the body does not always result in a clearer picture. Allowing space for the heterogeneous, the excessive and for difference may reflect a fuller and more complete picture. The mapping offered by Wild Science performs such a task and offers a strong argument that feminist critique with its many possible permutations is particularly suitable for such an endeavor.