Metaphors of Scale and Feminist Technosciences of More-than-Human Worlds

• In Event: Latin American Science, Technology and Society: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Issues 2

Abstract

This paper discusses metaphors of “scale” for examining the co-constituted connections of legal, scientific, and human-nonhuman worlds, and for building feminist, indigenous, decolonial STS approaches. It draws its insights from ethnographic research in South Africa that simultaneously examined how a succulent plant native to the Kalahari Desert named Hoodia was reinvented through patent ownership, stereochemistry, pharmaceutical research, the self-determination efforts of Indigenous San peoples, Hoodia growing practices, contractual benefit sharing, and bioprospecting legislation, and that also asked how Hoodia plants interrupted the very forces of law, science, and the marketplace that differentially valued and sought to contain them. While metaphors of scale from chemistry and geology can help guide STS analyses of different ways of knowing (e.g. chemistry, farming, indigenous peoples’ knowledge), nonhuman modalities (e.g. molecules, flowers, seeds), and the governing of knowledge production (e.g. patents, bioprospecting permits, benefit sharing agreements), they remain limited without the insights of feminist intersectional approaches that emphasize scale for analyzing how different ways of knowing, being, and doing in more-than-human worlds are valued differently in society. They also exist in tension with metaphors of scale from law as a machine for weighing, which can reduce STS analyses to a balancing of different ontologies, epistemologies, and responsibilities as competing interests that are singular and unrelated, thus offering a narrow future for social justice. This examination of the genealogies, limits, tensions, and possibilities of metaphors (and methodologies) of scale contributes insights for a feminist technoscience considering questions of more-than-human worlds, the subterranean, and the physical sciences.

Author

• Laura Foster