Toward a Praxis of Queer Biology: Feminist Ethnography in the Fields of Animal Mating Science

• In Event: Methods of Engagement: Feminist Approaches to Collaborations in Studying Beyond the Human

Abstract

This paper examines animal behavior science—such as studies of mate choice and sexual display—as a set of cultural, social, and political practices (Haraway 2008). As scientists work to understand animal behavior along the lines of agency, choice, sexuality, sociality, and bonding, they are also often co-producing understandings about our own social worlds that have significant consequences for who counts as human, who has the right to “pair,” and what kinds of behaviors count as “normal” (Willey 2016). I use ethnographic and discursive analysis of a “jumping spider mating lab” and its arachnologists to ask: How do practicing scientists and researchers engage with queer feminist methodologies and approaches to understanding sex and gender in non-human animals--spiders, in particular?
This paper offers two main contributions to the future of feminist science studies across species: First, it demonstrates how historically exclusionary and hierarchical ideas of race, sex, and gender are both replicated and disrupted by contemporary laboratory and fieldwork practices, as well as theoretical innovations, in animal behavior sciences. Second, it presents innovative feminist ethnographic methods and a queer ecology research agenda (for academics and social-change agents alike) that takes seriously the practices, instruments, field experiences, communications, media representations, and political alliances that constitute the very laboratories and scientific communities in and through which knowledge of “queer animals” is being made. I suggest that in order to (re)generate conversations across social and natural sciences, we must also design our research questions, methods, and objectives together.

Author

• Ashton Wesner, UC Berkeley