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I Read the Famous Feminist Glaciology Paper So You Don’t Have To
The paper “Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research,” referenced recently on Reason and PowerLine, analyzes how we have come to know what we do about glaciers. Apparently, glaciology has been polluted by men who — wielding pick axes and slinging about equations employing tensor notation — “participated in the imperialist, colonial, and capitalist projects associated with polar exploration [and] mountain colonization.” In case you feel slightly confused, please note the authors “use ‘glaciology’ in an encompassing sense that exceeds the immediate scientific meanings of the label,” and do this in order to capture the themes of “power, domination, colonialism, and control – undergirded by and coincident with masculinist ideologies – have shaped glacier-related sciences and knowledges over time.”
We didn’t know this until now because this topic had been “understudied” while the rest of us were preoccupied with, ostensibly, more important things.
The authors assert that “[m]ost existing glaciological research – and hence discourse and discussions about cryospheric change – stems from information produced by men, about men, with manly characteristics.” This is, apparently, bad: somewhere between very, very bad, and the ultimate crux of badness itself. Apparently, knowledge acquisition and even knowledge itself can be “gendered.” When the authors insist that a “critical but overlooked aspect … is the relationship between gender and glaciers,” they’re not just squabbling about whether the French use a masculine or feminine noun for “ice” — it’s feminine, thank heaven — but are identifying an existential threat. However, they do go on to relate that gender is not just a “male/female binary, but as a range of personal and social possibilities” including “power, justice, inequality, and knowledge production in the context of ice, glacier change, and glaciology.” I’m so glad we got that cleared up straightaway.
The authors deploy a rather large number of words in decrying the glaciological he-men of the past who flaunted their gender through masculine activities like exploring the dangerous terrain of remote ices-capes, planting flags, and drilling cores into the pristine ice. In the authors’ feminist glaciological view, the debate between scientists James Forbes and John Tyndall (men, natch) regarding how glaciers moved across the landscape was settled not by gathering evidence and testing hypotheses, which are mundane and, likely, male-gendered tasks. Rather, they were owed to Tyndall’s displays of masculine dominance in mountaineering, and his deployment of “a rhetoric of manly risk and exertion.” Back in those so-very-backward days, “[g]laciology was for muscular gentlemen scientists” only.
But the authors assure us that the “history of glaciology is not simply about the ubiquity of men and the absence and/or erasure of women.” Women scientists are finally publishing in academic journals of glaciology, even if they are still “often managed by men.” Moreover, females of indigenous peoples have always contributed narratives infused with the special knowledge that comes from close contact with the ice. Don’t believe me? Allow the authors to explain:
[W]hereas glaciologists may try to measure glaciers and understand ice physics by studying the glacial ice itself, indigenous accounts do not portray the ice as passive, to be measured and mastered in a stereotypically masculinist sense. ‘The glaciers these women speak of’, explains Cruikshank (2005: 51–3), ‘engage all the senses. [The glaciers] are willful, capricious, easily excited by human intemperance, but equally placated by quick-witted human responses. Proper behavior is deferential. I was warned, for instance, about firm taboos against “cooking with grease” near glaciers that are offended by such smells.… Cooked food, especially fat, might grow into a glacier overnight if improperly handled.’ The narratives Cruikshank collected show how humans and nature are intimately linked, and subsequently demonstrate the capacity of folk glaciologies to diversify the field of glaciology and subvert the hegemony of natural sciences.
Despite its elegance, lyricism, and wrong-righting, this paper is not without flaw. Amid the long list of “glacier-oriented visual and literary arts” that includes explicitly erotic narratives — including a non-CoC compliant description of two glaciers copulating in Pakistan and the depiction of consuming Alaskan glacial water as a sexual awakening – they curiously overlook the well-known song “Cold as Ice” (Foreigner, 1977). This omission by itself casts serious doubt on the breadth and seriousness of their scholarship.
But, as the authors state, their “goal is neither to force glaciologists to believe that glaciers listen nor to make indigenous peoples put their full faith in scientists’ mathematical equations and computer-generated models (devoid of meaning, spirituality, and reciprocal human-nature relationships).”]. Instead, we “must recognize the ways in which more-than-scientific, non-Western, non-masculinist modes of knowledge, thinking, and action are marginalized” by, you know, science. Indeed, they conclude that if only “we constitute glaciological and global environmental change research differently, we can constitute our future, our gender relations, and our international political economic relations more justly and equitably.”
I simply couldn’t have said it better myself.
Published in Science & Technology
Your tax dollars paid for it. It was funded by the National Science Foundation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plz-bhcHryc
Oh my goodness. The field of Airborne Laser Volcano Lancing is so done for.
CYRANO
Thanks. I simply had no idea and will forevermore, look upon my crampons and ice axe with a deep sense of guilt and shame. I’m even questioning the derivation of crampon.
The good news: true science does open our eyes.
My fingernails are starting to dig trenches in the table veneer. I should laugh this off, but I’m a scientist, and it’s getting under my skin.
Back off man, I’m a scientist.
Let’s try applying their motivation to my field, astrophysics. For too long, astronomy has relied on the masculinized approaches of observation, mathematics, modeling, and measurement—devoid of meaning. And honestly, what has that really accomplished? Can we say we understand the workings of nature any better today than we did in the ancient, pre-scientific past? Should we be trying to “understand” nature at all?
Instead, we should pay attention to the folk explanations of the stars and listen to what the stars are trying to tell us. In fact, these stories survive today as astrology, marginalized in the face of “science.” So let’s bring back astrology to help us understand the reality of the stars as conscious beings. To understand the human/nature relations: “Will I get that promotion at work?” “Is this a favorable day to risk everything on a new romance?” “Should I plan that trip I’ve been dreaming of or stay home with a hot cup of cocoa?”
Honestly, this is the exact equivalent of what they’re trying to promote in glaciology. It’s utter, primitive nonsense, unfettered by facts or truth, and they’re proud of that.
Be kind, try to think in Hayekian terms. The mathematical models and patriarchical scientists were going to dominate us in the name of warming and carbon foot prints. These serious caring ladies (can one use that term?) will liberate us and allow us to consult our spiritual roots, our communities, and Mother Nature . Isn’t that freedom under the rule of law?
Nooooo!
Thanks for this hilarious post. I was aware of the article, but as I had not read it, I previously could only imagine its triteness and awfulness.
I sometimes wonder if progressives keep a checklist of words by their sides. Just from your post we learned that the article contains the following liberal buzzwords:
Also, note how “feminist” is always used in a positive sense, while “masculinist” is always used in a perjorative way. Isn’t that, you know, sexist?
Throughout history, men have outnumbered women in many areas of endeavor: starting with hunting and building, and moving on to exploration, invention, science, engineering, architecture, etc.
I don’t mean to disparage or discount (or erase!) the achievements of the minority of women in these fields. I’m sure there were some early human women who were crack squirrel hunters. There was Amelia Earhart. There was Marie Curie. There were many others. But they were a minority (and not because masculinist men kept women down).
Therefore, can there be any doubt that our progress as a civilization would have been glacially(!) slow if women reproduced asexually and gave birth only to girls? (Be honest; in such a world, would the first suspension bridge have been built earlier, or later?)
The progress that was enabled mostly through masculine achievements (with feminine contributions) ultimately created a society where women’s intellectual strengths have been able to attain full flower and where their contributions are on par with men’s.
Certainly “ice, glacier change, and glaciology” perfectly describe my feelings, thoughts, and emotions after dating some women.
But, the male question of the hour is, how would a feminist scientist-type know about outdoor cooking–with grease no less? That’s a man’s thing isn’t it?
I laughed at your phrasing at first, but then I remembered something from my go-to person for radicalized astrophysics, Chanda Hsu Prescod-Weinstein. Check out “The Decolonizing Science Reading List.” But beware, she is not really committed to the struggle, because I’ve found in her four refereed papers that she’s resorted to that masculinist, hegemonic tool of math. Then again, she’s a theorist, so at least she’s able to avoid the masculinist trope of observation.
It’s a hoax though, don’t you think?
Actually, the business of Airborne Laser Hair Removal for those Feminist Glaciologists out on the field might be good.
TIM H,
May I suggest part of your problem begins with the the term you use for your area of work: Astrophysics. The term itself is badly tainted by overt Maleness.
Try instead Astra…physics. It might just change your entire view of the Cosmos.
Just trying to help.
1. Is this nonsense grant-funded by the public fisc? I know Proxmire’s dead, but has no one assumed the mantle, uh, Fleece?
2. You’ve really shown me the resemblance between modern Femspeak and the acceptable Soviet jargon parodied in Zinoviev.
This is the future, and we simply must accept it. Indeed, we should join forces to make it so. Between the two of us, surely we could “subvert the hegemony of the natural sciences” better than these postmodern pretenders? We should resolve to accomplish this before lunch.
I look forward to the flood of articles that surely will follow that celebrate how the many food and hygiene laws from Leviticus and Deuteronomy are “indigenous narratives” that “diversify the field” and “subvert the hegemony of natural sciences”.
Yes. It was funded via a National Science Foundation grant.
I wish it were. It would be an impressive hoax, on par with Alan Sokal’s joke against Social Text in 1996. But they’ve been giving talks on this research for over a year. I saw an official press release on this paper just the other day, but I’ve searched the University of Oregon website now with no success (though references to the paper are still there). I wonder if they scrubbed it, given the criticism.
By the way, I don’t object to papers on the folk tales of glaciers and how they supposedly react to your cooking grease nearby. That can make for some interesting anthropology. Just don’t claim it’s science. Don’t claim it’s helping us understand how glaciers actually behave. Don’t claim this is superior to measurement, modeling, and math. Let it stand on its own without envying the understanding of the natural world that science gives us.
“…diversify the field…”
So if I relate a folk tale of the moon being made of cheese and I add it to the “scientific literature” then am I diversifying the field of astronomy? Can a white man do that, or only a woman or indigenous person? Can I get a special card that would allow me to add this diversity?
SCIENCE IS HARD!
Here is the laudatory U of Oregon press release.
Nah! I’ll go hoax.
And make you cry during RomComs. And increase the urge to resolve conflicts by “hugging it out.”
Tim H. said: “Let’s try applying their motivation to my field, astrophysics.”
Can anyone deny the obvious phallic symbology represented by refractor telescopes with their longer and longer focal lengths?
If I had the time, I would love to put out parodies of this stuff. I’m not sure I’m up on my postmodernist gobbledygook well enough to turn out a passable imitation today, though. I’d need more coffee, clearly.
For all of you—you might enjoy this Twitter feed: @real_peerreview. That’s where I first saw this paper. It links to a few of these each day.
The feminist volcanology thing is brilliant, Cyrano. As a geologist, I almost spewed. (I also emailed a link to the original glaciology paper to my daughter, a senior geology major in a major UC program (almost volcanology), to see what her reaction will be. I am waiting with bated breath for her response.)
Thanks, Mike. I think. I mean, I don’t want to be responsible for inducing too much “spewing”. It sounds like oppressive masculinity.
Also, I’d like to clarify that I, myself, am not a volcanologist. Based on my review of the postmodern science literature, however, I don’t think that any real, established scientific expertise is actually necessary, or even desirable.
According to the ever interesting Katherine Timpf at National Review Online, the University of Oregon is quite proud of the useless piece of garbage.
The late Senator William Proxmire used to make public Golden Fleece awards for the best (meaning worst) uses (abuses) of public money. Surely this study would have been a front-running candidate for the award.
Ace of Spades fisked this paper the other day. His takeaway:
I think the answer to that question is that the NSF is a bunch of PC cowards and would rather waste taxpayer money on nonsense than risk coming across as even remotely “misogynist” by denying the grant. Got to get the girls participating in STEM after all…
I was on a scientific proposal review panel recently, and one perfectly serious research proposal had a silly pun in the title. We were told to warn the scientist that NASA policy is not to have titles that are easily ridiculed, because Congress likes to go through these and point them out as wastes of taxpayer money. In that case, the actual research was perfectly good, but the worry was that it could look bad if it were publicized with a headline like, “Look what ridiculous things NASA is spending taxpayer money on!”
In the present case, we’ve gone deeper, into the substance of the research, and that’s the ridiculous part of it. The NSF should have been more careful what they were putting our money towards.
P.S: I’ve seen it claimed that the funding wasn’t exclusively for this one project, but more generally for Mark Carey’s research. I don’t know just how the numbers work out, and it may well be true, but the source was Gawker, so…