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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
I honestly thought the era of fem sci had reached its nadir some years ago, but silly me.
Sad but true, women’s studies profs have taught their students well as this glaciology paper makes painfully evident. I’ve posted this before, but it bears repeating:
[As this ‘research’ suggests, feminists of her ilk] believe that logic and rationality are antithetical to a woman’s way of thinking and that therefore the tools of logic and science must be replaced with the far superior female instruments: focus on feelings and anecdotal evidence. This way of ‘thinking’ led mathematics professor Dr. Margarita Levin to dryly remark, “One still wants to know if feminists’ airplanes would stay airborne for feminists’ engineers.”
I read this paper too apres Timpf. I fear it is not only serious, and has been published in an actual journal, but is typical of the proto-feminist PC BS that I have found in graduate work in musicology. Pseudo-scholars write this crap on our dime, make full professor and teach generations of students to undermine their parents and to always vote D.
One notes other papers from the Feb 2016 issue of the same journal, Progress in Human Geography (the addled name of which should be adequate warning):
Considering how morphological traits of urban fabric create affordances for complex adaptation and emergence
Geography and post-phenomenology
Alcohol-related violence and disorder: New critical perspectives
Closing the loop or squaring the circle? Locating generative spaces for the circular economy
The study of heavenly bodies?
Check out the National Science Foundation grant funding this. We’ve already paid over $400,000 for it and it still isn’t closed. Copy/Paste from the paper itself,
FundingThe author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work is based uponwork supported by the US National Science Foundation under grant #1253779. Thanks to the GeographyColloquium Series at Ohio State University for valuable input on this project
A feminist volcanologist and a feminist glaciologist walk into a bar. The bartender says what would you ladies like? [Please finish this joke]
Somewhere Karl Popper is throwing up in disgust.
The study of glaciers as anthropomorphised entities is as far from science as brick laying is from being a pastry chef.
Those foolish male scientists narrowly thinking of a glacier as a mass of ice acted upon by natural forced described by mathematical formulas. Can’t they see the colors of the wind?
That’s what I was thinking. Perhaps I’m just not familiar enough with scholarly papers (entirely possible), but it just sounds way too much like word salad to be serious.
Thanks for the funding statement, OldDan. I’ve used it to find the actual grant award at the NSF site here.
The grant does cover “Arctic Social Sciences,” I’ll admit, and it has resulted in three other papers to this point. Not that I’m saying this is necessarily a worthwhile expenditure of our tax money.
Well then, the Foundation should be demanding their money back. That was awful on a number of levels.
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Totally agree.
Actually, I tend to flip it around: would humanity be as violent and warlike if it was either all female or female dominated? My answer, by the way, is yes—yes to the bloodshed, and yes to the suspension bridge, because the problems that human beings needed to overcome with both would still exist. The notion that women could or would just nurture, nurture, nurture because that’s how women are is silly; women are the way women are at this moment because nature (both women’s own nature and “Mother”) presupposes the existence of men.
If a man is available to defend me, I don’t have to defend myself. If no man is available, I do have to defend myself and, should I be successful, whatever gave me the edge (larger muscles, a more aggressive personality, quicker identification and utilization of the local rocks and sticks as weapons) would presumably be passed along to my daughters… wash, rinse, repeat…pretty soon, we’re lobbing nukes with the best of ’em.
One thing the author of the paper knows is what it takes to get funding in modern academia.
If you write a paper called “A Study of the Mating Habits of Squirrels”, good luck getting grant money, or being invited to talk at TED or any of the other places the cool kids hang out.
Instead, you must submit it as, “A study of the mating habits of squirrels in the context of a modern philosophical rubric of matriarchal success in a world threatened by global warming.”
THAT is funding gold. And heck, you might even get invited to a UN conference in Davos or some other beautiful resort area, so long as you can find a way to hector people about the failures of capitalism in the process.
GLD lll,
Re: #63 / Careful there. In Astra…physics there is a clear Coc and orbits not to be crossed.
Climate change, Dan, climate change. Or, perhaps “a patriarchial assault on climatic tranquility.”
I assume that was a typo and that you meant to write “climate equality” or “climate justice”.
The most over-the-top liberal I know is a professor of chemistry. But like most humans, he is conservative about what he knows best. He is quite upset that the women in his department get to fool around doing research on women in chemistry while he must do actual research.
So, on the upside, this conduct is busting up the “Clinton Coalition” of single women, school teachers, nitwits, children, etc. . .
All of a sudden, I see the method in this paper’s madness.
The forces of darkness know that they have a vice-like grip on the political leanings of the academy, even in the natural sciences.
However, they also know that even dyed-in-the-wool commies tend to remain conservative about their own fields of study.
This paper is a shot fired at those hold-outs, warning them that no quarter will ever be given, and no compromises made with regard to the political interpretations of their own work, regardless of how well they stick to political orthodoxy in all other realms.
Really? Four pages and not a single crack about core drilling?
On a more serious note, does these kinds of papers get attention because we are running out of obvious areas of discovery? I realize it can’t be merging black hole gravitational waves every week.
This also seems counterproductive for anyone promoting women in STEM, and fantastic fodder for @Nero and the like. Men tell us how glaciers form, melt, fissure, move, and impact local biology. Women tell us that glaciers have feelings. The new Lady Ghostbusters are better role models.
As a climber, I have spent many days wandering across glaciers, falling into the occasional crevasse, and wondering at the advances and recessions. I can only assume from what you have abstracted from this silly little article was written by someone who has no experience of glaciers or glacier travel.
When the kind of idiocy written by these authors can find a publisher willing to print and distribute their work, we have definitely reached the end of the pendulum’s swing, and we can begin the return voyage to sanity once again. Sort of the way I see the Obama administration.
Yes, I’ll voluntarily submit myself to the required re-education, now.
It’s a nice thought (????), but I think it gives too little credit to male nature for the advancement of civilization.
I think Kate’s comment really just states this–the concept of men and women is meaningless without both. It’s like asking what fish would be like if their were no waters. It wouldn’t really be a fish then.
Let’s flip the hypothetical again. Would men have all the characteristics they needed to produce what they have without women? If they had to carry children, would they be the risk takers who pioneered new advancements or conquered territory for their tribe/nation?
Yeah, I get that, but it cozies up to the notion (without crossing the line) that women could be men if only men didn’t exist. With the totalitarian Left running things these days (and massively confusing us about male/female differences and sexuality generally), I don’t think any of us, men or the women who love them, want us going there.
Put me down for crediting men and their aggressive, competitive, risk-taking natures for getting us to this point of civilizational advancement. I’d also like it if we stop feminizing our boys, as I’d like my daughters to have some men to choose from when it comes time to pair up. But, that’s a whole other topic.
Apologizing only makes it worse. Reject the premise, strike an assertive pose, and wait for the furor to blow over.
“A feminist volcanologist and a feminist glaciologist walk into a bar. The bartender says what would you ladies like? [Please finish this joke]”
I don’t know what they would order, but I think they might have an exchange like this:
Female Glaciologist: Don’t be a moraine.
Female Volcanologist: You breccia!
Believe me, I am a firm God-created-man-and-woman complementarian who believes the distinctions are good. Men and women should appreciate the contributions each make and cast off notions of competition. I meant what I said, not to make it seem the genders should run towards neutered center of bland egalitarianism, but to heighten the appreciable attributes of both.
Aw man, I was looking forward to being appointed commandant of the re-education camp!
“Erasure of women” is something that I am definitely against! And while it evokes my own near-traumatic memories of entering prep school decades ago, I’m sure my suffering was trivial compared to that of women glaciologists. So, I applaud this long-awaited change. And at the same time, I deplore the pace of change, for the pace of change has been…
…okay, this gag is lame, even by my own feeble standards.
Because having a vagina makes all the differences in redox reactions.
Thanks for the Gawker link. The writer seemed embarrassed at having to defend this gobbedlygook, but seems to think the iron was pulled out of the fire by noting that the NSF grant was funding the senior author’s “entire body of research on glaciers”. The snippets Gawker gleaned from the NSF abstract made it appear that the feminist glaciology paper was just a dalliance or a trifle of a serious glacier scientist. Only a pittance went to supporting folk glaciologies of grease-fearing ice piles.
A fuller read of the abstract and a sampling of his other papers reveal that Prof. Carey is not a scientist but a historian. Nothing wrong with that, per se, although let’s not expect any physical insights regarding “theories of ice dynamics” from the man.
This link has Carey propounding on “critical climate history”. He quotes a paper that (incorrectly) asserts, “The elite world of global climate simulation still includes no members from South America, Central America, Africa, the Middle East, or south Asia”. Apparently we need an identity politics of climate modeling because “well-intentioned science can alienate people, facilitate imperialism, or yield injustice and inequality.”
Piled higher and deeper, in other words.