Discussing the masculinized narratives of physics training and feminist critiques of archaeology

1. Gender in Science
Ethan Hein

2. Sharon Traweek - Pilgrim's Progress

3. Undergraduates
• Learn from textbooks whose
interpretation of physics is not to be
challenged, or even seen as
interpretation
• Solve a repertoire of known problems
Graduate students
• Start to imagine themselves as
members of the physics community
• Learn the style of "doing” physics via
stories of success and failure
Postdocs
• Learn self-assertion and competitive
bravado
• Begin to learn and communicate
about physics orally
Only 25% remain in the field after 15
years of training

4. Physicists see themselves as an elite meritocracy in which
everyone has a fair start
Informal dress code, non-fancy offices, "first naming," social
eccentricity and childlike egoism "are cultivated displays of
commitment to rationality, objectivity, and science"

5. Roland Barthes:
"The origin of work
is not in the first
influence, it is in
the first posture:
one copies a role,
then by metonomy,
an art; I begin by
reproducing the
person I want to
be."

6. Quantum Physics by
Eyvind H. Wichmann:
a widely used
undergrad textbook
Presents its topics as
unfolding logically
and chronologically,
with each discovery
building on the
previous one
Its history of physics is
"a short hagiography
and a list of miracles"

7. Gaining sole responsibility for
a risky project requires self-
assertion, bravado, disdaining
the work of others, and
willingness to expose mediocre
work
Desired self-presentation:
competitive, haughty, and
superficially nonconformist
Discrepancy between official
values (cooperation, deferring
to authority) and hidden values
(competition, transgression)
creates a "double bind"

8. High school physics textbook: particle physics is "the
spearhead of our penetration into the unknown"
The shaft extending behind it: chemistry and engineering, then
biology, then (maybe) the social sciences and humanities

10. The physicist's story is a
picaresque: a journey that
begins with loss of innocence,
depicts growth of strength and
pain of betrayal, hails the
achievement of success,
valorizes discoveries, looks
back in "erotic nostalgia," and
eulogizes the heroic dead
Picaresque is a "male" genre;
women supposedly do not
gain strength and wisdom
through "the rambunctious
loss of their innocence"

11. "The scientist is persistent,
dominant, and aggressive,
ultimately penetrating the
corpus of secrets mysteriously
concealed by a passive,
albeit elusive nature. The
female exists in these stories
only as an object for a man
to love, unveil, and know."

12. Social and emotional worlds: arbitrary, unknowable,
uninteresting, requiring skills not thought to be based on
reason, e.g. persuasion; therefore emissaries to "the world
of the merely human" are disbarred from practicing science
Women and minorities are at a disadvantage because
they can't ignore social experience

13. Alison Wylie
The Engendering of Archaeology
Alison Wylie -
The Engendering
of Archaeology

14. A critical mass of women entering archaeology led to
emergence of feminist critiques
Female archaeologists are not necessarily overtly
political; they are simply more inclined to be skeptical of
norms and assumptions around gender underlying
archaeological interpretation and research agenda

15. Content critiques (as opposed
to equity critiques):
choices of research problems
and determination of
significant sites, periods or
cultural complexes that neglect
women and gender even when
they are a crucial part of the
story
Archaeology does not
necessarily ignore women and
gender altogether, but
conceptualizes them in
normatively middle-class,
white, North American terms

17. Feminist challenges to romantic ideas about "Man the Hunter"
- ethnohistoric evidence shows women as highly mobile, and
that their foraging activities provide most of a hunter-gatherer
community's dietary intake

18. Joan Gero
• Men dominate Paleo-Indian research and focus almost
exclusively on hunting
• Women focus on edge-wear analysis of stone tools; are
cited less than male colleagues even when they do
mainstream research (except when they coauthor with men)
• Research on stone tools show that Paleo-Indians foraged
plants to complement diet of Pleistocene mammals

19. Pat Watson and Mary Kennedy:
• Who domesticated plants? Pre-feminist theses: plants
domesticated themselves, or male shamans cultivated them
• Ethno- and paleobotanical evidence show key plants
appearing very early in environments that were not
optimal for them, indicating human intervention
• Women in foraging societies do most plant exploitation
and processing and hold primary expertise about plant
and animal resources
• Shamans aren't always men

20. Christine Hastorf:
• Gendered organization of domestic units in highland
Andes was significantly altered by incorporation into
the Inka state
• Therefore gender relations and household
organization cannot be treated as a stable substrate
that predates and persists as a given

21. Is archaeology politics by other means? Critics of feminist
research bemoan nihilistic "hyperrelativism” - if there is no
"view from nowhere,” how can we have facts at all?
Feminist researchers: diverse standpoints can enhance
empirical accuracy, explanatory breadth, and rigorously
critical perspective by evaluating claims or assumptions
that might go unquestioned by a homogeneous community