Lady Science Podcast

For this episode, the hosts discuss tech start-up products, services, and devices sent in by listeners, with a few of their own thrown in. From pregnancy devices to diet and weight loss products, the hosts discuss issues of self-surveillance technology and gender in the tech industry. For shownotes, visit www.ladyscience.com/episode14-the-tech-industry-and-their-bad-ideas

01:05:00

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg

Guest: Dr. Joy Rankin

Producer: Leila McNeill

Music: Careful! and Cassie Lace by Zombie Dandies

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In this episode, the hosts have an extended interview with long-time Lady Science contributing editor Joy Rankin, author of the new book A People's History of Computing in the United States. Then the hosts air their (many) grievances about the latest academic hoax "Sokal Squared."

A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

Joy Lisi Rankin

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian

Transcription by Rev.com

(intro music)

Rebecca:

Welcome to Episode 13 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science magazine.

Anna:

I'm Anna, co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm a writer, editor and PhD student studying 20th-century American culture and the history of the American space program in the 1960s.

Leila:

I'm Leila, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the Internet, and I am currently a regular writer on women in the history of science at smithsonianmag.com.

Rebecca:

I'm Rebecca, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the Internet and managing social media for the Science History Institute in Philadelphia. Today, a little later, we're going to be joined by a Lady Science contributing editor, J. Rankin. She's going to be talking about her new book, A People's History of Computing in the United States. So we're pretty excited about that conversation.

Anna:

So, before we get into our conversation with Joy, we do want to remind everyone that this month, October, is Lady Science's fourth anniversary and–

Rebecca:

Yay!

Anna:

We did it.

Rebecca:

Barely.

Anna:

I mean, not that four was a specific goal and now we're done or anything, whatever.

Leila:

That would also be a weird number to end on.

Anna:

We're going to do this for four years and then we're going to quit.

Leila:

Yeah, we can't make it to the five. Sorry. Yeah, we're tired.

Rebecca:

We don't believe in round numbers here.

Anna:

Well, that's not true. We believe in as many years of Lady Science as we can possibly do, and we've been able to get this far because of our awesome readers and listeners. So if you want to continue being awesome and send us money for our birthday, that's always welcome. (laughter) You can do that at patreon.com—

Rebecca:

Presents!

Anna:

—/ladyscience or ladyscience.com/donate if you want to make a one-time donation. You know, $40 for four years? I don't know.

Leila:

Just so you know, we now have our sights set on going to PodCon, and someone had asked us to be on a science panel, but we, for some reason, did not have the forethought to think about going to PodCon. So that will be something that we have on the docket for fundraising for the next PodCon. So if you want to give us some money for that, that we'll squirrel away so that we can go national.

Rebecca:

Yeah. We've decided that academic conferences are silly and podcast cons just sound like a lot more fun. So let's do it.

Leila:

To our academic listeners, I mean–

Rebecca:

We love you, but–

Leila:

–it's true. (laughter)

Rebecca:

The conferences are terrible. It's not about you, it's about the conferences, let's be real.

Leila:

Yeah, it's none of you individually.

Anna:

It's just when you all get to the same place. I'm glad this is coming out after we've already been at one conference, but it is before we will be at another one, so a little dicey. But next year, we're just doing PodCon and fun things. I mean, yeah.

Leila:

Let's just keep digging this hole. (laughter) Keep on digging, there is no bottom.

Anna:

Anyway, I did want to just remind everybody that we're right in the middle of our sports series that I've been editing, so make sure you're looking for that. We have already published a great piece on hockey and another piece on masculine fitness, and we have some good stuff coming up about football, roller derby–so stay tuned for more sports content.

Leila:

So before we jump in to the interview, which I actually—this is Leila—was not there for, but before we roll that, we do want to say that we know that many of you, as are many of us on the Lady Science team, are really struggling with what we've seen, well, for pretty much the past two years, probably more, the whole 2016 area-ish until now. But especially with what happened with the Supreme Court nomination, and that Brett Kavanaugh did get confirmed, even though he had multiple sexual assault allegations. So we know that the whole situation has caused many, many, many, many women to confront and relive their own traumas, and so we just want to take a second and say that we believe you and we hear you and we stand with you.

(music break)

Rebecca:

Okay, let's jump right in. We've already said that Joy is a contributing editor to Lady Science, but we'll let Joy tell you a little bit about herself and the work that she does. Welcome to the podcast, Joy. Welcome again, I should say.

J. Rankin:

Thank you.

Anna:

Hi, Joy!

J. Rankin:

Hi, Rebecca and Anna! Thank you. So first, I want to say thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I am so happy to be here. I also have to pause and thank Anna and Leila for creating Lady Science four years ago. Happy Birthday, Lady Science!

Rebecca:

Yay, that's so exciting.

Anna:

Yay, thank you.

J. Rankin:

I value it so much as a space for thoughtful and clear writing and talking about how gender and science and technology and medicine are inseparable. It's actually one of the things that I am proudest of that I do, is be a contributing editor here. So: thank you!

Rebecca:

Thank you.

Anna:

Yay.

J. Rankin:

So about me, I could say—I was thinking about this because "think a lot" is what I do. I could say I'm a historian, or a writer, or a partner, or a parent. But to me, those are static and boxed in, and this will be a theme that comes up again. I prefer thinking about actions and doing and what people do every day. So I like to learn and I like to write: traditional disciplines and boundaries need not apply. For as long as I can remember, I've studied things in combinations other people tend to find unusual. Like when I was a math major, I wrote an encryption program, but I also wrote about the history of cryptography. So I've also studied opera and theater, and written a play and worked on documentaries. And now I've written a book!

Rebecca:

Awesome. Well, speaking of that book—it's of course what we're here to chat with you about—so can you tell us just a little bit about A People's History of Computing and what makes it different from other computer origin stories?

J. Rankin:

So the people in A People's History of Computing in the United States are students and educators (which would be K-12 teachers, college and university professors) who built and used academic computing networks, then known as "timesharing systems," during the 1960s and 1970s. So some examples of this are, there is a network across New England of high schools and colleges and universities that centered at Dartmouth College. It's called the Kiewit network or the Dartmouth Timesharing System. I also write about Minnesota, which had an incredible statewide timesharing network by the mid-1970s, and also a network based at the University of Illinois called the Plato System.

So my book is a history of the digital age that emphasizes creativity, collaboration, and community. So I'm arguing that these timesharing networks were not coming from individual genius—they were not the product of the military-industrial complex—but rather they were created for and by students and educators at public schools and universities as civilian civic-minded projects.

I think origin stories matter a ton in talking about where we came from culturally, socially, and what we think of as the possibilities for the present and the future. So in my book, I talk about the "founding fathers' origin story" of digital culture. So sort of broadly, it's a focus on homebrew hobbyists—Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos—and that sort of founding fathers' origin story says only a few people can create change. To me, that's a pretty limiting history. So in contrast, my book points to hundreds of thousands of everyday people who were creating computing communities and making personal and social computing. So I think my history is more optimistic and more empowering because it's a history of many different people creating digital worlds.

Anna:

Okay. So in terms of origin stories, I do want to back up a little bit and just talk about why you work on the history of computing and how you became interested in this topic. I just always like to ask people about their own sort of scholarly origin story, because usually it's super weird. Especially I find for historians of science and technology, it's usually just really strange and roundabout.

J. Rankin:

Yes. It is also a strange and roundabout story for me. So after college, I worked—I had a career that the unifying theme was I launched educational programs, and it was often educational programs that involve technology. So launching an online site that did English as a second language or English as a foreign language, or doing online courses for rural students, that kind of thing. And every time—every time—I was always impressed with and inspired by how creative the students, the teachers, the users would be with whatever technology we put in front of them. They never did exactly what they were supposed to do, but they always did something new and more interesting, and if they had to problem solve or figure it out, they could, and they did. I saw this day in and day out for almost a decade.

So that's the first part. The second part is—I guess I should say to finish that up, I sort of carried that in my head and in my heart when I finally decided to get a PhD and was sort of thinking about doing the history of science and technology, that I was like, "Wait a second, there are all these people out there doing really interesting things with technology and we don't hear these stories." The second part is that I did my undergraduate degree at Dartmouth, which I write about in the book, and Dartmouth had a very rich computing culture in the 1990s when I was there, and it seemed to me like a sort of logical place to start. I knew a little bit about the history from being a student there, and when I thought about like, "Where's a place I could start looking to tell this story?" that was one of the places.

Anna:

Okay. All right. Let's go ahead and—I'm going to jump into the book textually. I have quotes and stuff. (laughs) So in the introduction, you write—I think this ties into what you said when you were sort of introducing yourself and talking about action and being interested in doing and what people do. You say, "We need histories not of computers, but of the act of computing." So I guess professionally, sort of you would be classified as a historian of technology, even though we just talked about boxes. So I'm interested in what that distinction means for you, and what does it mean maybe for history kind of methodologically and also I think the way you intended it, kind of maybe politically as well?

J. Rankin:

Yeah. So this to me is absolutely crucial, because I think when we think about a history of the computer or a computer or even a history of sort of technology, we think of sort of a product or a machine or a device or a system, but that often sort of erases or masks the fact that science and technology are produced by people. So they're social. Science and technology are social. It is people making technology and people sort of constantly creating and inventing and reinventing what technology means or what computing means in particular. So when we talk about computers—or now if we, I think, talk about social media platforms—it's that we're thinking of things that are somehow separate from people, objects unto themselves, and it's like a disconnect between the people and the technology. So I think that's a really false separation. Computing and networks and social media wouldn't be what they are without people.

So I wanted to underscore focusing on computing, the act, and the fact that there are people doing the act of computing, and a practice gets at the idea that people are making and remaking technology all the time. In some ways, think of the 1960s and 1970s as that long ago, but I feel like this history has been largely forgotten. I mean, just in the same way that the fact that women were computers is largely forgotten history. Part of why I'm interested in this book, I say it at the end, I sort of hope—my biggest hope is that it creates more people's histories of technology and sort of recovers all of the people doing these things rather than giving us a few founding fathers.

Anna:

Yeah. So this idea of founding fathers is obviously really integral to your story and this idea that I think fathers is intentional, right? In part because obviously all the men that are sort of talked about in this Silicon Valley sort of mythology of personal computing, they're all men anyway. But I'm wondering what role does gender play in your story sort of on the people's end of things?

J. Rankin:

Yes. So I was looking back through the book, and I realized that gender is everywhere in this story! What role does gender play? So I will say this, it is everywhere in this book, even when I am not explicitly calling attention to it. By that I mean, gender is everywhere in this book in the same way that it's everywhere in society. It's about how relationships and interactions between people, or people in institutions, are structured and shaped and interpreted and made and remade sort of every moment and every interaction. So it's not separate from technology, it's not separate from computing. Gender was and is constantly created and interpreted by the same people who were creating these computing practices and communities in the 60s and in the 70s.

One overarching theme of the book is that girls and women were present and active in these communities in the 1960s and 1970s, but their activities even at the time weren't recognized or sort of remembered after the fact as much as the work done by boys and men. I think one of my favorite examples of this is the women teachers who taught and mentored students on the Dartmouth Network, or the Kiewit Network, which is this network of schools around New England. They had to learn this timesharing system, they had to learn how to write programs in Basic, and then they were teaching this to their students, they're troubleshooting, they're problem solving and mentoring them, and they were recognized at the time for really creating very vibrant computing communities, but were forgotten after the fact.

Rebecca:

The little bits about the students at Dartmouth, and just the degree to which the programs that the kids are creating are exactly what like college boys anywhere would create. It's like, "I have the chance to make a game: it's going to be a football game. I have a chance to make a game: it's going to be Battleship." There's something that is so almost like parody 1950s varsity jacket-wearing New England college boy, but so many other different things that they're doing, and it's easy to take that as the default, as the assumption, as the "Of course that it is." But of course that relates to who was there at the time and who had access to computers and all those sorts of things. But you end up with, yeah, this very hilariously gendered collegiate series of programs that these guys create. (laughs)

J. Rankin:

Yes. Yeah. I mean, it was important to me to sort of not just say, "Oh, computing at Dartmouth was masculine because it was all-male until the early 1970s," but rather to sort of show in detail how computing also becomes masculine with these games, with the socializing, with, "Oh, let me bring my winter carnival date to the computing center to show her my computing prowess." (laughter) To me, that's also sort of a story of showing that it's not necessarily obvious and that it's not necessarily—it didn't have to be that way, maybe that there were other paths. Because the sort of what I think of it as the contrast to that is, there were so many women working at the computer center at Dartmouth, at Kiewit, in the 1960s and in a diversity of roles. But they, too, have been forgotten, or sort of in a way that the culture became masculine and erased them or sort of signaled their participation differently.

Rebecca:

So you talked a little bit about this earlier, but you write that the Silicon Valley myth has really overtaken the history of computing, and that is obscuring this real story that isn't about personal computing at all, but it's said about this collaborative computing, especially in academic settings. So I was wondering if you could talk about the Silicon Valley myth, and then how you see it manifested outside of academic history in kind of the everyday understanding of how technology has developed.

J. Rankin:

So the Silicon Valley myth that I write about includes what I would call the founding fathers' idea, which I talked about earlier. So really a sort of history of computing, or a history even more broadly of digital technology today, that focuses almost exclusively on Silicon Valley, on big names of big corporations. So a history of digital culture that starts with Apple and Microsoft and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and sort of jumps to the era of iPhones and the Internet and Facebook and Google. I think in the United States right now, our cultural moment is dominated by Silicon Valley, dominated by these few big corporations: Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter. But most people think as a result that the United States owes its sort of digital heritage and its current digital creativity to a few guys, or a few corporations that were started generally by guys.

So again, it's such a limiting story. I think it does us a disservice. I like to think that my history of students and teachers and principals and professors illuminate a world of collaboration with the vision of computing and technology for the collective public good. I think because the people in my book are not the usual suspects, having more stories from under-listened to or under-heard people can help us paint a more complex picture of our digital and social heritage and help us imagine more possibilities for the future, and maybe look to ways that we might want to rethink what's happening now and what the possibilities are going forward.

I will add one more thing here, which I think sort of is related to the Silicon Valley mythology, which is another theme in my book, is I want to point to and emphasize the role of investment in public education and in science and technology research and say that was valuable. Clearly it underwrote a lot of the networks that I write about. But also, K-12 education was not where technology went to die. I think right now there's sort of an idea that—this is certainly not my view—but that sort of public schools are where nothing new or creative or innovative happens with technology. And that makes me really sad, because I've seen the creativity firsthand and I've seen the magic that happens. This book is a testament to the outcomes of investing in education and research.

Rebecca:

One thing I kept thinking of in reading here, reading the book is, so once in a while you'll see on the Internet, people refer to late millennials as the "Oregon Trail Generation" sometimes. So people who are in their mid-30s now. Really it's based around the idea that we were all introduced to computing via elementary and middle school, and this idea that an educational setting was really the way that the Oregon Trail Generation first interacted with computing technology. Therefore, there was kind of—the older millennials kind of remember sort of a pre-personal computer world and then being introduced to it. Even given that, the fact that education was this place where computing first entered the lives of people who are adults now and are running a lot of this technology stuff has been lost, and that's really sad.

J. Rankin:

Yes! Yes, absolutely. I will say, full disclosure, I am of the Oregon Trail Generation. I remember being introduced to computing, I think Commodore 64s in my public school in Connecticut. Also, I will say part of what—one of the delights of my book was writing the history of the Oregon Trail and learning that really it goes back to the 1960s in Minnesota and there's a connection to Dartmouth—and I'll let people read the book to find out the rest of that story. But Steve Jobs, I think it was an interview he did with The Smithsonian, where he said Basically Apple in the 1980s owed its success to education, because they sold–

Rebecca:

Seriously! I remember all those Apple computers.

J. Rankin:

–computers! They sold computers to schools.

Rebecca:

Yeah.

J. Rankin:

So it was absolutely crucial and has been largely forgotten. Yeah.

Anna:

Yeah, I was just going to say, I think my first experience with a computer was an Apple II, which by the time I was in middle school was already kind of ancient. It was pretty old by then. Big five-inch floppy disks. But yeah, certainly Oregon Trail for sure. So since we were speaking about some of these specific technologies, I think you do such a good job of explaining the technology in this book, well, for us, the Oregon Trail Generation who knows nothing about what computing was like in the 60s, except that ENIAC was the size of a room or whatever. (laughs) So I'm just wondering kind of, what was your research process to kind of cover your bases in terms of the technology? Did you learn any of these programming languages? You said you had a career in this earlier, so I'm assuming that you already know all about that.

J. Rankin:

So first, thank you, because writing about this in a way that made sense to people and was not in any way sort of obscure or obtuse or difficult to understand, it's one of the things that I really set out to do. I wanted readers to understand the networks and the timesharing because I wanted it to be approachable history. I think I was actually inspired—So in my research reading about Kemeny and Kurtz, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, who sort of outline the principles behind the Dartmouth timesharing system, the Dartmouth Network. They always put the user first, and reading through their documentation for the system, it's super clear and understandable, and I thought, "I will put my reader first." I want my readers to be—I want her to be able to understand what I'm talking about, and I wanted to give the readers sort of some of the elegance and in some ways the simplicity of these systems and the approachability of Basic, in the same ways that the students and educators of the 60s and 70s were enthusiastic about them.

It was something that sort of screamed out from every source I looked at, was how much students and teachers loved these networks. They loved Basic, they generally thought it was easy to learn and incredibly sort of personally productive and creative. I will say, so other people at the time and since have criticized Dartmouth's system for example, or Basic as "not a real programming language" or not technical enough. I think there's probably a whole other essay I could write in there about gender and what it means to be "technical enough" or not, but I think Dartmouth's network and Basic accomplished exactly what the community set out to do, which was get people computing.

So I did learn some Basic as part of my research, which was generally fun. But I had also had experience, yes. In college, I sort of wrote some programming, and then in my work afterwards, I had done programming as well. So I had some familiarity there, but I also wanted to understand it in a way that I could share it with my readers and have them understand it and feel enthusiastic in the same way.

Rebecca:

So you talk about the transition from computing citizenship to computing consumption. So I was hoping that you could talk a little bit about that transition and what you mean by citizenship in this particular case.

J. Rankin:

Yes. When I researched and even was writing the book, I really struggled with the idea that all these students and educators were just users, and that was sort of, at the time, the best word I could think of or sort of how people were categorizing them. But as I was researching and writing, I was thinking, no, they're creating and they're making and they're doing, and I thought about them as authors writing programs or makers and programmers and coders, but none of those ideas was quite right. As the book came together and writing and revising, and I realized the centrality to my argument of this idea of a collective and community and a collective good, I realized this membership in a computing community is central.

So I introduced the concept of computing citizens to describe those who access the timesharing network. It's a broad definition of a computing citizen, but it really hinges on membership and/or access to, or participation in a computing community. So it's broad and inclusive, in the same way, it mirrors the ways in which the advocates of timesharing networks envision computing access as broad and inclusive. I have a chapter in the book that talks about the vision of computing as a public utility, and really the idea in the 1960s, that was hugely popular and widespread that computing, that would be something like electricity or water, where it would be publicly available and regulated for the public good. So citizenship to me as well emphasizes the communal institutions, the schools, the universities, state and federal government, and the National Science Foundation, for example, that enabled access.

To get to this shift to computing consumers, what I realized as I got to the end of this story is that sort of the story ends in some ways when Apple comes on the scene and starts selling individual computers, a product, a machine that people can buy. Largely, for much of our history, that's been something that's celebrated like, "Hurrah, the arrival of the personal computer. Isn't this great? Everyone can have their own." But what I saw for the people about whom I wrote is that in some ways it was a loss. It was a shift from accessing a network that had many people and that had sort of the benefits of a network in terms of access to multiple programs and multiple resources and a community, to an individual, isolated machine where individual people had to spend their monies or school systems had to buy many computers. To me, that was a substantial change that was best captured by thinking about a shift from personal computing and citizenship to consumers and computers.

Rebecca:

I don't know, maybe this is a simplistic question, but I feel like it's one that I a little bit have and that therefore probably other people have. But I'm curious, I'd love to hear you talk about the ... Okay. So yeah, you have these networks and then you have personal computers, and then we have the Internet of course. What do you see as the parallels or wild differences between the computer networks that you are describing and the Internet of the 80s and 90s?

J. Rankin:

I was just reading something the other day, I cannot remember what it was, but someone was saying that the early Internet—we'll say sort of early 90s Internet—was a Utopian place and everyone got along, and before social media corrupted everything or before it got too big and everyone became horribly rude and uncivil and harassing and everything else that happens—Whoever this author was, was saying like, "Oh no, it was so much better then." And my response to that in my head was, "No, no, wait. (laughs) In fact, I have researched networks in the 1960s and 1970s, and people were—" I'm going to be very mild here—"people were not nice to each other back then. (laughter) There were all sorts of problems with how people treated each other online 50 years ago, 40 years ago."

So there are similarities that maybe make me sad. I mean, I think the difference was in a lot of these cases, the communities had a sense of community that was also tied to place or school or university or some kind of affiliation. Where there was a sense of maybe responsibility to the community and idea that this was in some ways a sort of public good or a communal good. Or something that, as people talked and wrote about it and saw it growing, maybe they thought would be regulated, and would be sort of—start to embrace more of an explicit idea of political citizenship as well, or sort of unify computing and political citizenship. I think that's something in this moment in time now that I think people are starting to want or look for in all of the dismay and disappointment about how some of our large Silicon Valley companies are acting. That stands in stark contrast to this moment in the 60s and early 70s. Did I ramble? Did that make sense? Okay. (laughter)

Rebecca:

No. It did. It totally did. It's one of those things where it's like, "I'm going to ask a dumb ahistorical question," but it seems like one that will pop into other people's heads and it certainly popped into mine. So I'll just ask the dumb ahistorical questions.

J. Rankin:

No, I mean it's something I think about all the time. Every time I read any sort of current commentary or critique of technology today, it's hard for me to not stop and think, "What are the similarities? What are the differences? What does current news coverage tend to elide or miss? What voices and perspectives are we not hearing?"

Anna:

I think that's just related to what you described in the sort of Silicon Valley myth, that just it's so overpowering that it contributes to those sort of ahistorical misunderstandings of what the network was like back in the day, because for one thing, we don't know about it at all because of these overpowering narratives about Steve jobs or whatever. It just takes up so much of the discourse, there's no room, unless you write a really good book and make room. So, good job. (laughter)

J. Rankin:

Thanks.

Rebecca:

Yeah.

J. Rankin:

Thanks.

Anna:

Okay, well, Joy, thank you so much for coming on the show. The book is called A People's History of Computing in the United States, and it is available now, right?

J. Rankin:

Yes.

Anna:

As of today, as of the day we're recording.

J. Rankin:

As of the day we're recording!

Rebecca:

Yay!

J. Rankin:

Yes. Yay. Thank you.

Anna:

Happy book birthday.

Rebecca:

Happy book birthday.

J. Rankin:

Thank you.

(transition music)

Anna:

So at the end of every episode, hosts will unburden themselves about something in the news or their work or whatever that's just annoying the crap out of them. It is my distinct pleasure (laughter) to introduce this one annoying thing, because second only to the Vox Victorians, this is my favorite dumb thing that comes around every couple of years. I just love it. Oh, it's so delicious! We're going to talk about grievance studies guys.

Rebecca:

(laughs) The glee with which you say that is beautiful.

Anna:

I just love it. So last week, I guess, a piece was published in this magazine called Areo that was a sort of summing up end-of-project report about a publishing hoax that was undertaken by a team of researchers, people—

Rebecca:

Social justice warriors, as some have taken to call them. (laughter)

Anna:

Oh boy.

Rebecca:

Not us though.

Leila:

No.

Anna:

Some folks spent I believe more than one year writing fake papers and trying to get them published in peer-reviewed journals, and then they publish this very long explanation of why they did it and how this kind of publishing hoax can help us understand the diseased oozing heart of academia that needs to be cut out, that is basically anything that's not a hard science. So if this sounds familiar to you, it's because somebody does this like every five years I guess now, and acts like it hasn't ever been done before. But the sort of originator of this particular—I don't know what you'd call it, very involved method of making a very dumb point is Alan Sokal, right? I guess I could've actually looked that up.

Leila:

Yeah, that's him.

Anna:

Yeah. He was a physicist and he wrote a paper that he submitted to a critical theory journal that wasn't even doing peer review and he got it published in that paper, and then used that as an argument that critical theory and the social sciences and the humanities, particularly where they want to criticize science—so, what we do—are doing a bad job and they don't understand science and they're just appealing to identity instead of learning the actual science or whatever. So that's something—History of science folks learn about that first year of grad school in your methods course, will talk about that particular hoax. So it just seems like every few years, somebody has to do this and shriek about how it's horrible that women and gender studies or critical race theory or any of this stuff isn't physics basically. (laughs)

Leila:

Yeah, because we all have physics envy. And the particular targets of their ire were specifically gender studies, someone did or break down that showed that that was more than half of their fake papers was gender studies, and then there was race studies and fat studies as well. Those were the main grievances.

Anna:

Yeah. So I guess the innovation of this one is that they have now rebranded all things that are, I don't know, I guess not the five disciplines that people studied in the Middle Ages. They've rebranded all of that collectively under the umbrella of what they call "grievance studies," which is just—it's so petty and just small. Their argument is that anybody who does any of this work is just motivated by wanting to cast themselves as a victim or cast marginalized groups as being victimized and appealing to your identity instead of—I guess science is what we're supposed to be doing here in the humanities instead. I don't know.

Leila:

Well, only one of them comes close to being a scientist. I think one of them's a mathematician. I was about to say "math matishism" or something. (laughter)

Rebecca:

A "mathmatitist."

Leila:

Then the other ones are also—One of them is a philosopher and one of them studies medieval writings about women. So I don't even know what at least the two of them, what their particular bone to pick actually is.

Rebecca:

Well, it seems to be like the other difference from Sokal is that it's less about, I think it just—I was looking over it again right before this and I feel like what they write about is less that humanities are inherently flawed and more that any kind of thing where you're saying the dominant structure is flawed is dumb.

Leila:

Yeah. Yeah.

Rebecca:

So that seems to be the thing that they're attacking, is the idea that heteronormativity might be a problem or that science has biases as part of it, and other sorts of things that, yeah, say basically our western social structures are not idealized and magical.

Leila:

Yeah, social constructivism is what they're really attacking.

Rebecca:

Yeah. Which frankly, I can kind of see a certain kind of philosopher and a certain kind of medievalist being angry about the idea that people are saying that the sort of classical versions of their fields are kind of fucked up.

Leila:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess.

Rebecca:

I mean it's still bullshit, but it's kind of a particular sort of old-school asshole humanities personal bullshit.

Rebecca:

Yeah.

Anna:

Yeah.

Leila:

Well, I think that—because I saw several people on social media thinking that these people were brave and clever, because they've even, I guess, said that they're risking their future careers in academia now. Which is weird, because they're going after grievance studies in victimhood when they're already making themselves victims of this thing that they've created themselves—which I mean, whatever. I think that it speaks to kind of people whose maybe fields and research doesn't feel as relevant, because these other fields that have been subordinate and been tangential in universities and in departments are now getting more attention and they're getting more prominence in the public sphere outside of academic walls. I think that a lot of this comes from kind of another generation of academics who feels that their work is kind of maybe fading into irrelevance.

Rebecca:

Yeah. It doesn't mean you don't get still very much support from academia, but if you are a gender studies scholar, you probably have more opportunities to talk to the press than if you are a classical philosophy scholar.

Anna:

Right.

Leila:

I think one thing that a lot of people I haven't necessarily seen ask the question, "Why these specific pockets of academia to go after? Why these specific ones?" Because, I mean, I think that you can learn to fake data in cancer research and get that published in a cancer studies journal. If you will learn the system enough, you learn that peer review system enough, you can game that system and you can get fake stuff published in a cancer study journal. But you'd probably only do that if you already believe that cancer research was bullshit. You would only go to the trouble to knock it down if you already think that it's bullshit. But you don't do that with things like cancer studies, so why gender studies? Why race studies? Why fat studies? Right?

Anna:

Yeah.

Rebecca:

Yeah.

Anna:

It's also like, if what you're concerned about is bunk research getting through the system or whatever, wasting a bunch of people's time looking at fake papers is not doing anything to either expose or help to solve the problem of—These journals are run by extremely overworked and underpaid people. Stuff is reviewed for free, all of that labor is uncompensated, everybody's super stressed out and harried all the time. We had a journal on campus when I was in grad school, and it was a nightmare. The editor is going to be stepping down next year and she's just ecstatic because it just takes so much time and so much energy and she had such a small staff because they couldn't afford to hire anybody to help out.

Anna:

That's a problem that you could be talking about, is the actual economics of how knowledge gets produced: who's doing it, who's getting paid for it, and how much they're getting paid. There's none of that in here. This is just pointing at people—at very busy people—and saying, "You're all dumb idiots with dumb ideas and we win." It's extremely petty and it doesn't do any of the things that they're saying that it should do.

Leila:

Right. It makes no sense to judge an entire academic field by some bad faith actors who intentionally manipulated evidence and data to game the system. It makes no sense to judge the health of an entire academic field based off of two bad actors that did really shitty things to manipulate the system. I haven't seen the people who think that this is awesome, like refer to how many were rejected, the feedback that was given during peer review, and the fact that before this came out in the past week, people were already onto them in the summer because their papers were shitty. (laughter) So I mean, it's not like they just hoodwinked an entire academic field. There was one thread on Twitter, I felt really bad for this guy because he was a graduate student and he was reviewer number one I think for one of the papers.

Anna:

Something like that.

Leila:

So this poor graduate student who reviewed this paper, didn't get paid to do it, and he thought that it was just a grad student paper that somebody after a seminar just tried to quickly turn it into a peer-reviewed journal paper. So he was trying to be nice and kind and provide the best feedback that he could, which is the point of a reviewer. It's not to make someone not look like an asshole and an idiot once they're actually published, it's to provide the feedback that they can in the moment. They wasted this nice man's time.

Anna:

Yeah. Especially, I think that grad student's thread is really telling, because it's a bad faith gesture butting up against a good faith gesture, and it demonstrates that good faith is actually what keeps the academy sort of running and keeps the sort of journal ecology healthy on its own, and that's fine. But for some reason, I don't know, maybe because we're so obsessed with the idea of empirical falsifiable evidence because we've been inculcated into the science cult for the last 30 years, good faith isn't good enough.

Leila:

Yeah.

Rebecca:

And even in science, to go back to the cancer studies metaphor, you could be a scientist and make up a bunch of numbers that prove that, I don't know, eating peas every day will mean that you'll never get breast cancer. You could say something absurd and you could make up shit and you could include a bunch of data—

Leila:

That's happened before!

Rebecca:

That's happened before, exactly.

Leila:

There's a reason why journals retract papers, because people do that!

Rebecca:

Right, exactly.

Anna:

That's something I was tweeting about, is that this also really I think fundamentally misunderstands how this whole process works. Something getting published does not mean it is the whole complete unvarnished truth and Canon Gospel forever and ever. It's one of the first steps to becoming a piece of knowledge that can be used. Nobody can do anything with it until it's published. To get into a journal, it's read by three reviewers and an editor, and maybe a copy editor—maybe a copy editor—but that's it. The second half of peer review, the most important half of peer review, is when it gets published and you get your journal in mail and you open it up and you say, "What the fuck is this?" Then you write a paper refuting that paper. That's how the whole process works. Like, "What are you talking about?"

Anna:

They're acting like the act of getting something published means that it is the truth forever and that if we let anything through the gates of the journals, then we're going to destroy society. It's like, well, you clearly have not been reading these academic journals, because there's all kinds of bad stuff in there, and there's all kinds of perfectly passable but really boring stuff, and there's all kinds of useless shit that literally no one cares about even in their own field. That's how it works!

Leila:

Yeah. I think that that is a fundamental problem that they might have inadvertently stumbled upon that wasn't their point. Then the fact that we are talking about this grad student who wasn't getting paid to review this paper and was already overworked, and was trying to do the best that they could, exposes another flaw in the peer review system—that has nothing to do with their stupid hoax. All it did was waste a young man's time, and that's part of the problem. We know peer review has issues; we know that it's flawed. We know that there's issues of finding out who reviewers are, issues of race and gender discrimination in peer review. We know that those things exist. But manufacturing an outrage that wasn't there until you created it doesn't help get to the real issues that can be resolved in peer review and make peer review better. This doesn't work to make it better.

Leila:

Hoaxes inherently punch down. They punched down and make people feel ashamed, and that's also part of this problem. So when I see senior academics saying that this was brave, no, it's just your brand of humiliation that you like to traffic in, in academia.

Anna:

I think an important thing to say about the content of the papers that they wrote is that they are cruel, and the way they discuss these papers and the way that they discuss sort of learning the tropes of a discipline and then manipulating them, it's cruel. There is a lot of stuff just in this piece that they're supposedly objectively describing what they did. There's a lot of stuff in here that is blatantly fatphobic, misogynistic, and transphobic just in this article. The subject matter, the subjects that they chose themselves and the way that they decided to frame these things are in and of themselves bigoted arguments against feminism. They're antifeminist arguments, they're transphobic arguments, these papers themselves. So it's like, "Oh, you're just showing your whole ass now out there." I love this part in this paper about when they're like, "So why did we do this? Is it because we're bigoted? No." It's like, "No it is. You said the quiet part out loud!" (laughter)

Leila:

"You made the subtext text. You did it! We didn't even have to."

Rebecca:

Also, let's be real, given the way that a phrase like "grievance politics" is used in the year of our Lord 2018, making a grievance studies is not even a dog whistle: we know who you're aligning with. Don't then be like, "No, we're liberals, we're just trying to show how flawed identity politics is."

Leila:

Yeah. You're exactly right. This is just another iteration of a self-appointed liberal talking about how identity politics is sinking the left. It's just another iteration of that and I just have zero patience for that anymore. It's such a boring conversation to keep having.

Anna:

So I did want to bring up there was—it's just been a smorgasbord of amazing stuff this last week or so. But there was another piece, let me find it, in Salon called "Why Most Narrative History is Wrong," which is I think in a kind of similar vein, although it's more attacking public history or popular history. Because the author goes to great lengths to say that he's not talking about academics. So it's sort of the other side of the coin. Not only are the academics bad, that's what these hoaxers tell us. But now, whoever this is, I believe he's a philosopher, writing in Salon is telling us that your popular history books and stuff are also just ripping up the fabric of society with their untruths, and we know this because of neuroscience somehow.

Anna:

Honestly, the article is so poorly written, I really have a hard time tracking the argument. But the part that we talked about in the Slack that's sort of most relevant to all of our interests is the way that he talks about the history of science and how that is—This is his argument for why narrative history doesn't work, because he says, "Even where historical narrative doesn't seem indispensable to understanding something, it is widely believed to be the best way. Nothing illustrates this belief more clearly that the penchant of science writers for historical narrative science. Science is not stories: it's theories, laws, models, findings, observations, experiments," nouns! That last part I added myself. "Yet, almost the only way writers communicate science to the general public is through the narrative history of breakthroughs or the biographies of scientists who achieved them."

Leila:

I mean, another thing that directly goes against the things that I read about, (laughs) being a popular history writer, and my upcoming piece in Baffler where I actually have a sentence that says, "Science is as much a story as art or literature, and one that we have done a particularly bad job of telling."

Anna:

Absoltuely.

Rebecca:

That's a great sentence.

Leila:

I feel so attacked by all of these things. I mean, not really attacked, because I also—

Rebecca:

They're all dumb.

Leila:

I'm not going to change what I do because some men decided that what I do doesn't matter.

Anna:

I mean, yeah, we're right. So it's fine.

Leila:

We're right.

Anna:

All of is basically aimed right at the core of what we do at Lady Science. So the other quote, this is the one I really wanted to read because I like this one as a historian of science myself. He says, "Meanwhile, there are several other things we need to consider that should make us skeptical about narrative history as a path to understanding. For one thing, when it comes to physics, geology and the other natural sciences—" you know, all the rest of the squishy ones too I guess—"the specialists don't care about history much at all. Read the textbook, scientific journals, attend seminars and colloquia where they present their results to one another. The histories of their disciplines, how they go out to where they are today, don't come into it. Facts, data, evidence, observations—" more nouns—"they're all important, and many are about past events, recent or distant. All they do is provide evidence for scientific results, finding models or theories." I love that he's saying "They are using data from four years ago, but they're not talking about the history." (laughter) Yeah, this is—

Leila:

But also, history of science, the discipline was basically founded by scientists wanting to learn about the history of their field.

Rebecca:

Exactly. I think that a good 50% of the audience of the science history museum where I work right is scientists and they get super excited.

Leila:

Yeah. I mean, and what the scientists did who founded this field, it's mostly been trash history, but to claim that there's just no interest there and people don't care is just not true. They founded an entire discipline tangential to science.

Anna:

I think nobody told him that there is a discipline of the history of science. I think this dude genuinely thinks no one's ever written about the history of geology, and I know five people who do that for a living. (laughter) I love that his last thing, and I'll stop quoting this ridiculous article, because it's so badly written, he says, "Scientists never confuse science with the narrative histories of science, still less with biographies of science." O-kay.

Anna:

So I love the juxtaposition of this huge hoax that they tried to make in this big smoking deal and this dude off in the kind of backwater that is now what's left of Salon being like, "I've never even heard of the history of science!" So we can't win for losing, either we're tearing apart the fabric of society or we just don't exist. So whatever.

Leila:

Well, I mean, I guess—

Anna:

Cool!

Leila:

That's a good place to actually end. We're they're tearing apart the fabric of society or we don't exist. Or: If we're not tearing apart the fabric of society, do we exist?

Anna:

Man, far out!

Leila:

Well, that's been our episode today, folks! (laughter) If you liked our episode, leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcast so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions—

Anna:

I don't know why they'd want to do that. (laughter)

Rebecca:

So they can tear apart the fabric of society with us!

Anna:

Oh, right. Okay.

Leila:

Help us, so you can exist too. If you have questions about any of the segments today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladycipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article and more, visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. As we remind you all the time, you can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations, just visit Ladyscience.com/donate, and until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter and Instagram at @ladyxscience.

(exit music)

01:19:21

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg

Guest: Dr. Jordan Bimm

Producer: Leila McNeill

Music: Careful! and Cassie Lace by Zombie Dandies

Subscribe. Rate. Review.

In this episode, the hosts discuss the masculine design, construction, and use of technology in the American Space Program. Then the hosts have an extended discussion with space historian Dr. Jordan Bimm about the gendering of primates in the Space Program, the Lovelace Women in Space Program (aka Mercury 13), and space medicine.

Why Masculine Technologies Matter by Ruth Oldenziel

Gender & Technology: A Reader edited by Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun

Dr. Jordan Bimm

Mercury 13 - Trailer

Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program by Margaret Weitekamp

Brazil’s Museum Fire Proves Cultural Memory Needs Digital Backup by Emily Dreyfuss

Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930-1968, and the Making of a Male Technical Domain by Ruth Oldenziel

Transcribed by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome to Episode 12 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topic centered on women and gender in the history in popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: Oh, I'm Anna Reser, Co-Founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Lady Science. I am a writer, editor, and PhD student studying 20th century American culture and the history of the American Space Program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet, and I'm currently a regular writer on Women in the History of Science at smithsonianmag.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's Managing Editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet and managing social media for the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

Leila: Before we jump into the episode, we have some housekeeping items. So, the first one is that next month, October, is going to be Lady Science's fourth anniversary. We started four years ago announcing it on Ada Lovelace Day, so it'll be four years.

Rebecca: Yay.

Anna: Four extremely long years.

Leila: Four extremely. It feels it's really long, but it also feel really short, too. Yeah. It's weird. So, usually for our fourth anniversary we don't do a normal magazine issue. We usually do something different, but we will still have a podcast episode next month. And we'll also have some bonus content next month. And then, also, just going forward, since we did reach that second goal level on Patreon during our pledge-a-thon, we are going to be releasing bonus content. These aren't going to come out on any particular schedule. They'll come out as we have them. So that you don't miss them, be sure that you are subscribing to Lady Science Podcast wherever it is that you happen to listen to podcasts.

Leila: And then, also, just remember to rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts. It really helps new people see us on the platform, so be sure that you're subscribing so you don't miss any content. And then, also, rate and review us. That would be super helpful, and we are accepting birthday presents for our fourth birthday next month. So, please send those in the form of cold, hard cash.

Anna: And then, the other thing I wanted to mention, just a reminder that starting next month in October, we will have in some special blog posts about sports and gender and science.

Rebecca: Yay.

Anna: And those are all, I think, going to be very awesome, so make sure you're tuned in to the blog. I don't know what. Follow us on Twitter because that's how you'll find out about them.

Leila: And also, we had such a big response that you're actually going to do a special magazine issue later on devoted to historical representations or historical pieces about sports, gender, and science, right?

Anna: Yeah. So, in the spring, there will be a more historical series of essays. The ones that we're doing in October, some of them are sort of more contemporary, or they're kind of like personal things. But, yeah. So, we had so, so many excellent submissions that we sort of broke off a piece of those to do later kind of the way we did with our Pain Memoir series that we had some more historical pieces about pain in a separate issue. So, look out for that in the spring as well.

Anna: Okay. So, this month, (singing) we're talking about men and masculinity.

Leila: Finally, they have a space and a voice here.

Anna: I know. It's been 11 episodes with no men except for them and their bad ideas. So, later-

Rebecca: We're still going to talk about them and their bad ideas. Let's not get ...

Anna: Well, that's true.

Rebecca: Let's be real.

Anna: So, later in this episode, in an unprecedented move, we will actually be interviewing a man. We're going to talk to Jordan Bimm, who is a historian of space flight. We're going to him about astronauts, masculinity, history of technology, and that is going to be a really excellent conversation.

Anna: But first ...

Leila: But first, to get us started thinking about these topics is that we want to have kind of a, I guess, theoretical conversation about what gender studies actually means and how that encompasses the study of masculinity and that that doesn't mean that we are now the red pill. And that doesn't mean that when we talk about men in the context of gender studies or masculinity that we're talking about men to the exclusion of women or to the exclusion of trans people or something like that. That masculinity is included in this idea of gender studies.

Anna: Yeah. And I guess I'll just say this isn't, "Oh, what about the men thing?" We didn't get a bunch of emails or anything. We are doing this of our own free will. [crosstalk 00:06:15]-

Rebecca: We're not being coerced by any mens.

Anna: Yeah. Sometimes, yeah. Anyway.

Rebecca: Yeah. But we did. We describe ourselves as focusing on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. Y'all hear me say that at the top of every single episode, and in practice, it does as is demonstrated by the last year of podcasts mean that we're talking about women and femininity. But we do say, "Women and gender," for a reason, and that means that we do look at men and masculinity and how masculinity is constructed and understood as well.

Anna: I guess the way that I was sort of taught about this and the way that I think about it is that studying men and masculinity is sort of like a way to denaturalize, I guess, what we think of as the default person, that men, in at least Western society that we're familiar with, are the default person, and they are the neutral person. They don't appear, generally, to be gendered, at least in the same way that women and people of other genders are.

Anna: And so, studying the construction of this can kind of help us see how that gets naturalized, and I guess the kind of blowback of that naturalization on people who aren't men. How do they become marginalized by this sort of flattening out of masculinity as the neutral default person, the actor of society? So, figuring out how that occurs, how we come to regard men that way can tell us a lot about the sort of dynamics of gender.

Anna: So, we criticize scholars and publications for focusing on white men to the exclusion of everybody else, but we can study how that exclusion occurs by looking specifically at how is the figure of this, or we talk about this straight, cis-white dude as being this problematic figure, at least in our work, and we want to kind of get behind that and sort of challenge all the assumptions about that we see at play in the way that women and other people are marginalized by that.

Rebecca: I think something that we say a lot that relates to this is that masculinity is constructed against femininity, so it can kind of be a way of... masculinity is defined by what it's not. This also is one of those ways that it's helpful to think about masculinity in a gender-studies context because it can shed light on non-masculine things because so many masculine things are about what they're not. I don't know if that made any sense, but-

Anna: But I think that's a good way of describing it, and I think that oftentimes, especially in our popular discourse about this that we talk about what things aren't-

Rebecca: Masculine.

Anna: ... masculine, or we talk about femininity as we talk about feminine gender roles. A lot of gender studies' things are specifically about feminine gender roles and the gendering of institutions at least that marginalize women and people of other genders, but not the way that that works in reverse, too, the way that femininity is constructed against masculinity. So, I think that there's like a turn toward that, too, toward studying masculinity, and it's not the same thing. But I think about it kind of the way that critical race theories studies whiteness in order to-

Rebecca: Yeah. I was thinking exact same thing.

Anna: Yeah. To make whiteness strange and unfamiliar and to make it something the way that we talk about other sort of racialized dynamics. We can talk about whiteness that way because then it helps us to see how whiteness is naturalized, and whiteness has become default. So, the dynamics are obviously different, and they intersect, too, like talking about whiteness when you're talking about men is not the same thing about when you're talking about women. But there's sort of a similar dynamic there, and it kind of ... I mean another similar but not the same way is the way that scholars of colonialism and empire study the metropole, the center. And so, instead of sort of going out and anthropologizing, anthropologizing the colonized people, studying the heart of the empire, too, to denaturalize its sort existence and to make it strange and make us understand the dynamics of that from the inside, I guess.

Leila: Yeah. And I think a way to bring this concept to the topic that we're actually talking about today is in one of the previous episodes ... I think it was the bonus episode that we did with Dr. Hooks, and we were talking about history as a social justice project, and, Anna, one of the things that you said in writing about the Space Program is that you don't write about specifically women in the Space Program, and that's kind of an expectation is that if you're doing gender in the Space Program, that's what you're talking about. But more of what you look at is how spaces become gendered, how spaces become masculine spaces or feminine spaces, and how gender is reflected in different aspects of the Space Program not necessarily that individual human actors in that story.

Anna: Right, and that's an important dynamic, too, that gender is something that people can have, but it's also something that kind of coheres to other things, too, like space or policy or material objects. Gender coheres to technology in really interesting ways, which we're going to talk about a little bit later, but it coheres I think also to things like the scientific method. We can talk about that, too.

Leila: Right. Yeah. Well, I know something that we've talk about at least a lot in the magazine. I don't know how much we've talk about this on the podcast, but the idea that in the 19th century, science was a masculine word. It was a masculine practice, and it was placed separate and above feminine nature. Nature's be effeminized since I will say, "At the beginning of time," that way you tend not to use such broad, sweeping phrases like that. But how this concept of science became an inherently gendered practice that people enter into.

Rebecca: Yeah. And just to sort of maybe bring this down to some things that also our listeners may have heard about, while there are many terrible things about living in the year of our Lord 2018, I think one thing that is interesting and maybe even positive that's happened is that I do think we are now in non-academic spaces talking about things like gendered ideas or racialized ideas and talking about masculinity, and especially now the phrase “toxic masculinity” is almost a Twitter meme. And so, maybe if you're having trouble all what we have, think about the way that when it's productively discussed on the internet, toxic masculinity is this idea, and it's not that all men are toxic. It's not what that means, but it's that there are certain constructions of masculinity that are toxic to everyone and create sort of toxic relationships amongst people.

Rebecca: One example, another example of this that I love because I wrote about it in undergrad way back when is the idea of the sort of male breadwinner or the male provider. The idea that a part of a man's masculinity is being able to economically, financially take care of their family, and I did work on this in the context of early 19th century, early industrial revolution labor movements in Britain. The fact that working hours in factories were restricted for women and children before they were restricted for men and part of the arguments coming from working class reformers about that was, "Oh, well, men are being demasculinized or emasculated because women are working, and they are not able to get jobs."

Rebecca: The fascinating thing about that is that all of that is a new idea. While obviously, there have ... Again, don't use this very often, but it's probably true ... for all of time, been different kinds of gender role work divisions and certainly in kind of the Western world, those have had value placed upon them based on gender roles. The idea that there's this economic provider component doesn't really work before you have wage labor. But then wage labor comes in, and people are paid for the number of hours they're working outside of the home. And then, that becomes gendered, and then we become obsessed with the idea of the male provider. So, this is something that we think of as inherent to what men do that's actually this relatively recently constructed thing, and I think that that's one of these interesting examples of how masculinity is this thing that is created by social circumstances.

Leila: Yeah. And I think we've seen how people have projected that image of the provider and the homemaker on to the very distant past as far as like the hunter-gatherer dichotomy, and that there because of that dichotomy, there was this idea for a long time that we survived because men brought home meat. That that was an image of our present gender roles that we were imposing on a very distant past for people who lived very different lives, and there's new research and different research coming out to show how that actually wasn't even if the men were the ones bringing home the meat, it was really the women that were putting the caloric, the calories on the table because they were doing and bringing home so much more than what the men could. And so, there's just a lot of ways that we have naturalized our present gender roles onto the past.

Anna: I think that's such a good example, too, because I think the distance is it's just a good one to think with. Because you have researchers who live in our present society and are embedded in these gender roles already. They're looking at a past society, and they see a whole bunch of things. They see that these people were nomadic. They see that these people ate roots. They see that these people hunted wooly mammoths or whatever. They have all of this stuff, and they need to sort it somehow and make it make sense. Usually, without even thinking about it, you just say, "Well, men are big and strong, so they did the hunting. That means that the women were probably digging up the roots or whatever." So, it's just a way that we organize our information. It's a way we organize our sort of scientific and technical systems without even thinking about it, and that's what it sort of can be really dangerous I think.

Leila: Yeah. And how that categorization was an inherently gendered categorization to devalue the work that women were doing in the past because we devalue that now.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's this weird thing where also I think we want to think that history and progress moves in a linear fashion, and that everything can kind of be put on a upward moral swing. And so, we say, "Well, obviously, the further we go in the past, the more divided gender roles are because now we know that gender roles are bad." And therefore, in order to prove that we have always been progressing, we sort of have to go back in time and show that it was worse back then, when really all of these things, because they are constructed and have to do with the context in which they exist, it's never quite that simple.

Anna: I think that also pairs really nicely, well, nicely, I don't know, but it lines up, I think, really well with this tendency we have to also have a progressive notion of the history of technology that way back in primitive times when they only had spears, of course, the men did the spearing. But as you go into the future where we have technology that that's somehow going to iron everything out in terms of gender roles. But what we find, and there's a very famous book about this, about how technology just reinforces gender roles, that that kind of thing is not sort of a constant, progressive flow. There's all kinds of snags and retrograde motion with that, but we do love a nice, linear, progressive narrative and one that progresses from strict gender roles to no gender roles fits kind of evenly in with primitive technology to advanced technology.

Anna: So, that's one of the things that we wanted talk about today is the construction of a technophilic masculinity that sort of casts men as naturally more inclined to technology than people of other genders, and so in history of technology, scholars who work on gender have identified this dynamic in sort of the design and construction and use of technology and technological systems.

Anna: And so, an important contribution to this line of analysis, and it's one that I teach my students is Ruth Oldenziel's essay Why Masculine Technologies Matter. I have it as part of a edited volume on gender and technology which is called, I believe, Gender and Technology, and I'll link to that in the notes. It's a really useful edited volume. It has a lot of really great sort of brief essays. It has Jennifer Light's really important essay on computing, And When Women Were Computers. So anyway, in this essay, Oldenziel talks about the history of The Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild, which was a 20th century organization for young men, and it was connected to the Fisher Automobile Company. It was sort of this ... I don't know much about the history of young men's organizations in the early 20th century but that's a thing, and she uses the history of this guild to talk about the ways that the associations, I guess, between men and technology, between masculinity and technological skill or competence, and the way that organizations like this that kind of train young men in various skills for living. They sort of reinforce these associations.

Leila: Yeah. So, the guild like Anna said, was an organization for young men, and it was connected to the Fisher Car Company. The essay focuses on a model-making competition sponsored by the company and open to guild members, where young men were encouraged to perform certain masculine values in the process of making and presenting their models. Oldenziel contrasts this with ads for Fisher Automobiles that use women's bodies to symbolize the sleekness and attractive curvature of their cars. So, in this sort of symbolism, symbolic ecosystem, women are objectified in relation to technology while the young men of the guild are taught to be designers and craftsmen.

Leila: So, Oldenziel argues that these constructions of masculinity and technology are intimately connected to economic and social forces that were mobilized at this moment to, "Shore up male identity boundaries in the new world of expanding consumerism precariously coded as female." She further argues that a technophilic identity for men and boys is constructed by car companies, advertisers, et cetera at exactly the moment when women begin to have more and more access to technology as consumers.

Anna: So, I think one of the reasons that I use this essay to teach my students is because it does a really good job of showing how these constructions of masculinity are they're not inevitable, and they don't come from a kind of amorphous societal ether. They come from the Fisher Car Company. It's a very discreet, specific place that you can look and say, "This company is using these advertisements, and it's using this model-making competition to tell men how to behave and to give them a specific role connected to technology that is constructed in opposition to what women do."

Anna: So, if technology is sort of entering into public life in a really sort of explosive way the way it is in the 20th century where people are ... or the early 20th century where you're able to purchase cars and certain kinds of appliances. People are working in factories where they're running machines and stuff. The role of men in that world has to be decided and negotiated, and it's done by specific companies and advertisers and their economic reasons for those kinds of construction. So, women are working in factories and running woolen mills and running machines and stuff, and so there has to be a role for men there that kind of separates them and shores up this masculine role that's connected to technology.

Anna: So, one of the things that Oldenziel argues is that by participating in this model-making competition the role of designer and craftsman not just a consumer of technology ... That's what women do ... but somewhat or just an operator of a machine ... That's what women do. Men design technology, and they build these things for women and other people to use. So, that's how this kind of role gets constructed, and she uses the ads that use women's bodies to show you that women are either identified with the technology in a material way where they're just meant to symbolize how sexy their cars are, or they are doing this consuming or just operating machines in factories. But they don't have the sort of spark of innovation and design that can be kind of inculcated in young men by things like the model-making competition.

Leila: I mean I was just thinking about that Fiat commercial not too long ago-

Anna: Oh, my God.

Leila: ... where the woman actually turned into a car-

Rebecca: Oh, my God, yes.

Leila: ... or the car actually turned into a woman.

Rebecca: Ah.

Leila: Oh, yes, how far we've come.

Anna: Is that the same? Are you thinking, or is that the same Fiat commercial as the Fiat 500 one with the Viagra, right?

Leila: I think so, yeah.

Anna: I just remember. I think that was like a Super Bowl commercial, and we were at a Super Bowl party, and all of the women in the room were like, "Excuse me."

Leila: Yeah. It's really bad, and one of the things I was thinking about while you were talking about positioning men as designers and women as consumers is about how that does actually trickle into public consciousness and actually trickles into the way companies hire people because if we have this kind of understanding that these are the things men are meant for, those are the ones who get hired into those jobs. And then, of course, you have the kind of underlying discrimination that goes along with that, but then you also have a homogenous group of people creating technology for a culture and a society that is not homogenous. And so, that's why feminist critiques of technology are so important so that we can continue to call attention to how these ideas about how technology is gendered and the people who use them are gendered and the people who create them is also a gendered idea, but then how that creates shitty products that not everybody can use or actively hurts other people in a society.

Anna: And this like what you were saying, too, Leila, about the way that this translates into our kind of current jobs' ecosystem for women in tech is that there's people out there like that Google asshole whose argument was that women are psychologically unfit to work on technology, and that's like a compounding of these gender roles that has been sort of filtered through a kind of scientific objectivity filter that makes it seem reasonable to a frankly terrifying number of people apparently are willing to buy into that. But I think that's an interesting example of the way that these kind of assumptions about gender are sort of built up like sedimentary rock over time. That it starts with things like boys are the only ones who can build these car models.

Anna: And then, over the course of history, you keep adding things to them and adding different dynamics to them and shifting these very old ideas in ways that make them sort of fit with our current understanding of society. So, yeah, if that dude says that it's psychological, there's research about it or whatever that like, "Science says, 'It's true.'" That just fits a very old idea into our current sort of way of processing the world.

Anna: And so, it's really important to dig deep and find the kind of roots of these ideas and where they come from and to show how they're constructed. I think that is the thing I like most about that essay is that it's so specific to this one thing, this one sort of group of young men that are participating in this kind of symbolic exercise, and you can see all of these norms being created kind of in real time.

Anna: So, yeah, I guess we can wrap it up-

Rebecca: Seems like a good place to, yeah, leave it.

Anna: ... and get to our conversation with Jordan. Okay. So, with us today is Jordan Bimm. Jordan is a post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University. His PhD dissertation, Anticipating the Astronaut, focuses on the early history of space medicine and space psychology, and his next project, Putting Mars in a Jar, investigates Cold War era military astrobiology. Welcome to the show, Jordan.

Jordan B.: Thanks.

Rebecca: Yay.

Jordan B.: Thanks so much for having me.

Anna: I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention that you're the first man who has ever been on Lady Science. So, it's true. We-

Jordan B.: I'll take that as an honor, I guess?

Anna: Yeah.

Leila: Good for you. Breaking glass ceilings and-

Jordan B.: Yeah.

Leila: We're very exclusive about the men we allow on this podcast.

Jordan B.: Oh, my gosh.

Anna: Oh, oh, definitely. Yeah. So, I hope you're suitably honored.

Jordan B.: Very much so. Couldn't be more.

Anna: So, this whole episode has been about technology and masculinity, so we wanted to just start, I guess by if you could tell us about your research interest in the history of space flight. There are not that many of us out there, so what appeals to you about the field and the history of technology, in general?

Jordan B.: Well, my interest in space flight goes back to my earliest memory as a child when in 1986, January, I tuned into the launch of a space shuttle and watched it explode a few seconds into flight killing its crew of seven. That seared itself into my mind. There was a teacher onboard, Christa McAuliffe, who was going to be one of the first teacher astronauts, so that as a child really impacted me.

Jordan B.: Within the larger history of technology, one thing I've noticed about space history is that it's very technology-focused and centric. So, you get people writing about rockets and space capsules and even spacesuits, but very rarely do you get someone who's interested in the human inside the spacesuit or the animal inside the space capsule. So, that's what I'm most interested in is sort of human-machine interactions within space history, but then, also, approaches like the social shaping of technology applying that and just to the technologies of space flight but to the human as well, like how is society, politics, and culture reflected not just in the physical manifestations of machines but in the humans we put inside them and send to space as well.

Leila: So, let's talk a little bit about your dissertation, which I'll admit I didn't read all of it.

Jordan B.: I wouldn't blame you.

Leila: I did read most of it. I read a lot of dissertations, and I have to say this one was actually really easy to read.

Jordan B.: Thank you.

Leila: It was really, really just I don't know. It kind of broke the mold for me as far as dissertation reading goes, so thank you.

Jordan B.: Thank you. Thank you. That's high praise. I really appreciate that.

Leila: So, the dissertation is about the construction of the image of the astronaut in the 20th century, so if you could just give us a little bit of a rundown of ... I mean, it's like over 200 pages, so as much of a little bit of a rundown of your dissertation and maybe just your main arguments that you can.

Jordan B.: Totally, yeah. So, the summary of the dissertation goes something like this. When I started investigating the history of astronauts, I found out that it's mostly like a space race story that takes place like after Sputnik within NASA. It's focused on white male, military test pilots who eventually became sort of the famous astronaut in the 1960s, but what I learned was that instead of focusing on astronauts, I should be focusing on the people selecting astronauts--the doctors and psychologists in a field called space medicine.

Jordan B.: And as I read more, I found out that space medicine existed for like 10 years before NASA existed as a military science within the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy, and that a lot of the key people in military space medicine were actually German scientists brought over after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip. So, that was incredibly interesting to me because they had their own ideas about bodies and minds and superiority, men and women, that sort of thing that I don't think the sort of checked at the border. They brought it with them. They sort of baked it into the cake.

Jordan B.: So, I decided, "What would a history of the astronaut look like that wasn't about NASA, and it wasn't about these white male, military test pilots?" So, I found within the decade of pre-NASA, military space medicine these sort of four episodes that each one kind of focuses on an unexpected or different type of test subject that was used to build up the astronaut that wasn't a white male, military test pilot.

Jordan B.: So, the first chapter looks at the first attempt to simulate life in space by putting this sort of unskilled, young airman inside a space cabin simulator for a week and seeing how he would fare inside this very tortuous environment. The second chapter focuses on a high-altitude mountain experiment with mountaineers and high-altitude indigenous people in Peru for the purpose of astronaut acclimatization to low pressure. The third chapter takes a detour from human to animal astronauts and looks at the case of Able and Baker, the first primates recovered successfully from a space flight, who went on to become America's first celebrity space animals and this sort of fantastic, gendered afterlife.

Jordan B.: And the final chapter looks at the Lovelace Woman in Space Program, which was an unofficial test of women pilots for space fitness that has been written about and is the subject of a recent Netflix documentary. It's probably the best known of the four episodes I focus on, so each one of those kind of complicates this image that we have of the white male, military test pilot and shows that other types of humans were in the mix earlier on. It brings to the fore I think a number of interesting themes about the construction of the astronaut.

Rebecca: So, building on that, of course, as you mentioned, one of the subjects you talk about is animals, and so can you tell us a little bit about this idea of animal biography and what that can teach us about how we constructed astronauts and the human norms?

Jordan B.: So, I was fascinated by this animal chapter and this animal episode because it gives us a chance to think about humans without focusing on humans specifically. It becomes like a foil, and you can really see some things that you wouldn't normally see. So, when I was looking for methodologies, I came across animal biography, and that's sort of outline by Helena Pycior, who's an animal historian in animal studies. She applies it to the lives of First Dogs, so dogs that are owned by the President of the United States of America specifically Laddie, who was owned by Warren G. Harding in the '20s.

Jordan B.: So, she says there's a number of problems with the way we normally write about animals. The most common one is that we sort of recklessly anthropomorphize them. We ascribe them human characteristics, and we write about them in that sense. And the other major problem is that there's just not a lot of records about animal lives, so she says, "Yes. We need to not ascribe them sort of human qualities when we write about them. Stick to the facts, and then we also need an archive that's thick enough to give us enough information about these animals."

Jordan B.: So, while Pycior writes about First Dogs because they're owned by the President of the United States ... There was a lot of things generated about these animals when they lived ... the same is true in space science. For some of the animals that were used in high-profile space experiments, their lives are pretty well recorded both in terms of their lives as laboratory animals and specimens, their encounters with the technologies of space flight during experiments themselves, and then also their afterlives where there is intense public interest on them. So, that afforded me an archive big enough to be able to tell the life stories of Able and Baker in this way.

Leila: Before we move on, can you actually just explain to our listeners who Able and Baker are? Because I think a lot of people might know about Ham, but, of course, or I don't know. If you could, yeah, just explain who Able and Baker are.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Jordan B.: So, it's kind of my jam to go one step back before the thing everyone knows about, so, yeah. Everyone knows about Ham, and they think Ham was like the first animal in space or the first primate in space. Ham was a chimpanzee that was used by NASA in 1961 as part of Project Mercury, but Able and Baker were two monkeys that were sent into space two years earlier in May 1959, and when they were recovered, they became the first large animals to be successfully recovered from a space flight. So, a lot of people know Laika, the Soviet dog, the first sort of animal in orbit. Unfortunately, she died about four hours into the flight. That was a secret that was kept secret for a long period of time, but there was never any plan to bring Laika back. It was always intended that she would die up there at some point.

Jordan B.: So, to actually have animals back alive after the experiment was a big deal because you could do things with them. You could subject them to further experiments, but then you could also parade them around for public relations purposes, which is exactly what NASA did with Able and Baker. They had a giant press conference for them at NASA Headquarters. They appeared on the cover of LIFE Magazine together, and they sort of had these very long and interesting afterlives as these sort of unwilling representatives promoting space flight.

Jordan B.: The most interesting thing about Able and Baker is that both of them were female monkeys, but afterwards, they were sort of gendered in this binary, where Able was sort of crafted as the stereotypical Cold Warrior and assumed to be male and is referred to as “he” whenever it appears in movies, whereas Baker was fitted into the image of this sort of suburban housewife, and she was confined to an enclosure they called Baker's Bungalow. They even found another male monkey that they called her monkey husband, and they expected her to reproduce. So, the focus there was on her reproduction capacity and the study of her offspring.

Jordan B.: So, anyways, it's a fascinating story. It shows how masculinity in the space program was under construction even before the first humans even flew in space. These ideas were already there, and it was sort of already this really important shoring up around space flight that it comes out even in the case of monkeys.

Leila: Yeah. I thought some of the examples that you gave in the dissertation about how they were gendered was just super bonkers though and it was like super heteronormative as well and that they described as marriages and weddings, and it was bonkers. I was giggling to myself during those whole descriptions.

Jordan B.: And I think that one of the interesting things that it hits on which is we oftentimes we ascribe human qualities to animals as an attempt to elevate them, as an attempt to say they become more human after a space flight. But, why do we need to think of them as like little humans to afford them some respect and care? We shouldn't be masking what we do to these animals with these fantastical stories about how they've become little honorary humans after they return from the magical land of space or whatever.

Anna: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can I also ask, did you find yourself sometimes having to stop yourself from anthropomorphizing them as you were writing, and what was that like?

Leila: That's a great question.

Jordan B.: Yes. I mean, one thing I learned from reading Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman's book, Thinking with Animals, is that is just how common it is to anthropomorphize animals. We all do it every day. I do it with the cats in my house and all that kind of thing, so it was something you had to constantly check yourself with. I did write the methodology section before I wrote the actual meat of the chapter, so I had it front of mind sort of the rules that I was trying to follow, Pycior's rules. But, yes. You definitely do find yourself. It's inescapable.

Jordan B.: So, I think what Daston and Mitman say which is instead of trying to argue, "Should we do this, or should we not do this?" it's more interesting to understand how we do it and why we do it. And in the case of space monkeys, it serves a number of different purposes. It makes space flight seem natural. It makes the participation of animals in this thing seem like a transformative technology, like things that intersect with space flight become more human in a way. Animals that get used in atomic testing, for example, after the experiment don't get elevated in the same way that animals who participate in space flight get elevated to honorary human status.

Anna: That's really interesting, and I like that you brought in also how that elevation extends to like what happens to space animals after they died and the different sort of negotiation over, "Well, what do we do with their remains?" And, "Should we have a funeral, or do we take their skeletons out?" That is also a very kind of creepy part of the chapter, and I saw Able earlier this year. She doesn't look great, man, at the museum. It's really kind of horrifying the way that she's preserved.

Jordan B.: Yeah. I find it incredible that she's still on display there, and as part of writing the chapter, I visited the graves of all those space monkeys. I visited Able at the Smithsonian. I visited Baker's grave in Huntsville at the Space & Rocket Center. I visited Ham's memorial at the International Space Hall of Fame in Alamogordo, New Mexico, just to try and get a sense of what these places are like where these animals are memorialized and presented in the case of Able. So, yeah. I think part of my research was archival. Part of it was also just going to places.

Leila: Can you explain a little bit about how even the way that they were memorialized is gendered as well?

Jordan B.: For sure. So, Able, the monkey that sort of became this male Cold Warrior or Ashma caricature. Able died four days after returning from space during a botched, unrelated, medical procedure, and then the decision was to stuff Able and display her body at the Smithsonian. And in there, she's presented as still part of the experiment inside the little capsule they had built for her, and in a way, that is like it is Able's sort of at work perpetually. Whereas, Baker got to live this huge afterlife for almost, I think, 20, over 20 years in captivity after the experiment in a very domesticated space that they called a bungalow that they populated with different monkey husbands at different times.

Jordan B.: So, when Baker died in 1984, there was no longer a public taste for taxidermy. She'd become I think too anthropomorphized, too real for them, so they buried her under a marble headstone, which is much more of like a sort of human, domestic marker. So, whereas Able's sort of always at work at the Smithsonian, still forever inside that enclosure with all the wires wrapped around her, and her finger still on the telegraph key, Baker is sort of laid to rest in a much more pastoral, human way.

Leila: Wow. We went really off script there.

Rebecca: That's so weird.

Jordan B.: That's okay.

Rebecca: But, it's so great and so fascinating.

Anna: I know. It's just that chapter was super awesome.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Anna: I'm like, yeah. Are you-

Jordan B.: Thanks.

Anna: Just the idea of using animal biography to talk about like human gender norms I think is really awesome and really well done.

Jordan B.: Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Anna: I think the other thing that we're very interested in is the chapter about the Lovelace Program, and because I think more people are familiar with that than they will be with Able and Baker or some of the other episodes in your dissertation. But I think you have a really fresh take on it, so the thing that struck me most about that chapter was this idea of male performance. That the women and people who are not men have to sort of degender themselves by acting less feminine or acting more masculine if they want to enter masculine spaces and to be perceived as not gendered. I guess they have to do this sort of male performance, so can you talk about that in the context of the Lovelace story and this kind of myth I think that we're still struggling with that gender somehow doesn't adhere to men, that men are just neutral actors at least in the same way it adheres to women and in the case of astronauts, too, I think that's the case.

Jordan B.: Definitely. So, I mean, for people who don't know the Lovelace Woman in Space Program, it began in 1959 and ran until 1961. It was basically a comparative study where the doctor, Randolph Lovelace, who had designed and conducted the medical testing for NASA's first astronaut group, the Mercury Seven, decided a year later that he would try and find women test subjects and put them through what he said was sort of the same group of tests ... In actuality, it was a little bit different ... to see if they could pass and meet sort of the standards that he had set for space fitness.

Jordan B.: And famously, the first couple women test subjects through the program did incredibly well by his standards. He judged them fit for space flight, but then there was a big pushback from NASA and from the women themselves advocating to try and get added to the official program that led to Lovelace canceling the program early and without it sort of being a finished study. So, it sort of lives as this moment in the history of space flight where women tried to get access to the profession of astronaut and were denied. But it is a space medicine story, and that's what I've tried to highlight in my chapter because oftentimes what you'll see is people telling the stories of the women themselves, their biographies, but then sort of leaving space medicine untouched as sort of this neutral, value-neutral thing or even something that was totally valid.

Jordan B.: So, if you look at something even as innocuous as the title of the Netflix documentary, it's called Mercury 13, and I have a number of problems with this title. The first is that they used Mercury which was NASA's project Mercury. It makes it seem like the women were actually part of an official program when they weren't, and I don't think it helps anyone to gloss over where the barriers really were for them.

Jordan B.: The other thing is the number 13, which refers to the number of women who passed the tests, and I think that sort of writes out of history the test subjects who didn't pass. We should remember them as well because to only concentrate on the ones that passed the test kind of implies that, yeah, these tests were actually valid judgments of who belongs in space and who doesn't. When I think if you look at the tests, they were made by an ex-military doctor whose primary concern before astronauts was high-altitude spy plane personnel and all this other kind of stuff. So, his interest in women I think is not so much about equality and achieving sort of gender parity. It really has these other Cold War concerns about weight restrictions, about trying fly as high as you can with efficient human factors as they would call them.

Jordan B.: So, anyways, yeah. The chapter kind of tries to bring out the politics of space medicine and tries to present them, the tests themselves, as political. So, your question was actually about male performance, and I haven't got to that yet. But I think-

Leila: Take your time.

Jordan B.: The space medicine and the interiors of spacecraft were basically extensions of male-dominated military spaces, so as much as NASA tried to position itself as a civilian agency, it, in fact, inherited culture, machines, personnel from the military which was already super, super masculine. So, even something like if you go back into the pre-NASA history of space medicine and look at the space cabin simulator, the very first attempt to simulate life inside a space cabin, that was super masculine space right from the start, and women were not tested in that space. There was only men.

Jordan B.: So, when women were finally recruited into NASA in the mid-1970s, and the first women flew in space in the early 1980s with Dr. Sally Ride being the first, there was this institutional non-knowledge of women both at the administrative level and at the medical level where they just didn't know. It was like they didn't want to know, and now that they had to know, they were really just uncomfortable with these things. So, male performance works in so many different ways. You can find it just in the way that if you listen to women astronauts speak in space, they will try and sound like a fighter pilot or something calling into the tower. That is very subtle, but that's part of the culture that they've sort of assumed.

Jordan B.: So, space medicine constructs men as sort of the normal or the standard component within sort of like a system configuration, and anything that's abnormal is seen as dangerous and unwanted. So, what women do when they finally are allowed access to the astronaut core is try to eliminate all those things that might make them seem different and might make them seem less desirable than a man to send to space. So, that goes from everything from suppressing their periods, which were seen by space medicine doctors as one of the most problematic parts of a woman. And hello, men have leaky bodies, too.

Jordan B.: I find it super interesting that these space scientists, in general, will go to insane lengths to solve a technological problem. They will be like, "We got to fit this round thing into a square hole." They'll spend all night, and they'll come up with the most complicated solution possible. But it'll work. And then, they're like, "Oh, yeah. We want to send a woman into space." And they're like, "Oh. I don't want to work on that problem." When it's a human, they just suddenly shut down, and they don't have that ingenuity that NASA's so famous for.

Jordan B.: So, yeah. Suppression of periods was something. They offered Sally Ride drugs to do that. They also just totally didn't understand what women needed in space. For example, they famously asked her if 100 tampons would be enough for seven days in space. So, stuff like that, all the way down to when she landed, and the crew was sort of coming to a press conference. Someone stepped forward with a bouquet of flowers for her, which they had never done for any of the male astronauts, and Sally Ride was like, "No. Don't give it to me. I don't want it."

Jordan B.: So, just ways like that they felt the need to not demarcate themselves as women, and I think that's unfortunate because space is always presented as sort of this utopian place where humanity's future is. But in fact, what I've found through my study is that that's a bit of a myth and a bit of a fantasy, and in fact, it's a pretty dystopian place where a lot of these Cold War gender politics are reproduced both in terms of heteronormativity and masculine superiority. So, I think if we are going to actually create the vision of humanity in space that we really want to which is to sort of reproduce human diversity as it exists on Earth in space, we have to go back and sort of dismantle space medicine from its very earliest beginnings because that's when it was sort of all baked into the cake.

Leila: Yeah. I think it's super important to highlight, and you did this in dissertation, and you mentioned it just now, is that Lovelace Program wasn't some sort of huge step towards equality. It was not constructed for that purpose, I think that there's a lot of as the "Mercury 13" in quotes has become a more public story that more people in the public know about it is that it is often written about that way. I think it's really important that just because women are allowed somewhere, doesn't mean that it's some just huge step for equality and progress when it was kind of doing the opposite.

Jordan B.: Totally, and Lovelace gets sort of written about and thought about as this sort of advocate for equality, and in space medicine is seen as sort of this value-neutral thing and if only we can appeal to science, then, of course, women will be seen as equal to men. And it's like no, space medicine was a conservative practice from its core, from its very beginning. It was basically founded by Luftwaffe doctors from Nazi Germany, so their opinion of women, surprise, it was not very high, and that get built into all sorts of things like just even their lack of interest in women, the design of different machines in the laboratory to not accommodate women's bodies. There's just a million different ways in which their disinterest and their sort of dissuasion of wanting to include woman is apparent.

Anna: And if I'm not mistaken, it was only white women that were included anyway, right?

Jordan B.: Oh, yeah.

Anna: So, yeah.

Jordan B.: There's that as well, and there's a number of different intersectionalities that just get totally ignored even heteronormativity in space flight today is still super problematic. The number of people who have been to space is approaching 600, but the number of people who have been openly queer or out in space is like one or zero. And Dr. Sally Ride had to come out in a letter published after her death. That's how much there's still sort of a de facto, "Don't ask. Don't tell," in NASA, even though it wasn't even part of the military that that law applied to.

Jordan B.: So, anyways, yeah. For example, you'll get these space psychology studies about long-duration Mars missions, and they're like, "How do we stop inter-crew problems?" And they're like, "Well, we should maybe only send men so that people don't have sex with each other." I'm like, "What? Wait a sec."

Leila: Because men don't have sex with each other.

Jordan B.: Yeah. Or like, "We should only send married couples," and then they'll just write about how it should be men and women and not understand that other types of people get married and whatever. So, there's still a very super conservative theme in space medicine and also extends to not wanting to include disabled people in the astronaut core and that sort of thing. Even though the ability and disability is kind of totally reworked in the zero-G spacecraft environment, there's not sort of an interest there in trying to select anyone other than sort of who's super-normate on Earth.

Leila: This value neutral science thing kind of leads into the next question that we had that one of the challenges posed to the masculine figure of the astronaut is the idea of the "Data body" that was created when space medicine practitioners created machine-readable punch cards for the astronaut candidates. So, can you tell us a little bit about what the data body is, and why it was a potential challenge to that astronaut image?

Jordan B.: So, data body is a term that I invented myself, and it was inspired by a course I took during my PhD with a medical anthropologist named Naomi Adelson called Bodies in Biotechnologies and Anthropology. So, I was really interested in this system of machine-readable punch cards that Randolph Lovelace, the NASA space medicine advisor, who selected the Mercury Seven and also did the tests on the women pilots in the Lovelace Women in Space Program, was also working on. So, these machine-readable punch cards were basically going to record all the different types of information that they collected about the human body in these sort of exacting and exhaustive medical tests.

Jordan B.: So, in the end, when they're judging who's going to go into space and who's not, they're not judging a physically present person. They are judging a stack of basically Scantron cards, and it wasn't just like 10 or something. There's 76 cards that sort of represented the human body, and, of course, you can ask questions like, "What's included? What's not included?" You can talk about like cuts like Karen Brad talks about. You have to choose what you want and what you're interested in, and one thing I thought was super interesting was that Lovelace's cards did include a mark for sex, either male or female. That was the first time that that had appeared in these types of cards because they had been used by the military previously, but they'd never included an option for sex because it was assumed that it would be only men taking it.

Jordan B.: The thing that I thought was sort of interesting was that this can cut both ways. You can say, "Okay. It's good that they're including women sort of assuming that they might take these tests by putting that on there," but then what that does is it allows you, affords you a sense of control over that. So, you could sort all your candidates and basically say, "Anyone who ticks that box for women, don't include them." In the dissertation, I sort of reference a 1960s TV show about military space operations in which they use the computer punch card system to select candidates, and they don't include a control for men or women. And then, they find themselves accidentally selecting a woman candidate, and all the military brass are in a huff because like, "Oh. We can't have this. How did this happen? This is a mistake, and the computer's not supposed to make mistakes," and that sort of thing.

Jordan B.: So, yeah. The data body is just like a representation of the body as data that then can be judged separately of the body itself. There's definitely a political dimension to what you choose to include and what you don't choose to include, and how that affords you different control over the output that you then select.

Rebecca: So, before we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about the idea of shoring up male identity, and so I was wondering if you could talk about how astronauts identity was constructed as against femininity and what that can tell us about how the masculine identity gets formulated?

Jordan B.: Sure. So, space travel, it really reworked American masculine and challenged masculinity in a number of ways. So, if you think back to like sort of the Teddy Roosevelt American masculinity, it's rooted in like autonomy and freedom and the environment, whereas spacecraft, you were basically cocooned inside a machine, and you had almost zero agency. It was all automatic, so there was a challenge in that to masculinity. It did not seem super masculine to A, not be in control, so the Mercury Seven went to great lengths to try and get control over the spacecraft in certain ways. They were given some control over backup systems in the end.

Jordan B.: So, yeah. There was this sort of challenge to: Would the person inside the spacecraft be inherently masculine? And it turned out like, "No." So, in a lot of ways, they had to work to reproduce masculinity in this space so that even went down to space monkeys, for example, and the way that they had to be sort of binarily constructed as male and female.

Jordan B.: There's another way, though, that it gets constructed, and that's in relationship to space as an extreme environment. When you look at the history of mountaineering and polar exploration, the environment is sort of constructed as this hostile enemy that needs to be physically resisted by like a strong, masculine body, and it becomes like an extension of the military culture that way. So, not only is it a question of technology and automation and agency, it also becomes a question of a challenging environment and which bodies are appropriate for resisting that. And in that moment, in the Cold War, there was sort of this culture of masculinity that emerged around resisting physically extreme environments that had become strategic all of a sudden because of the sort of globally-scaled nature of the Cold War. So, that became part of the shoring up of the masculinity of the astronaut as well.

Leila: Good. Does anyone have anyone have any other questions, or, Jordan, do you have anything that you want to say just to put a little bow on the conversation?

Jordan B.: One thing I would like to add though is that for years, I have kept a Lady Science postcard next to my-

Rebecca: Aw.

Jordan B.: ... writing desk, and it's like a really awesome just a design piece. I don't know. I've found a lot of inspiration in it over the years.

Rebecca: Aw.

Anna: Aw.

Leila: Thanks.

Anna: That's so great.

Rebecca: Yay.

Jordan B.: Yeah.

Leila: Thank you.

Jordan B.: So, thank you for the work that you guys do. I think this podcast is awesome, and it was a real honor to be asked to be part of it.

Anna: Aw.

Leila: Oh.

Rebecca: Yay. You go.

Leila: Well, thank you so much for sharing your dissertation with us and sharing your time with us. We really appreciate having you on.

Jordan B.: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Leila: Yeah. Thank you.

Anna: At the end of every episode, our hosts will unburden themselves with something in the news, their work, whatever that's just really annoying the crap out of them. So, this one annoying thing.

Rebecca: Hey. Okay. So, it's my turn this time, which means we're going to talk about museum stuff.

Anna: Woo hoo.

Rebecca: So, over Labor Day weekend, which will have been a couple weeks by the time everyone is listening to this, something not annoying but devastating happened, which is that the Brazil National Museum burned down, or large amounts of the building burned. At this point, as of a couple of days ago, they are still estimating that they have lost 90% of their collections. Particularly hard hit by the fire were records of the indigenous languages as well as a lot of their natural history collections. Those were areas of the museum where it just, the fire, raged.

Rebecca: It's pretty awful. This is the most significant museum in Brazil, one of the largest both historical and natural history collections in South America, so this is a pretty devastating loss.

Anna: And if I'm not misspaken, misspaken, mistaken, the museum is older than Brazil was an independent country from Portugal, right?

Rebecca: Yes. Yeah.

Anna: Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, yeah, like a few years older than it, and it has been seen as kind of like, from what I've read, a symbol of Brazil as an independent country as well. So, yeah, it's really sad, and it's sort of been something that as a member of the museum community, my heart has been with that museum and the people of Brazil lately.

Rebecca: But, of course, when terrible things happen, someone out there has to have annoying, stupid responses to it. And so, I want to just talk, so I want to complain about a couple of stupid, annoying responses that I've seen. One of them is something that unfortunately is going to always be bubbling beneath the surface in discussions of museums that are not in the West or historical or natural history collections that aren't in the West, and that's this assumption that brown people, essentially people who aren't Western, aren't able to take care of their collections, and that's why they should all just be at the British Museum.

Rebecca: I saw some discussions online of people kind of saying that they had seen, "Oh, yeah. Well, obviously, Brazil doesn't know how to take care of its museum." They tell us it's financial crises, da, da, da, da, da. So, maybe we should just have all these collections in more stable countries like the U.K., and this has essentially been the argument for stealing national treasures from across the world since white people started stealing national treasures from across the world, so it's pretty horrifying to see it.

Anna: The beginning of time, you mean?

Rebecca: Yes.

Anna: Yeah.

Rebecca: Since the beginning of time. We are using “since the beginning of time” so much in this episode, but it feels both inevitable and just really frustrating to see how easily it is for people to make that leap. Especially, when God knows there are museums all over that don't have their shit together. Not always, and it's often because of lack of funding and because of lack of national support. The U.S. does a really bad job of funding and supporting its many museums and historical treasures and even the Smithsonian is pretty badly funded by the Federal Government.

Leila: It's awful on several different levels. One, it's incredibly disrespectful to the people who did the work at that museum.

Rebecca: Yes.

Leila: That they worked really hard, and they did their jobs really well with the means that they had. That had nothing to do with them not being capable of taking care of their museum and taking care of their collections. This idea that so archeology and anthropology has always been tied to nation and Europeans and Americans think that they can just go into other people's backyards and basically pillage their shit and take it back home and put it in their national museums, right? And so, throughout the history of these fields, people in other countries have been consistently stripped of their right to own their national identity by being able to keep the things that people took out of their backyard. And that is basically what this argument is. It's saying that we still have the right to own your shit. You don't get that because you can't play nicely with your toys.

Rebecca: Yeah. You have proven that you can't take care of it.

Leila: Right. Yeah.

Anna: I think what you said about being disrespectful to the people who work in the museum is a really important thing to reiterate. The people work in a museum are not in charge of paying for it. That's not how museums work.

Anna: It's not their fault they didn't have the money to take care of the building. We have to be able to, I don't know, be careful about and understand the dynamics of how these things are funded and the differences between different kinds of museum work and who's responsible for what, and, yeah. The curators on the floor, this is not their fault.

Anna: So, you can talk about the mismanagement of the funding for museums in Brazil or whatever but even if you want to make some kind of argument that Brazil is in economic turmoil or whatever, sorry, but that still doesn't give you the right to lay claim to someone else's shit.

Anna: You don't get to say that. You don't get to swoop in and say, "Well, you can't take care." You don't get to do that for other people's kids. You don't. I don't understand this argument. It's bananas to me. Like, "What?"

Anna: And that's just to let that's like the ... It's such a ... I don't know. It's one of those imperial kind of legacies that is just floating on the surface of our culture that nobody seems to take any issue with. It's incredible to me that we would assume that the U.K. or the U.S. is somehow entitled to doing this, and that our argument is that our argument is that, "Well, we have to preserve it for posterity." No. We don't have do anything. We don't get to do anything with other people's stuff. What are you talking about?

Leila: Rebecca, that article that you sent from Wired about, "Well, they should have digitized everything." First of all, digitization takes money, and it takes labor. And if they're already thin on both, it's going to be real hard to crank out digitizations that even if we consume for free on Internet Archive, doesn't mean it was free getting it there.

Rebecca: And the idea of digitization as a substitute for the actual thing, or a way of preserving the actual thing, is one of the things that makes digital museum people look bad in this way that makes me super angry. Because digitization often is and should be about access, not about preserving things, and there are so many people out there who say, "Digitization is bad because it's a way of ... " because people think it's a way of preserving things, and then we're going to end up throwing away all this stuff. And I always want to say, "No, no, no. That's not what the digitization is for." And then, something like this fucking Wired article comes down, and it's like, "No, actually, this would have helped preserve stuff," and I'm like, "Stop it. Stop it."

Leila: I think that this is the first time Rebecca has said the F word on this podcast.

Rebecca: Is it?

Leila: Welcome, Rebecca.

Anna: We did it.

Rebecca: Is it?

Leila: Let's just hope.

Rebecca: Oh, my God. Yay.

Leila: We got you upset enough.

Rebecca: See? Me being angry about people being stupid about museums. It's appropriate.

Anna: I'm just going to say that also digitization does not ... It is not automatically preserved. You have to then preserve the infrastructure that kind of holds up the digitized product, and we have no idea how to do that. We are flying by the seat of our pants here on Planet Earth-

Rebecca: Oh, my gosh, yeah.

Anna: ... with our internet shit. We have no idea what we're doing. What? Are you just going to build more data centers until the whole surface of the planet is covered in data centers?

Rebecca: Yep.

Anna: Digital things require physical infrastructure to survive. It's not just ... I don't know how people think that works, but you got to have servers and shit.

Rebecca: If the server, if the digital file server, or I don't know. We don't use hard disks anymore, but disks or whatever, was still-

Anna: The tapes.

Rebecca: If tapes were still in the museum, they also would have burned up. I mean which is why part of most digitization plans involve the shit being stored on like five different servers in different parts of the world, even really, really basic digitization plans often involve that, which that's also super expensive.

Anna: Which I'm sure is super affordable for a museum that doesn't have money for fire sprinklers. Just saying.

Rebecca: Exactly. Exactly. To be fair, honestly, the Wired article does go into more detail about the money and labor that the process takes than a lot of places, but it still concludes that this all a totally doable, rational solution to this problem.

Anna: It's also like we talk about this all the time about, "Oh, well, there has to be some technological solution to our problems that is somehow removed from the physical reality of the world." And not only is we've discussed that not true, but we don't have the technology to preserve all of the information that is contained in a physical artifact. So, say your natural history collection has a bunch of preserved dead birds. That's a thing. How are you going to preserve everything that that actual bird contains, all the data that's inside that? Data that we might not even be looking for right now, but that someone else might look for later? There's no way to preserve all of that, so even if that were a solution, it's not like a complete solution. You're only going to be able to preserve probably at most like an image of the bird and some metadata about where it came from and when, and that's probably all you're going to get out of that.

Leila: Well, hey, if we bring in that 3D body scanner ...

Anna: Oh, no.

Leila: ... that we talked about last time. You'll be able to do that.

Rebecca: Sure.

Anna: Thanks a lot, Peter Thiel.

Leila: Peter Thiel to the rescue.

Anna: Oh, my God.

Leila: Okay. Well, I guess that's a good place to close up since I just said, "Peter Thiel to the rescue."

Anna: We'll all be departing this hell planet right now. I mean, just shoot me into the sun.

Leila: I'm dead now.

Anna: I'm done.

Leila: Okay. So, if you liked our episode today, please, please, please leave us a rating interview on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about any of the segments today, Tweet us at @ladyxscience or #LadySciPod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article, and more visit ladyscience.com.

Leila: We are an independent magazine like we keep reminding you, and we depend on the support from our readers and listen, my pleas get more and more desperate. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations, just visit ladyscience.com/donate.

Leila: And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.

Anna: Oh, and we're on Instagram, too.

Leila: Oh, and we're on Instagram, yes.

Anna: It's also @ladyxscience.

Rebecca: Yay.

01:18:22

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: Careful! and Cassie Lace by the Zombie Dandies 

Subscribe. Rate. Review. 

In this episode, the hosts talk about the history of the IQ test and how disparities in intelligence have been used as a tool of oppression against people of color. Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble joins in to talk about her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, which explores how Google and other search engines are engineered to marginalize women of color, particularly black women.

The birth of American intelligence testing by Ludy T. Benjamin Jr., PhD

Genetics Generation by Laura Rivard

Sick? Or Slow? On the origins of intelligence as a psychological object by Serge Nicolas, et al.

“Scientific racism” is on the rise on the right. But it’s been lurking there for years. by Nicole Hemmer

Sam Harris, Charles Murray, and the allure of race science by Ezra Klein

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public by Sarah E. Igo

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

Safiya Umoja Noble

“Insatiable” Trailer

‘Insatiable’ Is Lazy and Dull, But At Least It’s Insulting by Linda Holmes

Naked Labs’ 3-D Body Scanner Shows You The Naked Truth by Laura Goode

Edited for clarity 

Rebecca: Welcome to episode 11 of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-owner and chief of Lady science. I'm a writer editor and PhD student studying 20th century American culture and the history of the American Space Program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet. I'm currently a regular writer on women and the history of science at Smithsonianmag.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm [00:01:00] not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet and managing social media for the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

Leila: Okay, so we've got some housekeeping before we start on the episode. So first thing is that if you listened to last month's episode, you'll know that we just wrapped up our summer pledge drive that ran through June and July. At the beginning of the pledge-drive, we had $228 in monthly pledges, and we just closed out the drive with $538. So that's a $300 increase. Though we didn't reach our third goal of $650 we're incredible incredibly grateful for what you guys helped us to achieve these last two months. So we just want to say a big thank you to everyone who made new pledges, increase their pledges and spread the word.

It means so much to us, and we can't do any of this -- the magazine, the [00:02:00] podcast, any of it -- without you guys. So, thank you.

Rebecca: Seriously, it's so awesome. Since we did reach our first two pledge goals. we're gonna be putting out some new content. So that's exciting. When we reached $400 in pledges, we promise that we started an Instagram account. And so we went and did that. You'll find video, stories, and more there so follow us for more Lady Science goodness. Our handle is ladyxscience, which is the same as our Twitter handle.

When we had our second goal, we promise to share bonus podcast content. So to get all the bonus and mini episodes, make sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts Google play or Stitcher.

And the last sort of housekeeping thing I wanted to mention is that we are getting ready to start another special series [00:03:00] that will be running in October, and we're accepting pitches for it right now. We're doing a series on the intersection of sports gender and science.

So we specially when hear from people that are sort of not traditionally well-represented in sports writing. So, you know folks who are not white dudes, and even if you've never written about sports before, if you want to you should pitch us and we're looking for six hundred to a thousand word pieces. They can be historical or contemporary. They can even have personal elements, but they should sort of fit well with the Lady Science perspective on gender and science. So, you know things like gender and statistics in professional sports or performance-enhancing drugs, exercise culture, sports medicine, technology and sports. So you can find more details about that on our Twitter and Facebook pages, but the basics [00:04:00] are send your pitch, some clips, a little bit about yourself to ladysciencecienceinfo at gmail dot come with the subject "Sports series," and we pay so that's fun, too.

Leila: Cool, so a little bit later in this episode, we're going to be talkin to Safya Noble about her new book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Eeinforce Racism. Her work attacks head on the notion that algorithms that control search engines are not at all neutral and she does this by exploring how those algorithms work and how Western societies' biases against people of color and especially black women get baked in every step of the way. Her book does an amazing job of dismantling the idea that algorithms somehow remove biases from decision-making processes, and shows that they do exactly the opposite, which is amplify and codify those biases. But before we get to talking about why there's [00:05:00] no such thing as an unbiased algorithm, let's talk a little bit about data.

Because algorithms are built on some kind of data, whether it's the browser history that gets fed into a search engine algorithm or it's the Lady science business expenses that we keep track of and calculate using it an Excel spreadsheet. And here's the most important thing you need to know about data: like algorithms, data isn't neutral.

Recebba: It seems like especially when we're talking about science -- super sciencey science -- we've decide there is something called raw data that scientists collect in a lab. And this pops in my head, it's kind of like the science we learned at school, right?

So you have a scientist, and they're in white lab coat, and they do something like count cells in the petri dish, or observe the change in color in a solution, or track some like small animal's heart rate, and that's supposedly [00:06:00] raw data. It's apolitical because they're cells in the petri dish and cells in a Petri dish don't care who the president is. So just counting them, therefore, we assume must be a neutral act. Right?

Anna: But we can ask all kinds of questions about how that could not be neutral like: Why is the scientist counting those particular cells and not other cells? How did they decide to do this experiment? Who is supervising them? Who's paying the scientists to count them? Why? Who taught them how to count the cells in the first place? Is the scientist getting enough sleep at night? Like there are all kinds of things that we can, um, variables if you will, that we can inject into you know this idea of neutral data.

Leila: So this example about cells [00:07:00] reminds me of a really good example from history -- which I guess in the last 10 years or so has gotten a lot of attention because of Rebecca Skloot's book --which is Henrietta Lacks and the Hela cells. And just for some basic background. What happened with Henrietta Lacks and Hela is that in 1951 a black woman named Henrietta Lacks went to Johns Hopkins for what she was believed to be cervical cancer, and it did turn out to be cervical cancer. And so during her treatment, the doctor who was treating her extracted cells from her cervix, and extracted them without her consent or knowledge, which was you know to some degree acceptable. Well not acceptable. I wouldn't say that. [00:08:00] Legal at the time. Doesn't mean that it's acceptable. But they they took them, and those cells are still being used today. They're the first immortalized cell line, and it's become one of the most important cell lines in medical research.

So some of the issues surrounding HeLa, and the name comes from the first two letters of her first and last name, so some of the issues that come into that with Hela, obviously, are the idea that she didn't give consent, and these cells of her own body were taken without her knowledge. But also that these cells continue to be used long after she died, long after we did establish informed consent laws. And they have also turned a profit. She died less than a year later in 1952 from the cervical [00:09:00] cancer, but her family was not even made aware of the cell lines' existence until 1975.

So there's a whole lot of issues that come into play with that: with commercial commercial purposes, about privacy and patients rights, and stuff like that. So if we're talking about cells, I think that might be one of the most prominent examples of how that wasn't necessarily just raw data that just like sprung up in a Petri dish.

Rebecca: Another example that I thought of maybe this because it was about counting -- maybe made me think of this -- but the census. Not not like lab science in the same way, but on the surface the census seems like a very like basic thing: you go and you count a bunch of people and find out where they live. But then how do you define what it means to live somewhere and how do you count people who like don't want to answer [00:10:00] their door to people they don't know, and maybe even particularly government officials.

And so this thing that seems on the one hand maybe really basic counting people has just so many variables involved in it.

Leila: That's become something that's become a prominent topic during the Trump administration because they're asking questions about immigration status, which you know with what's been going on with deportation and ICE all of that, that naturally puts immigrants, you know, they obviously have concerned about that. And then also I believe maybe a year ago or so they were a floating the idea that gay people weren't going to be counted on the census. And so sure you can't exclude gay people from your data collection and then just use that data and pretend that it's raw data, but it's not because someone decided who [00:11:00] got to count and who didn't get to count.

Anna: Yeah the census is -- oh my god, ugh -- There is also, when you're talking about like people not wanting to open their doors or not, you know not wanting to participate in the census, there's a good book,I believe it's called the Averaged American about how Americans were first sort of exposed to this kind of data collection for social sciences. And like we were basically trained to participate in creating this kind of data, like the history of the Gallup poll. Things like that. It's a really interesting book.

So in terms of what we want to talk about today, you know, even when we're talking about things that seem to us straight forward like the census or counting cells, I we've seen already that that gets really fuzzy really quickly. You know, what happens when we try to [00:12:00] collect data on something that's much more complicated, and I think that most of our listeners would understand IQ, intelligence quotient, as being really complicated. So there are various kinds of tests that are supposed to measure and quantify intelligence, and they've been shown to be biased against people of color, women, non-Westerners. But they're meant in this like "all data is neutral" optimistic kind of way to turn something squishy and difficult to understand, intelligence, into something quantifiable and comparable and neutral.

Leila: Just a little bit of history here about the IQ test. So the first working intelligence test was developed by a French psychologist named Alfred Binet in 1905, and he had a pretty political reason for creating it in the first place. At this point in history, France had rcently instituted universal public education, and Binet [00:13:00] wanted to ensure that so-called "abnormal students" were also served by the new system. He created intelligence tests as a way to advocate for specific education policy and at his urging the French government created a quote special education system where quote feeble-minded students attended classes separately from quote normal students, but in the same school. And I wanted to keep saying "quote" there because I want people to know that these are not things that we say, these are things, these are terms that were common then, and that's why we're using them because it goes to show how ableism was built into even just the language that they were using to talk about the IQ test.

So shortly after Binet published his intelligent test he got a visit from an American psychologist named Henry Goddard. Goddard also studied feeblemindedness and he was fascinated by this idea of being able to [00:14:00] quantify intelligence, but he had a somewhat different interest than Binet. He was trying to figure out what made some people quote feeble-minded and some people quote intelligent. And he was pretty sure it had something to do with heredity.

Rebcca: So back in America, Goddard translated and published Binet's test, and this is when it really takes off. Before that it was really kind of this interesting French social science political thing. But it's kind of amazing how fast it takes off. By 1911, he introduced the test to public schools in America. By 1913, it was being used to test immigrants at Ellis Island in 1900.

Leila: That sounds great.

Rebecca: And then the next -- right it gets even better. But in 1914 Goddard became the first psychologist to introduce evidence for Binet's test into a court of law. So this is like five years after this test has been published in English for the first time. [00:15:00] It's already like having a serious impact on the like socio-political system of the United States. All the while he's also a psychologist who is studying the idea that intelligence is an inherited trait. And that made him super duper popular with a group of other well-respected psychologists who were calling themselves eugenicists.

Anna: You know when we started this magazine, I did not think we were going to spend quite as much time talking about eugenics as we do, it's like a lot. But I think you can't talk about data without talking about eugenicists because they were all about data. Eugenicist love data. They like measuring people's heads and like their height and weight. They like tracking rates of mental illness. They really like tracking criminal behavior. And they were pretty excited by this test because now they had something that was [00:16:00] quote-unquote objective by which they could measure intelligence to, and, shocker, Goddard and his fellow eugenicists came to exactly the conclusion that they were looking for. So according to the data from the intelligence test, women, poor people, black people, were all less intelligent than white people, and they produced inferior children. Which is exactly what the eugenicist wanted to hear, and data and objectivity never lie, right?

Leila: Yeah, even today and so, this wasn't that long ago. This was early 1900s. So I think it's really important when we're starting to bring this into the present day, like you know these stories weren't that long ago, and even today we have people who use intelligent test to conclude that women are inferior to men or poor people are inferior to rich people or black [00:17:00] people are inferior to white people.

Anna: I just want to say, when you say "even today," we have people who use intelligence tests, stuff like this is being published in like mainstream medical journals. So it's not just like a people like Pepe Twitter yelling about this stuff. Like it's embedded in our academic system, and there're supposedly legitimate discussions happening in academia about stuff like this right now.

Rebecca: Yes, and this is the part where we have to talk about Charles Murray.

Leila: It is where we have to talk about Charles Murray. Even though he's gonna be kind of the person we talk about, it's not just Charles Murray. It's James Daramore who got fired from Google, and is now deciding to I guess to Google. It's Sam Harris [00:18:00] who runs a podcast where he talks for two hours because he has enough confidence as a mediocre straight white guy that he thinks people want to listen to him for two hours.

Rebecca: And he considers himself. a progressive, If I remember correctly.

Leila: He does. He does. He's just another racist misogynist ... go on. Sorry.

Rebecca: Yes. No. Yeah so many terrible people. Yeah, but, on the one hand, Charles Murray is, I was gonna say considered a crack pot, but I can't even quite say that anymore. But you gotta remember this guy is like has a sociology degree and worked for the government and is considered a normal intellectual human out in the world.

Anna: Didn't he work for the CIA, that trustworthy and kind branch...?

Leila: Yeah, in Thailand.

Anna: Perfect

Leila: [00:19:00] You know, I'm sure he saw brown people in a totally like neutral way.

But I also wanted to say that people like Charles Murray and Sam Harris, and these two are in cahoots with each other...

Rebecca: Totally.

Leila: ...the New Atheist movement, capital A, see like men like Harris and Murray and Dawkins as being like their leaders, and so we need to interrogate the New Atheist Movement in a really rigorous way because they're they're touting the same demagoguery and racist ideology as any other white male movement.

Rebecca: Yeah, and the reason that they're kind of able to do that just to back up for people who don't know all the details. So Charles Murray, he came really to prominence in the 1980s. He was a big proponent of dismantling the New [00:20:00] Society programs and, therefore, was super popular among the sort of Ronald Reagan political set.

His book The Bell Curve, which is probably what he's most known for, came out 1994, and that argued that IQ was heritable and unchangeable and that it was correlated to both race and to negative social behavior. And the reason why people like Sam Harris, people like the New Atheists, get super excited about this is that the Bell Curve is notoriously stuffed with charts and graphs and numbers to make it super weird and sciencey in this way that appeals to a certain kind of mediocre white man who needs to justify his racism via number things. So even Charles Murray, which I think is hilarious called it social science pornography. So like he knew exactly what he was doing. [00:21:00] Yeah. And I learned that from an article that was written by Nicole hammer in Vox last year that was called "Scientific Racism Is On The Rise On The Right, But It Has Been Lurking There For Years," which basically lays out the fact that all these eugenics ideas, which didn't start that long ago, really just never went away. They took different forms, but they just sort of hung out. So for more about that specific history and that intellectual trajectory. I really recommend looking up Nicole Hemmer's stuff.

Anna: And Nicole Hemmer, correct me if I'm wrong, she is a historian, a political historian of American conservatism. Correct?

Rebecca: Yes. That is correct.

Leila: And I okay. I want to point out also that Sam Harris -- I'm sorry that I keep coming back to Sam Harrist but...

Anna: Oh my gosh

[laughter]

Leila: ...when I was making notes and researching more [00:22:00] for this piece he just kept popping up more and more because he has hitched his wagon to Charles Murray in the last year. He has been very much attacking Vox, and Nicole Hemmer runs a column in Vox, and ezra Klein, who has publicly denounced what Charles Murray and Sam Harris are pushing, and so I don't think it's a coincidence that there's these two like Nicole Hemmer and Ezra Klein who have been very outspoken about this particular issue, and Sam Harris continues to go after Vox. Just saying.

Rebecca: Yeah. Oh, yeah 100%. Yeah, there's that absurd transcript that Ezra Klein published in Vox. I only got about like a quarter of the way through it, and I was like I can't do this. But he published like this full transcript of a conversation.

Leila: Yeah. Yeah, it was terrible. I listened to it.

Rebecca: And it's just... oh god [00:23:00] I couldn't even listen. I was like, "nope, can't listen to this."

Leila: But I think it's important to note that these men who claim objectivity and non-bias and denounce identity politics because they're above that are attacking media outlets and media figures because they're being criticized. So like yeah, that's just some cognitive dissonance there.

Anna: So I guess we could probably rant about Sam Harris for the rest of the episode if we really want to...

*laughter*

Leila: Yeah, so lets!

Anna: Do you remember when him and Dawkins and Dennett? And who was the other one? Oh, wait him. Dawkins, Dennett, there was one other one,

Leila: Krauss?

Rebecca: Andrew Sullivan?

Anna: I don't remember.

Rebecca: There are so many of them!

Leila: I know, but there was like that core group...oh! Hitchens! And they were calling themselves the Four Horsemen. I just...

Rebecca: Oh right!

Anna: [00:24:00] Anywhere horrible. Okay, so but the point of bringing up all of these awful men -- are you surprised, really? So the thing here about Murray and his defenders and all of these yahoos is that they always want to talk about pure science -- quote-unquote pure science -- raw data, and they defend The Bell Curve and other studies like it by saying "well, we're just following the data," and accusing people who question their motives as being unscientific, which ugh!

Leila: Nothing is worse than that!

Anna: But this pure science just doesn't exist, which I think should be our new log line for Lady Science. Like it doesn't, so even when we're talking about something much less controversial than IQ, scientists collect data about people that is, and other things not just people, but that is influenced by their [00:25:00] own assumptions and biases and by this sort of structural biases of our society writ large, that's been true historically, it's still true today.

I think one of the things that I struggled with in talking about this kind of thing to people who didn't go to grad school for a History of Science and don't spend all their free time thinking about this is that there's this really hard-to-squash misconception that there is there is an important and comprehensible difference between the data that is collected and who does the collecting and how. So Ithink it kind of gets into some like probably too obnoxious Philosophy of Science stuff to go into here, [00:26:00] but...I don't know what I'm trying to say...that there's some kind of difference between reality and the way that you observe that reality and that like any kind of bias you like even if you were prepared to admit that there was bias, which I'm not sure that we've even got to that point as a society, that there's some way you could just Bad Apple the whole situation and say "well, like a real scientist would never do that." But we're not always talkin about the Charles Murries of the world who have like a specific evil intent, not all biases in science come from, you know, mustache twiddling, eugenicists. I's baked in all the way through and so it goes from being super evil to being very banal. [00:27:00] I think it's just important to say that like if you try to dismiss the problem as just being "Murray and his ilk are evil" that's not gonna solve the problem.

Leila: And I think this is a good time to take these things that we've talked about a little bit step further and maybe specifically with this idea of IQ is how these things get, passed into social policy.. So it's not just about thinking white people are smarter than black people, which in and of itself, face value, is just a terrible thing to believe. But it goes a lot further than that because this affects social social policy. And so if we think about something like Affirmative Action, and you actually believe that a black person is not as smart as a white person, then you think that affirmative action is inherently fone out of bad faith, [00:28:00] that it is swindling well-deserving genetically superior white people just so that we can please black people, right? The fact that we keep still having to have this argument about Affirmative Action shows that these ideas about intelligence and IQ are baked into that very conversation.

Rebecca: The thing that came into my head today when I was thinking, when I was getting ready for us to record, was the article that came out recently that was... was it women are more likely to survive a heart attack if the doctor is a woman, I think was what the study showed. And that's not because every single male doctor is like "well, I don't care if this woman dies" but because of so much of how we think about how heart attacks work is [00:29:00] based on studies on men, and if you're not listening to a woman and how a woman is describing her symptoms, and how her body works then you aren't necessarily going to be able to save her life. And that's just because of both implicit biases that mean that a lot of doctors are less likely to listen to women in pain, but also structural biases like the studies on women and heart conditions don't exist at the same level that studies of men and heart conditions do, and that all comes from decisions that people made to do neutral things like which studies to do.

Leila: Right and that's how these things become systemic is that it's not just an individual belief that Murray has or Harris has, that these become systemic things that affect real people on the ground. And I think that we talked about it a couple episodes ago, about how it wasn't even until the 90s [00:30:00] that in clinical trials it was required to have women and people of color in there. Because that wasn't happening. It was white men. Their bodies were being used as the data for medical science. And so if we have a medical system that continually dismisses woman's pain, where black women are continually dying in childbirth, like those things were done by design because they were systemic, and we're having to dismantle them even now.

Rebecca: And all of that starts from...what you know...this is okay sounds silly....but that starts from someone deciding which cells in a Petri dish they feel like counting.

Leila: Yeah, absolutely.

Cool. So, we'll just go ahead and transition into our interview with Dr. Sofiya Noble, which we actually recorded at a different time, and it was recorded [00:31:00] while she was at a Starbucks. And so there's a lot of sounds of people like moving chairs around on the concrete. And an ambulance and stuff like that. So I'm just letting you know heads up. Uh, it's not going to sound too great, but you're definitely going to want to listen to it because the conversation was really fantastic.

[musical break]

Rebecca: Today we've been dismantling the idea that data about human intelligence is or ever has been neutral and now we're going to be turning to something else that many people assume is neutral and that's the Google search engine. We're excited to have Dr. Sofiya Noble with us to talk about her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforced Racism. Dr. Noble is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern [00:32:00] California. In her book, she demonstrates how Google creates biased search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, and particularly black women. So welcome to the podcast, Dr. Noble.

Dr. Noble: Thank you. Thanks so much. So great to be here.

Anna: Okay. So let's start at the very beginning. You use the term "technological redlining" to describe the power of algorithms in reinforcing oppressive social relationships and racial profiling. So that we're sort of all working from the same baseline understanding, could you first explain what redlining is in a non digita spacel?

Dr. Noble: Sure. Sure. So redlining has been a historical practice of institutionally discriminating using certain kinds of metrics or indicators within systems that really kind of skew [00:33:00] resources and power away from for the most part communities of color in the United States, but also women. And one of the ways we've seen this most profoundly, for example, is in the real estate, banking and financial services industries where people who live in a particular zip code, for example, might be more likely to pay a higher premium on their insurance: car insurance, automotive, and home insurance. Maybe they pay a higher interest rate when they're trying to get a loan for a house or small business or personal loan. So these are the kinds of ways that we've seen redlining happen over time. And, of course, that's been ruled illegal since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. And so one of the things that I'm trying to do in the work is show how. some of these key markers about group identities, community-based identities, get kind of reiscribed into data [00:34:00] profiles and ideas about who people are and then get implemented through technical systems, like software or artificial intelligence that does a certain kind of automated decision making and that also incorporates all kinds of demographic features are raised, our gender, and so forth, but does it in ways that are very very difficult to see and, of course, even more difficult to intervene upon.

Rebecca: So how is it that the Google search works? How does it find and serve up search results?

Dr. Noble: Google searches actually a complex phenomena, and most of us who study Google or study search engines have to kind of come to, to draw a lot of sophisticated conclusions about how it works based on its output and what's publicly available.

So [00:35:00] at a very technical sense, the only people who know how Google search works are the engineers who work on search at Google. But more broadly, I think we can glean from what we know about how search engines work, that, for example, the primary mechanism that influences what we find is the advertising algorithm, which is Google's AdWords program that allows people to optimize content and pay for and outbid others to link certain keywords with their content. And that's a huge feature of how search engines work which is to say that their content is moving through an advertising platform, and advertisers with the greatest amount of capital as well as breadth of reach with their content either through hyperlinking [00:36:00] or having their content embedded with other people's content; they're typically the winners in a search engine. And so we see this, of course, in some very obvious ways. If you're looking for new stories, for example, you're much more likely to be directed to major international and national news outlets before you are kind of local news or kind of local perspectives. And if you're looking, you know for dresses, of course, this was a big story in the New York Times a few years ago, you might be more likely to find JC Penney's or Macy's right instead of of a boutique in your neighborhood. So ultimately, search engines are really trying to, I think they're at balance between optimized content and paid for advertising.

Leila: So to kind of bring those first two questions together, how combining the idea of [00:37:00] redlining and how Google works, how then does this technological redlining happen in a search.

Dr. Noble: Well, you know when I first started my research many years ago, I was looking for example to see how women and girls were represented conceptually in a search engine, and you know many people have heard me speak now about this and I write about this in the book, it was the impetus for the book and the book cover, which is what happens when you search for black women and girls or you see what kinds of water suggestions come about or what kinds of images come about for these identities. And what you find is that, for example, with women and girls oftentimes is the porn industry that has a tremendous amount of influence over the type of content that comes up in relationship to keywords, searches that use the word girls in particular, girls, or black girls, [00:38:00] Asian girls, Latina girls. So that's one dimension of it, which is to say industries that have a lot of money like the porn industry are able to dominate and control keywords and, of course, those keywords are actually made to real human beings in real communities, real groups of people. So that's one dimension of how I kind of argued that people lose control over their representation and um, and they're not able to kind of purchase their way out of that.

And of course now ambulance is going by so.

*laughter*

Anna: So one of the, I think, one of the really important threads in the book is about understanding the way that Google is first and foremost [00:39:00] concerned with advertising and profit and the disconnect between what people assume Google is concerned with, which I suppose think of some kind of like public service. And so you describe Google searches and advertising algorithm not as an information algorithm, and I was wondering if you could just talk about that difference and why is it important to know and be able to identify that difference as a user of the internet?

Dr. Noble: Yes, so this is one of the most fundamental reasons why I wrote this book, which is we're living in an in a moment where people, particularly in the United States and in Europe, are extremely reliant upon the internet to kind of provide their basic information needs. Governments are increasingly pushing people to the web to facilitate government business. The public.is increasingly reliant upon the internet and [00:40:00] digital technologies and media platforms as a proxy for all kinds of things, so we see, for example, in local communities where libraries are being threatened with closure; the general public sensibility is "what do we need the library for when we have Google." And so we have this kind of increasing tensions around our conceptions of what public information and reliable and credible information is and where it can be found. And one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I felt that there was an increasing conversation about the trustworthiness and the reliability of Google to really serve as something akin to a public library online.

There's many studies that bear this out, that show people believe that what they find in a Google search, for [00:41:00] example, is highly reliable, credible, trustworthy. And yet when you start to look at certain kinds of concepts, especially concepts around traditionally marginalized and oppressed communities, you find that there's a lot of misrepresentative information images and ideas that flourish, and this to me is significant when we think about how important it is to have trustworthy and reliable evidence based research and journalism and fact-based information. In order to see democracy flourish. If there were ever a time, of course, where those kinds of ideas are threatened would certainly be as we look to see how social media and platforms like Facebook and YouTube have played a significant role in the spread of [00:42:00] disinformation and misinformation whether it's in the 2016 presidential election or around other kinds of ideas.

So this is really what the thesis of the book is. It's like what's at stake when we outsource our information needs in a democracy to private corporations that are in essence advertising platforms and whose values are about the bottom line and returning shareholder value rather than maybe some type of non-commercial set of values that similarly what a library right might have. How different are the kinds of things that we find when we're relying upon an advertising platform to inform the public.

Rebecca: Now, on a very sort of practical level, I guess, the way that this happens that it acts as an advertising platform not as an [00:43:00] information platform is that it's so hard to tell the difference between an advertise search result and a non-,advertised result. But are there ways that people can tell the difference and can you give some tips on what people should look out for?

Dr. Noble: Yeah, you know, this is really complex because there have been times where Google has highlighted, for example, yellow box content to signal "this is an ad" versus what it calls its organic search results, which I think we might even trouble the notion that an organic search result is not tied to keyword optimization in its advertising tools. This idea that it's borrowing from an old model of newspapers, which is that the advertising is somehow wholly separate from the editorial, but in a search engine all of the content is really [00:44:00] reliant upon these organic ,so to speak, results are deeply tied to ads that want to be visible when people are looking for those keywords. So there's a real co-mingling, and of course, a lot of the content that we might see might itself exists because it's been paid for in essence to be optimized or to make it to the front page. So this makes it really difficult then to say like "well, what is advertising and what's a quote-unquote truthy fact or organic result?" I think that paradigm or that idea is a bit faulty. I think all the content that we find has through a variety of different factors, Google says over 200 different factors go into deciding what makes it to the first page right or how it finds what it finds and displays it to us. We don't know what those factors are, but we can be guaranteed that some level of [00:45:00] profit for Google is at play in that. That makes it very difficult to say what is an ad. In some ways. if you know that the content you're getting says ad right in front of it, which now is the way that Google is doing it, that's that's one way.

Although I will tell you that there have been studies that have been done by ConsumerWatchdog.org, for example that show that when they ask people to look at search results on a page and tell them which ones are advertisements and which ones are just kind of these quote-unquote organic search results most of the public can't tell the difference. So I think what we are more likely to find is that the public generally believes that if some content makes it to the first page of Google search results, it's credible. It's been vetted and it's reliable. I think they might not think of it as an ad.

Rebecca: It seems like even in a very practical kind of way even if you know that the ones at the very top are [00:46:00] almost always ads, sometimes you're in a hurry and you're just trying to find the thing and so it can be so easy to to fall into. Yeah exactly what you're saying, anything on the first page just is what you want.

Dr. Noble: Yeah and here's the thing. Listen I use Google all the time. People always ask me what do you u,se and I use a lot of different ones, probably three different ones. But the deal is if I'm looking for directions someplace, if I'm looking for a good coffee shop in a place, in a town I've never been to, Google can kind of quickly get me this type of banal information, and that reinforces our trust because if nine out of the ten things we look for are just like where is something, where something on sale, how do I get to this place, these kinds of things really reinforce our trust. Then when we do the one thing like ask Google a complex question [00:47:00] and it gives us back some propaganda, well that might be harder to discern. That's in fact what we're seeing, and of course, I wrote a chapter in the book about Dylan Roof and his searches, and I think that's a really one of the the worst kind of most extreme egregious examples of how that happens,

leila: Right. There was one time when I was researching black women inventors in the 19th century and the first result, one of the very first results, that popped up was a discussion thread from the Daily Stormer debunking the idea that black people had invented anyting. And like that wasn't what I was looking for even a little bit.

Dr. Noble: I know and imagine you were 14 or 12 writing a paper for some sixth grade class. We see this happen in fact. Many reporters [00:48:00] and scholars have talked about what happens when middle school and high school kids are writing papers on Dr. King for example, and they come across MartinLutherKing.org, which is a Stormfront website. That's a propaganda disinformation site about Dr. King, but it's been owned and optimized by Stormfront for so long that it's on that front page, and it's very hard, even the King Estate has not been successful in getting that URL taken down. And so what happens is it's legitimate by virtue of being on the first page, and young people in particular but even older people may or may not be able to tell. If they don't know that Stormfront, for example, as a white power organization, the largest online white supremacist community, if they don't know what that is, there's no reason for them to recognize what's happening there.

Leila: One of the things that you talked about [00:49:00] multiple times throughout the book is the importance of understanding historical context in which these oppressive algorithms pop up. So can you explain why history is such an important part of your argument?

Dr. Noble: Yes, well one of the reasons is because... I give the example of what happens to black girls and black women in this gross hyper-sexualized stereotyping that happened for many many years. Google has since changed the algorithm and suppressed the pornography and that's great, and unfortunately, it still for Latina and Asian girls; there's still work to do. But all of these can these communities of women who quite frankly are women: when you look at this pornographic content, it's allegedly women over the age of 18. So it's not girls in a fundamental women coded as girls. It's like a sexism [00:50:00] 101 elementary level example of that phenomenon of infantilizing women, regarding women as girls.

Thinking about women of color as hyper-sexualized objects in our society has been used historically as a trope in service of disempowering women of color, keeping women of color from meaningful political and social participation, legitimating the second-class status of women of color. There's a kind of long history that I go into about that specifically around black women, and these tropes are really important when we start thinking about again how they affect public consciousness about other people, so it's not just [00:51:00] that I was writing this thinking about black girls, which of course I was, and women but I was thinking about what do other people come to learn about black women and girls when they go to a search engine as some type of authority site to learn more to answer questions about things they don't know. This is where I think that these kinds of narratives are able to circulate without any ability to think more thoroughly about, how these are old tropes, old media stereotypes, and how they just keep circulating. Even in these allegedly new media forms, they're anything but Democratic and fair representations, and those are the kinds of things I think we need to challenge in our society.

Anna: So in terms of your methodology in the book you write that you are asking these questions about algorithms and searches from the specific standpoint of being a black woman. Can you explain [00:52:00] why that matters and how that standpoint sort of specifically shapes the questions you're asking and on a larger scale even the research projects that you decide to pursue?

Dr. Noble: Sure. So one thing is that there's there's a popular idea among researchers, some researchers maybe in some fields than others, that there's some type of objective neutral place from which research is done, which, of course, everyone who does research has a point of view, has a standpoint, is a human being, brings all their social context to the research experiene. I felt that as I was reading over a lot of the scholarship about Google, it was very kind of universalized about either the political economy of Google or what Google's business practices are, how Google, it's [00:53:00] founders, are the "boy geniuses" of the 21st century, and so forth. Yet some of these more complex dynamics about misrepresentation of women were not being asked about that platform, and I, of course, know that my own commitment to asking questions and developing a research agenda that keeps in mind the people who are most vulnerable whether that's women, or people of color, poor people. Those are typically the subjects that are not given any agency or attention by a lot of mainstream technology scholars.

Of course my own subjective experience in the world as a black woman gives me a [00:54:00] lot of insights about what these things mean. And I can tell you that I have presented my work, years ago I presented to conferences where I was the only woman of color present in the entire conference, for example, for sure the only black woman. And people would say, "Don't you dare try to mess with this algorithm," or they would say, "Well maybe black women do more porn than anyone else." Just like ludicrous ideas, like completely unsubstantiated, just reaching kinds all of ideas, and I felt like this is why people sometimes who belong to communities that are the subjects of inquiry often have insights and ideas of places to look and of questions to raise that people who haven't that lived experience ever even think of. And so that's [00:55:00] certainly been my experience as a scholar, and it's been exciting.

Also I can tell you to see more women of color, more women doing feminist research around technology, and I certainly am not even close to being the first mean. There were many women who were doing feminist inquiries of digital technologies that inspired me to think even in a more intersectional way than just like broadly a white feminist perspective on technology. But like how does this get specific in its various executions or realities for black women.

Rebecca: One thing that I found really interesting about your book, and I think we all did, was that you offer, maybe not solutions, but things that people can do or things that we as a society can do that might improve the situation. So can you talk about [00:56:00] how people who are marginalized by oppressive algorithms can in some ways fight back and claim to space in the digital landscape

Dr. Noble: Sure. So one of the larger concerns that I have is that the framework for rights, civil rights in particular, in the US and in other countries has been kind of one in the legislative realm, right? And so it's been public policy that has been the primary provider, so to speak, of pathways to enfranchisement. Let's say whether its voting, housing, full citizenship, and so forth. So, of course, there's no way I couldn't write about the public policy landscape right now around large digital media attack a companies, which quite frankly in the US, we probably have the least regulatory [00:57:00] environment around potential harms. I certainly think about some of my work in terms of consumer protections: what's the barriier or the lowest common denominator of consumer protections, and protection from harm that people should have, and how do we build on that? And we certainly have the Federal Trade Commission, for example, that has played a very important role in regulating advertisers. And so just even getting something a body like the FTC to start thinking about Google as an advertising platform is a mechanism for thinking about protecting consumers, especially vulnerable consumers. We have laws around predatory business practices, and we might be able to fold some of these conversations up around that. So I talked about that, of course.

I [00:58:00] felt like I had to write an epilogue to the book because it was going to press just as we were moving into a new administration and the Trump Administration, and I was like, okay, wait a minute, this might not be the right moment for that kind of fair and civil rights oriented legislation, and I think we've seen in fact a rollback of those kinds of commitments in the last couple of years. So this might not be the moment. But certainly, I think we should remain diligent and in calling for that.

I also talk about what I think will be increasing human rights abuses and concerns that we really don't have a legislative framework to talk about things like how automated decision-making platforms or algorithmic bias or artificial intelligence increasingly is taking power and decision-making power away from human beings and people and [00:59:00] putting it in the domain of machines. Increasingly, I think as we see more machine learning it will be more and more difficult for human beings to intervene upon the kinds of decisions and outputs that come out of AI.

So, of course, regulation and public policy as just a fundamental no brainer. But, of course, there's also some things that I offer up, which is around increased critical media literacy: how do we institutionalize that in schools and libraries? How do we educate teachers? How do we create alternatives that are in the public domain rights? A public interest search is something that I argue for that I'd love to see organizations like the Library of Congress and other kind of major information institutions to think about and play with and imagine because I think that's [01:00:00] important. Certainly technology design, interface design, how we think about providing more context for search results rather than less, and I have a whole bit there in the conclusion of the book about what it would mean to display content in a better context. So again, if I do my search for black girls knowing I'm in the red light district of the internet that I know that I'm gonna get the porn, but maybe if my interface could allow me to access products and services, I might get the good hair products. I don't know. I'm always on the search for that; that's crucial.

There's lots of different ideas that I try to surface in the book, and, of course, just at a fundamental basic level, if the public could be more aware that these technologies are not neutral, they're not apolitical, they have a tremendous amount of cultural power, we could engage with them differently.

[01:01:00] Leila: You were talking a little bit about that there are there are business regulations and that google is a business, so one of the things that you propose is breaking up Google. Can you talk a little bit about how businesses get broken up and how it could work in this particular case?

Dr. Noble: Well, this isn't a new idea. When companies become so powerful that they are monopolies in a market then the tendency has been to see that lack of competition as damaging as not giving consumers choice. In the case of giant tech firms, not just Google, certainly Facebook has no real formidable competition. The amount of capital across [01:02:00] Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. and Amazon for sure, it's so intense that it's very difficult for new entrants to pose some type of competition. And when that has happened in the past, let's say, for example, with AT&T when it kind of dominated the telecommunications market then it was required to break up for the possibility of new entrants into the telecommunication space. So this isn't really a radical idea. This is a very kind of common practice, but who knows whether there's kind of an inclination. Again, we haven't really seen a rigorous Federal Trade Commission that's thinking about these things since the new administration, if you can believe that or not, I know it's hard to believe. *sarcasm*

Professor Molly [01:03:00] Neisen, she's an amazing media historian and has really written the history of media policy and the Federal Trade Commission and how its acted and in the past, and I think she's an important voice in helping us make sense of these histories. But these are things that I think have to be considered if we're going to talk about any viable counterweights, and I think right now my faith has been in public institutions. I still believe in the public library. I still believe in public universities and research universities, community colleges, K through 12 education. I think that we have a lot of resources and knowledge and and capital in those spaces, and we should maybe turn to them to help us in this navigation of the information landscape.

Anna: So my last question. I [01:04:00] think you already answered it. So was there anything that we didn't bring up that you especially wanted to talk about.

Dr. Noble: Well, listen, I love this whole idea of Lady Science. And I need a shirt that says Lady Science. I know that one thing that I would just add is that some of the really interesting scholarship and research that's happening around what the past has been in relationship to our imagination about what the internet could have been, certainly what it is current complicated, and in many ways exploitive, business practices are. A lot of the really good work is coming from women scientists, women social scientists, women researchers, women computer scientists and technologists. Whether it's [01:05:00] people like Joy Borromini at MIT media lab, who is a black woman who's done this amazing work around the facial recognition, for example, how cameras don't recognize black faces. Sarah Roberts at UCLA who's writing about commercial content moderators and the outsourcing of ideas about what's acceptable content on the web to a global workforce that's making all these curatorial choices and making it more visible that the internet, in fact, is not a democratic place. There are all kinds of moderating effects, not just algorithms but human beings. People like Marie Hicks and her great book Programmed Inequality where she's talking about the history of women in British computing and how the UK basically tanked it's computing industry because women dominated it and so they thought it wasn't [01:06:00] really a thing and they're still playing catch-up to this day.

There's a lot of Lady Scientists who are doing brilliant work. I can't even begin to name them all but there are dozens and dozens and dozens who are helping us understand better the internet and the technological landscape and I think we should be listening to them. So I would say, if people are interested, certainly in the book I try to highlight as many of those voices as possible and send a signal out that people should be listening to the lady scientists.

Anna: We absolutely endorse that message.

Rebecca: Yes, stamp of approval. Awesome.

[musical break]

Anna: So at the end of every episode, [01:07:00] we, your exhausted hosts, will unburden ourselves about one annoying thing. And I think we mentioned this last time too, it's really hard to find just something that's annoying and not like actively horrifying. So what we're gonna talk about today actually does kind of border on horrifying, but we are going to talk about the show the TV show Insatiable on Netflix and a horrible 3D body scanner that was partially funded by Peter Thiel. This is the worst timeline. And just this I think resurgent fatphobia that we're seeing in the age of body positivity. So, as far as Insatiable, because I haven't watched it because I've been warned away from it, but from very smart and articulate writers on [01:08:00] Twitter who have written some scorching reviews, the show is basically, it's like a teen comedy about a high schooler who in is in a fat suit and then she gets punched in the face and has to have her jaw wired shut and she loses a lot of weight and then comes back to school and is like hot or whatever and takes revenge on all her bullies. But the twist that's supposed to be a body positive is that she's still a horrible person even though she's not fat anymore, that was their sort of way of saying something empowering about being fat. I don't know. I've read a couple of reviews, and it's apparently just horrible. And I think the most important thing to mention is that the main character is played by a thin actress...

Leila: Who puts on a fat suit...

Anna: ...who puts on a fat [01:09:00] suit.

Leila: Anytime there is a fat suit on a skinny person, we should probably just go ahead and nope out of that situation. And I do want to say that actually right now as we're recording, it's not out yet, just the trailer. And like some reviews of critics who have pre-screened it all apparently agree that it's terrible. But by the time this episode comes out, it'll have started on the 10th.

One of the things that I immediately noticed in a part of the trailer is that in the first 30 seconds it shows her as fat, and it is all of the horrible stereotypes that we have about fat people. She just sits on her couch and eats ice cream and eats horrible food and watches TV, and she wears frumpy clothes. She looks a little dirty, her hair's kind of greasy. All of these stereotypes that we have about [01:10:00] fat people are just played out in the quick 30 second beginning of this trailer.

Rebecca: I should say among other things in Linda Holmes's wonderfully scathing review on NPR, which if you follow her on Twitter, it turns out that all through the TV Critics Association tour thing that she was at she was definitely subtweeting Insatiable the entire time. But anyway to go back to the fat suit thing and the stereotypes about fat people that are baked into that, linda homes makes the point that like because it's a fat person being played by someone in a fat suit that the person has no sense of their own physicality. The idea that a fat woman could know how her body is shaped and how to move in it in a way that like makes her look like a [01:11:00] normal human being just doesn't even occur to the people in the show. So it looks like a skinny woman in a fat suit shambling around, which is a perfect representation of how so much of a culture thinks about fat women.

Leila: Right, and I was telling Anna about this when we were deciding that we were going to talk about this is that the actor or actress who plays the main character in the fat suit -- I can't remember what her name is, I think it's Debby Ryan -- she defends the show and says something about that it's a about how difficult and scary it can be -- and this is a direct quote -- to go "move through the world in a body." There's just such a big disconnect there because she is not a fat person. She is thin, and she [01:12:00] moves through the world, her every day lived reality, with thin privilege, and these types of comments from thin people are equating, yes, a world in which women are always going to be made to feel bad about their bodies with someone who is fat and moves through the world as a fat person with those biases that someone who is thin does not have.

Anna: Yeah. I was thinking that, I don't know if I would call it backlash per se because it's I think is kind of a different conceptual animal, but there is like a reaction I think happening to a lot of this...we have a lot more visible fat people with platform now to talk about what their lives are like, if you know Lindy West or Tess Holiday, people like that. It does seem to [01:13:00] me that there is not only a reaction to that, obviously women like that get unbelievable harassment on social media, that's why Lindy West quit Twitter. It's disgusting. But there's also stuff like Insatiable where this sort of bad faith engagement with body positivity or body acceptance ideals getting baked into our cultural products where to me this doesn't seem like an honest misunderstanding of the body politics of fatness. It seems in bad faith to me in like it seems like it is taking a shot at fat people, and I think that there has been like a resurgent fatphobia as we hear more from fat people [01:14:00] and from body politics advocates and activists and stuff. We're seeing stuff like this kind of cropping up, and I think that's also what's behind this length awful 3D body scanner thing that you sent me, Leila, which is terrifying.

Leila: Yeah, the body scanner like take a 3D scan of your body. And so ladies, if you thought that looking in a full-length mirror was bad enough, just wait until you can see all of your cellulite and all of your little wrinkles and all your stretch marks in 3D.

Rebecca: So wait, so okay, they didn't share this with me.

Anna: Oops, sorry!

Rebecca: No, no, it's okay, now used to tell me all about it though. So it takes a scan of you and you're a little hologram of yourself?

Anna: Also while you're standing on a [01:15:00] scale, so it's the package.

Rebecca: Of course. Oh my god, why?!

Anna: And they're billing it like it's for people who are obsessed with fitness and they want to check out their gains or whatever.

Leila: Again, it's equating fitness with weight.

Anna: Yes.

Leila: Again.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Leila: Which is something that body politics and women writing about fatness have just been like tearing their hair out about trying to tell people that that's not the case, that is a false correlation.

And speaking of bills, the actual bill for the body scanner, if you so wish to purchase one, is $1,395.

Rebecca: Oh god! To torture yourself every day

Leila: For the low low price of [01:16:00] $1,395, you can obsess over every imperfection on your body and never leave the house, I guess.

Anna: I will just add one thing about the 3D body scanner is that it's just another. piece of surveillance technology that you can volunteer to put in your own home.

Rebecca: Oh god, that too!

Leila: It helped funded by a man who founded the company Palantir so.

Anna: Yeah, that's something you should really think about. If you don't know what a Palantir is you should read, well, I guess the best description, well is you can watch the movie to they talk about in The Two Towers.

Leila: Lord of the Rings.

Anna: Yeah, it's for spying on people and hypnotizing Hobbits.

Leila: Yep. He purposely named his surveillance company that. I really need these men on the right to stop [01:17:00] appropriating my nerd culture.

Rebecca: No, for real though.

Anna: It reminds me of Soylent too where you're like "that's the name you're going to pick for your thing? And you want to try and convince us that it's not evil? What are you doing?"

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Stop, just stop being Bond villains. We are not enjoying living in the worst timeline.

*exasperated sighs*

Leila: So we'll go ahead and uh and that there today, but remember that if you liked our episode today to please please please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. That's how new listeners can find us.

And if you have any questions about the segment today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or hashtag #LadySciPod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for a monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea, and more visit ladyscience.com.

And remember that we are an independent magazine, and we [01:18:00] depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com.

Until next time you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.

[Music]

As Lady Science nears the end of it’s summer pledge drive, the hosts talk about what Lady Science means to them and beg you for money. We also include a conversation between editors in chief, Leila and Anna, about writing, editing, and mental illness.

In this bonus episode, Leila and Rebecca talk with Dr. Susan Stryker, a historian of trans history and director of the Emmy award winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria. Stryker discusses her work in trans history, history as activism, and the transformative power of trans history. 

For show notes, visit ladyscience.com/podcast/bonus-episode-talking-trans-history-with-susan-stryker.

56:54

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies

In this episode, the hosts tell the story of 19th century Irish surgeon James Barry and discuss the importance and complexity of trans and queer histories. 

The Radical Copyeditor Style Guide 

Dr. James Barry and the specter of trans and queer history by EE Ottoman 

Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield

Scanty Particulars: The Scandalous Life and Astonishing Secret of James Barry, Queen Victoria's Most Eminent Military Surgeon by Rachel Holmes

Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time review - an exquisite story of scandalous subterfuge by Wendy Moore

The First Woman To Go 'Round The World Did It As A Man by Robert Krulwich

Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncey

Unsexy History: Writing with Respect by Rachel Moss

The Forgotten Gender Nonconformists of the Old West by Peter Boag

Queer London by Matt Houlbrook

Transgender History by Susan Stryker

Men, take heed from the Victorians: don't hound women in public by Tiff Stevenson

Tweets:

What it’s like being queer in heritage:
You: That’s a chair.
Them: Actually it’s a 4 pronged implement. The word ‘chair’ didn’t exist.
You: But it looks like a chair.
Them: To the untrained Eye.
You: But I saw someone sitting in it.
Them: CONJECTURE! SLANDER! HEARSAY!
🙄🏳️‍🌈🏛 pic.twitter.com/vkcx15Yb8m

Obscurity and Gender Resistance in Patricia Duncker's James Miranda Barry by Jana Funke

Monstrous regiment: how should we talk about those who dressed as men and went to war? by Catherine Baker

Transcription by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome to episode nine of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder, co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm a writer, editor, and Ph.D. student studying 20th century American culture and the history of the American Space Program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet, and currently a regular writer on Women And The History of Science at Smithsonianmag.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet, and managing social media for the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

Leila: So, some housekeeping before we dive into the episode. We have a couple of things that we've got going on on the website. So first thing, thanks to everyone who participated in our Twitter share-athon that we ran back in April. So many of you shared our magazine issues, podcast episodes, blog posts, and connected our work with your friends and networks, and that's really helpful for us, and it really means a lot to us that you all want to see us grow, too.

And so, we've got another thing that we're running for the month of June and July, a summer pledge-athon. And now we're asking for your help to increase our operating budget through sustaining patronage. We have big plans for the magazine and podcast, and so we really need your help in sustaining the project. We're entirely reader supported, and not for profit. Your donations help us pay a fair fee for writer's work, to compensate editors through stipends, and pay for overhead costs, like website hosting and recording and audio equipment for the podcast.

Any increase in funding will help us meet goals like raising those fees and hiring more staff to create more content, but we do have specific goals in mind. So the first goal we have starts at $400. And I think we're at 330 now, so we're closing in on the 400 goal. Once we reach 400, we'll start an Instagram account, which means extra content like short videos, even though I've said on this very podcast that we're not going to do that. We will, I guess.

Sneak peak podcast teasers, and Instagram stories. And then the next goal is at 525. We'll add bonus podcast content, like cut for time segments and extended interviews, and then finally, at 650, we'll publish a special pop culture series on a topic voted for by patrons. We'll produce a special month of content on a pop culture topic that you all help us pick.

We're grateful for any amount that you're able to pledge, even if that be a dollar, two dollars, whatever. And if you aren't able to help us financially, but you know someone who is, spreading the word is always helpful. So, for our pledging goals and more details about reward tiers, and to make a monthly pledge, visit Patreon.com/LadyScience.

Anna: And lastly, we are running another special series on our website, in celebration of LGBTQ pride month, and inspired in part by Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer. We are running a queer science fiction series in June. So we'll have both new and returning contributors writing about the intersection of queer theory, imagined futures, and popular culture.

You can find our queer series, queer science fiction series on the Lady Science website at Ladyscience.com, and as always, if you really like one of our pieces, please, please, please share it in your social media circles. That really helps a lot.

Rebecca: Now that we have all that fun stuff out of the way, onto the episode.

Leila: Which was also fun.

Rebecca: Which is also fun, yes. But it's very important to emphasize how fun pledge drives and special series are.

Leila: Because we love begging for money. It's so fun.

Rebecca: We do. And we love it when people give us money, which, that actually is a lot of fun.

Leila: Sorry. Go on.

Rebecca: As Anna mentioned, it is pride month, and along with our queer science fiction series on the blog, we're dedicating this episode to the intersection of trans history and the history of science and technology. Before we really dive in, I want to pause here for a second, and talk a little bit about the language we'll be using on this episode.

The language that people use to describe their gender identities is, obviously, very personal, and it's always evolving. In this episode, whenever possible, we're going to be using language suggested by an online resource called The Radical Copyeditor. If you have any questions about the language we're using, I recommend you check out The Radical Copyeditor's website, and we'll be sure to include that in the show notes.

We are also going to be using the words trans and transgender, even to talk about historical figures, in some cases, even though that word didn't exist until 1974. And we'll even be talking a little bit in the episode about how using that word historically can get complicated, so we'll get into that. But now, let's get started for real, and let's begin with a story. So, Leila, take it away.

Leila: Okay, so, in 1809, a man named James Barry was accepted to the University of Edinburgh. Is that how you ... It's Edinburgh, right?

Rebecca: Yes.

Leila: Yeah, okay. I rarely read these things out loud, and so when I say them in my head, they're probably wrong, so just want to be sure. James Barry was accepted to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine in 1809, and also, around that same time, there is a financial record of a mother named Mary Bulkley, and her daughter, Margaret Ann Bulkley, sailing from Cork, Ireland, to Edinburgh. Later that year, on December 14, the Bulkley family solicitor received a letter from James Barry, the same one who had just been accepted to medical school.

In that letter, Barry requests that any letters from Margaret be sent to Mary, who James says is his aunt. And though James's signature is on the letter, for some reason, the solicitor wrote, quote, "Miss Bulkley, December 14" on the back of it. At this point, Margaret Ann Bulkley disappears from the historical record. Meanwhile, Barry went on to become a successful surgeon. But when he died 60 years later, the woman who laid out his body for burial claimed that James Barry's body was actually female.

Anna: A 2016 book by Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield titled Dr. James Barry: A Woman Ahead of Her Time used letters to show that James and Margaret were the same person. Those records show that after transitioning, Barry lived both his public and private life as a man, but for a long time, the dominant narrative was that Barry was a cis woman who presented as male in order to pursue a medical career.

He is often identified first as Margaret Ann, not James, and is given female pronouns. Given that women were routinely discriminated against in the sciences, it makes sense that a woman would pretend to be a man in order to practice her craft. But the eagerness to claim Barry was a pioneering woman physician completely elides the possibility that Barry was a trans man.

Rebecca: So Barry had a long and prestigious medical career. After graduating from the University of Edinburgh, he held a number of positions in the British army, and practiced medicine throughout the British empire. He performed the first cesarean section in Africa, for example, or at least the first successful one that we know about. He brought sanitation reforms where he practiced, and truly seemed to prioritize the needs of underprivileged people in his care. Barry retired in 1859 and died from dysentery on July 25, 1865.

Leila: I can't hear died from dysentery without thinking of the Oregon Trail. Anyway. Sorry. So there's a few different theories out there about Barry's gender and sexuality that have been tossed about and debated, and there is, of course, the one that du Preez and Dronfield subscribe to in their book. They say that Barry's decision to live as a man was quote, "Motivated more by ambition than identity."

Another theory is that Barry was intersex. In a 2002 biography titled Scanty Particulars, Rachel Holmes argues that Barry was born with both male and female genitalia, and chose to live as a man, despite being brought up as a girl. And one of the bits of evidence that Holmes uses is Barry's thesis at the University of Edinburgh studied femoral hernias, and those are hernias that occur in the thigh, which have also been documented to be descended or maldescended testicles.

So that is proof that maybe he was studying into himself. There is also another bit of evidence, as well, that is drawn upon. At the time of his death, there was someone that he worked with, a major. Someone McKinnon. I can't remember the exact first name. But had written a letter after he found out that the woman who laid out his body said that he was female said that he maybe was a hermaphrodite, which, we don't use that term anymore, but that would've been indication that, perhaps, he was intersex, as well.

There is also a bit in his thesis, his medical school thesis, quote, "Do not consider whether what I say is a young man speaking, but whether my discussion with you is that of a man of understanding." So those are some bits of evidence that are used to support an intersex theory. And then, of course, the other theory is that Barry was a trans man.

Existing evidence shows that he lived both publicly and privately as a man. He signed his letters as a gentleman and only used male pronouns to describe himself. Barry also left directions upon his death as to how his body should be handled, wishing that he be buried in bedsheets without examination of his body. This has been taken as further evidence that Barry not only wished to live as a man, but also to be remembered as one.

Rebecca: Yeah, so one of the things that I think got us all sort of on this topic in the first place was thinking about all the different times, especially, that in popular culture and history and all these sorts of things, that stories of women dressed as man, and went and joined the military. It's a cliché, almost, that we have, kind of in, at least, folklore and popular culture.

And the question coming about of, wait, is this just because life for women was terrible for so long, or is this a indication of different kinds of understanding of gender? And I know, for me, whenever I think back on how many historical fiction novels I read as a kid, that involved a girl dressing up as a boy and running off on adventures, it's absurd, the number that I read like that. And it's so interesting how embedded that idea is in our culture.

Leila: Yeah, there is a fair amount of history that we have that shows that women did do that, that women did dress like men to enter the military, to enter various professions. But we typically have evidence that they did resume a life as a woman after that episode of their life.

There was one that I had brought up when we were preparing for this episode, about Jeanne Baret, or Baret. She's French, so however you would say that in French. I'm not even going to try and embarrass the rest of us. Where she's now recognized as the first woman who circumnavigated the globe, and she did that dressed as a man to be on a ship with men.

And she had a relationship with the captain, I believe. He was the captain. And did a lot of that stuff dressed as a man, but did eventually, when she returned to Europe after all of those travels, returned as a woman, got married to a man as a straight woman and had kids. So that's an instance in which you had one of those dressing as a man to accomplish certain goals, but always still identifying as female.

But I think instances like that where that does happen, is that that narrative implies that there is a choice, that there is a free choice being made. And that free choice also implies a notion of subversion, that these women are making the choice to subvert gender norms, or gender binaries.

But again, that subversion can only exist with a gender binary. So those things, instead of seeing that these are stories of women going a great lengths to accomplish something that their historical, cultural context wouldn't allow them, that there's all these other narratives about free choice, and subversion, that are in there, that don't apply to someone who's living outside of those binaries to begin with.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. And yeah, like I said, folklore and popular culture and the record is full of stories where someone, for different kinds of reasons, for these practical reasons, or for other kinds, decided to live or dress as a person of a different gender than they were assigned at birth.

And when I was writing the script, I, of course, I had to think really, really hard about how to construct that sentence. Because I wanted to be able to include situations like the one Leila was just describing, but also situations where someone identified as a different gender than they were assigned at birth. But, of course, that is also a concept that, in that particular wording, is fairly contemporary.

And all of that gets to the heart of kind of what this episode is about, and what we're going to get into here, is, how do we, as historians, talk about and think about people who had a wide variety of gender identities that we now call trans or nonbinary, but who didn't maybe use those words?

Making this all more complicated is the fact that, I hope everyone who's listening knows this, and if not, here's a primer. When you're out in the world today, if someone tells you what their gender identity is, you should respect that. It doesn't matter if you don't understand it. It doesn't matter if it's not what you thought. People are who they say they are, is just a general, good rule.

Kind of along the same lines, gender identity and gender presentation are two different things, and there are people who identify as cis women or trans women, but dress in a very masculine way, and there are people who identify as men and dress in a very feminine way. And those things are not contradictory. So, again, good to believe people when they say what they are.

Leila: Also, it costs you literally nothing, personally, to call someone what they want you to call them. It costs you nothing. I don't understand people that dig their heels in, Jordan Peterson, and just won't ...

Anna: I was wondering when he was going to show up.

Leila: I hadn't planned on it, but then as I was saying that, I was like, "Man, that guy. Jesus."

Rebecca: And even people who have slightly more good faith than someone like Jordan Peterson, will sometimes be like, "But I don't understand." And it's like, "Guess what? You don't have to understand. You don't have to." The world contains multitudes. You don't have to understand every single human in the world. It's okay. But, of course, history makes everything complicated, which is why we love it.

But with that in mind, should we apply the same standards to people in the past? We shouldn't make assumptions about people in the past, right?

Anna: Yes and no, because, sure, sometimes, when we are very, very lucky, we can learn about a person from the past from their letters and diaries and other kinds of records where people are describing themselves, and we don't have to rely on someone else's impression of them. So, in those instances, I think that we can take them at their word. But more often, I would say, or, equally as often, we have to learn a lot about people from biased, sort of secondhand sources.

And because, in particular, various types of laws meant to regulate the behavior of marginalized people, we often learn about LGBTQ people through police records, or medical reports, sensational news articles. So we learn about people's identities from someone in power, someone who probably didn't care that much about how that person in question self-identified.

And in lots of cases, someone who, a police officer or something, who is invested in the criminalization of certain marginalized identities, so you have to be really careful about your sources, and what you're looking at, and who's sort of impression of a historical person you're working with. So, for example, you can find police records from the early 20th century that pertain to male crossdressers who were arrested for gross indecency.

You can't just read that record on its face because that could be someone who identified as what we'd now call a gay man who was doing drag for fun, or it could be someone who lived full time as a woman and identified as a woman. Today, we understand that as two distinct categories of identity, but you can't differentiate those from a police record alone to tell you how that person identified themselves. Or if they identified as anything like either of these categories at all.

Leila: And sometimes, historians will avoid the question completely by choosing not to talk about a person's identity, or at least implying that it's irrelevant, and that's not a great solution, either. We obviously, then and now, live in a heteronormative and gender essentialist society, and that means that if we don't talk about someone's gender identity or sexuality, that most people are going to assume that the person is cis and straight.

And we end up in a situation like we have with James Barry, where historians say, "This is a woman who dressed up as a man to get ahead," even though we do know that he used male pronouns and lived as a man for most of his life. And when we are too careful in subscribing a trans identity to someone, trans people get erased from most of history.

Anna: And I think, in the case of someone like Barry, who we do have lots of personal records and correspondence that he wrote himself, where he identifies himself as a man, I think that if you still, as a historian, refuse to identify him the way that he identified himself, I think that's really crossing a line.

I think that it makes perfect sense to represent a historical person the way they represented themselves, if you have access to that information. Even if, for some reason, you're not prepared to declare they were trans, because you are hung up in disciplinary debate about terminology and chronology.

But I think it's super important that we pay attention to this kind of representation, even if you're not going to go as far as labeling him a trans man, which, that's a separate debate. You can at least refer to him by the pronouns that he used for himself. That's a really small thing that you can do, and I think, as a professional historian, that is something, that's in the confines of your professional integrity. There's no reason not to do that. I don't know.

Rebecca: Yeah, and it's like there's so many situations where obviously, there is so much ambiguity, and it's not that there's never a situation where things weren't ambiguous, and you should acknowledge what we don't ... Historians should definitely acknowledge what they don't know, which is another thing historians are terrible at, I feel like, as a field.

But James Barry is such an emblematic example because it shows that even when there is all of the evidence in the world to be like, "This person identified as male," the bar is set so fricking high to subscribe queer identities to people that it becomes absurd. And so yeah, even when, yes, there's lots of ambiguous situations. Probably most situations are ambiguous. But the fact that much less ambiguous situations still get tagged in this, "Well, we don't know," category, is wildly frustrating.

Anna: And I think, once you really start to pull apart the threads of why someone would, why a historian would refuse to call James Barry trans, or even identify him as man the way he does for himself, I think that's where you start to see biases, but you see this weird thing where historians, who should be least guilty of this, are conflating the actual past with the recorded history of the past.

So yeah, there are not a lot of queer folk in our recorded, written histories of the past. That's something that we have had to recover relatively recently. But it is wrong, first of all, and sort of professionally, as a historian, not great, to go into your work assuming that there are no queer people in the past.

And that seems to be what is happening, that not only can we not know for sure, we don't have any sort of roadmap for it, so there's no way that I can ever ascribe this. And it's like, this fear of presentism is really getting in the way of historians being able to, first of all, recover these stories, and do it in a respectful and in a way that seeks to patch some of the holes in our representation. I don't know, I'm just sort of rambling, but ...

Leila: Well, and this idea, because, Rebecca, you said at the very beginning that transgender wasn't a word that was used until 1974, and so there's this historical argument through language that's like, "Well, that term is constructed from a specific historical, cultural context that we can't apply to the past."

And it's like, "Well, did you ever think about we had to have that word to describe something that was there?" That word had to be made. It didn't just drop out of the sky, and then trans people existed. That's not how language works.

Anna: Right. Trans people did not ... Right. They didn't come into being as soon as there was a name for them, and that's something that I feel like we get hung up on in history all the time, trying to describe something before there was a name for it. And the solution to that problem is not to just say, "Well, it didn't happen. It didn't exist." That's not how you do history.

Rebecca: And in the vast majority of cases, we're comfortable with that, except when it involves being an asshole to another historian, or marginalized people, it feels like. There was ... Oh, now, we're going to totally link to this tweet in this show notes.

There was a tweet that I came across a couple of days ago that was something like, "What happens when you work in LGBT heritage?" And it's like, "Person." Or like, "Me: This is a chair. Person: But the word chair didn't exist. It's a four-pronged seating implement. Me: But that's a chair." And it feels like that sometimes, where it's like, no, it's a chair.

Anna: Yesterday, I saw this great post of historical photographs of gay men posing together, and just generally being extremely cute, and sitting on each other's laps and looking at each other longingly, and they were very clearly late 19th century, into mid-20th century. A lot of black and white. Really nice post, I liked all the photographs. And then at the bottom, the notes on the bottom were like, "'They were really good friends,' said a historian, probably."

Rebecca: I think I saw that. But so, one thing that you listeners out there might've noticed is that all of us started using the word queer, and that is one way that a lot of historians of gender and sexuality have dealt with the issue of not knowing without kind of going too far in subscribing identities to people in less ambiguous situations than someone like James Barry.

The idea here is that queer is a word that implies otherness. Even before it has anything to do with sexuality, it's a synonym for unusual or strange. What I always think of is, both as a queer person and as a historian and a nerd, is Alice in Wonderland, and her, "Dear, dear, oh, everything is very queer today." And that word continued to have all of its otherness and oddness attached to it as it's used in Alice in Wonderland, even as it became a descriptor for sexuality.

And now, we can think of that otherness in a neutral or positive way, and so it can be a great way to say, "This is a person who fell outside a sort of generally accepted, normal, quote unquote, 'Social familial, or sexual expectation' of the society that they lived in." So, if you kind of say, "This is a person who didn't live by kind of the gender or sexual norms of their society, but I can't quite put my finger on in what fashion," queer can be a really, really useful word.

It is important to note at this point, also, that queer has historically been used as a slur. Initially, the strangeness that I was just laying out associated with the word queer was very negative, and many people still say it as a slur. So using queer in this way is something that not everyone is comfortable with, and I think it's important to acknowledge. But it is increasingly common in both scholarship and everyday conversation, and it's one tactic that a lot of historians use to avoid making a specific call about someone's identity when they don't know for sure, but want to feel like it's appropriate to include someone in this history of a queer community.

Leila: And I think using queer to describe historical people is that it creates a really great sense of obscurity in a really positive way that allows for an exploration and fluidity of the way people live their lives, that other ways of looking at these figures from the past doesn't really allow us to do.

Anna: I do want to steer us back to talk specifically about trans people because that's what the topic of the episode is. In her book, Transgender History, Susan Stryker talks about people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, regardless of why. So, stripped of its modern identity implications, transgender just means to cross gender, and it's the act of crossing genders that Stryker is interested in. So to her, everyone who has historically crossed genders can legitimately be called trans.

Leila: And another historian, Peter Boag, has made a interesting observation about writing his book, Redressing America's Frontier Past, which is about people who cross genders in the American West. He purposefully avoided using the word transgender, and he points out that he had to make some assumptions about identity so that he could use the right pronouns for the people he talked about. He has this to say about it.

"I tried to choose terms that conformed to what I reasoned the person I was writing about would have wanted." End quote. After admitting that that's obviously a pretty subjective choice to make, he adds, quote, "I cosigned myself to what all historians do at some point or another, taking a leap of faith and hoping the evidence is there to support one's landing." End quote.

As with this idea when admitting that that's a pretty subjective choice to make, that we all make subjective choices, whether we're writing about people who's gender we know or not. We make those subjective choices from top to bottom any time we're writing history.

Anna: Yeah, I think there are some historians who could do with being taken down a peg or two about what it is their profession can actually accomplish, in terms of objectivity. Not even in terms of what you're responsible for. What is actually possible? I think there is some ... I don't know. Some arrogance that is getting in the way of us being able to use history to create representation where there was none.

And the excuse for this is that, like, "Oh, well, but I am a historian, so I have to be completely objective, and there's no way I could just reason out what this person would want to call themselves, because I don't have the specific evidence to support that." And it's like, "Well, you don't have the specific evidence to support a lot of stuff that people write and publish about." It is a matter of interpretation. That's the practice of history, not rote facts.

And I like this idea of the leap of faith because I think it gives you room as a historian to say, "I'm going to make this leap of faith, but it's a leap in good faith, and I'm doing it for a good reason." That's another thing that historians don't like to do, is to have a reason for doing history. That, "It could be healing for people now to read about trans people in the past, and that's why I'm doing that." That, to me, is a good faith leap.

Leila: It's important that people have a history. It feels like such a simple thing to say, and such a simple argument, and yet, people don't think that that's an important reason to do something, that that's not an important reason to interrogate the past, it's not an important reason to look for queer people. It is important. It is important that people have a history.

Anna: Yeah. And if you're a historian who is a white, Western, cis person, it's not something that you ever had to think about because you always had [crosstalk 00:35:43]. You've always had access to that, and you've always had that link to the past, and you probably don't even realize how it shapes your life today, but it does. And for people who don't have that, it's a huge hole in their lives and in their identities. And it's something that, if you never had to think about it, that you just never considered.

Rebecca: Yeah. I love the humility in that quote. This is sort of what you were talking about, Anna, but just this sort of ... Yeah, this idea of a good leap of faith. And one thing that we were talking about when we were talking about this episode is that there are kind of gray areas in the other direction.

There can be times when delving into and talking about someone's sexuality, who seemed to be working really hard to hide it, can, especially as you get closer and closer to the contemporary era, that can feel more and more invasive. There can be times when it kind of turns into a joke. I think, Leila, you came across something recently that, I can't remember exactly what you'd been saying, where someone was making-

Leila: Oh, that Twitter thing?

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah.

Leila: Yeah, I pulled the article up, actually, in case we came around to talking about this. So, the thing that got this whole thing going in my head, so there was a tweet that went out a while ago about Agnès Sorel, who lived in the 1440s, and the tweet read, "Here's Agnès Sorel, who had her gowns tailored to expose her favorite boob in the 1440s."

And so, the picture, the painting actually is, she's got one boob out, and she's holding a child. And so this tweet went super viral, 54,000 retweets of this woman with her boob out. And the tweet didn't really at all capture the significance of what that meant at the time.

It wasn't just that there was this badass woman who had her boobs out in public, that it was actually, the real subversion here was that this was the mistress of Charles VII of France, and this painting was depicting her like the Virgin Mary, and that's actually what was subversive about this particular woman, and the representation of her at that time.

Then, a historian named ... Who is this person? I'm just talking about our thing, and I don't even know who it is. So, she wrote a long thing about how, yeah, the historical context was bad, but there's also another issue at play here, which is not respecting the innate human dignity of a historical subject. And that a lot of times, on Twitter, historical context does get stripped down a lot, and that's not always a bad thing, but when we're dealing with somebody's, their dignity, that Twitter doesn't leave a lot of room for us to honor that, and that we need to have responsibility as historians to respect that in our historical subjects.

And so that got me thinking about when we're looking at queer historical figures, whether they be gay, lesbian, trans, or something else, that kind of the politics of outing those historical people, so in the case of Barry, who requested that his body not be examined upon death, I don't know. I just got to thinking about what responsibility we do have as historians to maybe not out historical characters, and does that in any way kind of violate their human dignity? I don't know. What do you guys think?

Anna: I think that it's a touchy thing, right? Because we've been talking this whole time, so far, about how it can be really important that we identify these historical figures so that they can sort of populate a marginal history that hasn't been told before. And then, of course, the other side of that is, who's place is it to out people who can't advocate for themselves anymore, because they're dead?

That's, I think, maybe the crux of this discussion, and I think maybe that's also where things become more granular and individual, and that we can't have some kind of blanket policy for dealing with queer people in the past. Like you said, things like the fact that Barry asked that his body not be examined, that matters. It reminds me, also, and this is sort of related, but I had read some ... I'll see if I can find the article. I didn't prepare this, but I had read something about the way that we deal with photographs and illustrations and stuff from medical institutions that are documenting people's impairments and injuries and the presentation of disease and stuff, and they're used as reference atlases for physicians, and they're important in that regard, but they're also, those depict real individuals, and the way that we handle those materials is really important.

Because that's something that ... That's an image of an individual person, oftentimes, who is suffering, and we need to think carefully about what we do with our sources and what we use them for. You can use them to make some kind of general argument, say, about the way that physicians use images to diagnose people in a certain period, but it's also our responsibility to recognize that those are individual people, and think carefully about who we show the images to. Do we publish those online for people to see? Things like that.

I think there's some debate about the sort of handling of these issues that's not specific to how we deal with queer people, but maybe there are lessons there about this idea of dignity for historical figures that I think is really important. I believe the piece that I read suggested that, for those images in particular, they be treated as the way that we would treat human remains, with that kind of process. So it's not really relevant to what we're talking about, but ...

Leila: Real quick, so the person's article, her name is Rachel Moss. I just looked that up, sorry, but I was just like, "I don't know who this is," and just kept going. So, anyway.

Anna: I will find the one that I mentioned and put in the show notes.

Leila: Yeah, all in show notes.

Rebecca: We're just going to have a ton of show notes, it'll be great. It'll be further reading. It's all great reading, guys.

Leila: The show notes will be extensive, and there'll be lots of Twitter threads in the show notes, too. It's just that these conversations with actual depth and care are taking place on Twitter, I think is ... Because Twitter is a hellhole. It is a septic tank on fire, most of the time. But there are also some really great, thoughtful people on there that are trying to have really fruitful conversations about these types of histories, so it's a valuable resource for that, not just harassment and constant shit.

Rebecca: At its best, Twitter lets people kind of think out loud together, and that can be so fruitful for these kinds of conversations.

Leila: Yeah. The other kind of people that are also speaking and thinking out loud together ...

Rebecca: At its best, and its worst, it's people thinking out loud together, honestly. Yeah. Seriously, though. I think, Anna, that your point about history of medicine and the use of photographs and images of people in medical contexts is a really good one, in that it similarly, sort of, we have, both in the contemporary queer community, and in contemporary medicine, really, really important and hard fought ethical standards about how we talk about people's bodies. And those are super important, and knowing, again, that so many of these records we have of marginalized people are from people who didn't care about them and how they talked about their bodies is important.

Leila: And that brings in an issue of power, as well. That when we look at, we talked about police records, is that you have an issue of power structure going on there, and that those power structures are deeply embedded in historical records. That, when we look at historical records, these aren't just objective pieces of data, that those power structures are embedded into the historical records that we have. So not even those things are objective.

Anna: Yeah, I was just thinking about ... I must have lent it to someone, because I can't find it, but a classic work that uses, one of the main bodies of sources is police records, but that tries to sort of interpret through the lens of the state, I guess, to see what we can see about queer communities, is George Chauncey's Gay New York, which is just a really excellent book anyway, but that's a good example of ... Those are some of the only records we have of people, is getting arrested for being queer.

And so, the way that you handle those kinds of sources becomes really important methodological conversation for historians. When I was just thinking, in addition to people who, maybe, were being photographed or illustrated for [inaudible 00:46:34] for things like small pox, or whatever. People were being photographed because they were intersex. They were being photographed or having case histories written about them for being gay. So there are those kinds of sources, too. It's a little bit different, I think, than police records, but they're still a very powerful ... I guess, a very ... I don't know what I'm trying to say.

Leila: Well, because you get all sort of different lenses and gazes of which we look at different kinds of bodies, which is embedded in those types of things that you're talking about.

Anna: Yeah. And so we just ... You just have to be careful. And you have to be kind, I think.

Leila: Yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah, it really goes back to kind of the taking a leap of good faith, of earlier. And maybe, to a certain degree, saying, "Okay, these are records that were taken to strip the power away from someone, but can I use them to give the power back to someone?"

Leila: Shall we wrap up this, and go into our ...?

Rebecca: Yeah. I think so, yeah.

Anna: I think so.

Leila: Well, we're going to not do our guest interview in this episode. We'll release that later as a bonus episode. But that's going to be with Susan Stryker, Dr. Susan Stryker, who we talked about earlier in this episode, who is a trans historian, and we'll release that soon. So, onto our one annoying thing.

Anna: I guess I can introduce it.

Rebecca: Let's introduce it, yeah.

Anna: So, the annoying thing this week is an op-ed from the ... Well, it appears to be the men section of the Guardian opinion page. I didn't know. It just says men on the side. I didn't know they had a men section. Guys, you have a problem. An image issue. But it's called, "Men, take heed from the Victorians: don't hound women in public," by Tiff Stevenson. And I mean, really, you don't even have to read it.

Rebecca: The annoying thing is the headline and all it implies.

Anna: The annoying thing is the headline. But it's basically ... Tiff Stevenson's a comedian talking about, basically, street harassment, and men not leaving women alone at bars, and things that are real problems, and talking about specific, really awful situations that they've encountered traveling, and being out, and having the temerity to be out in public where there are men, or whatever.

Anna: But the point of the article is that men should take a lesson in propriety from the Victorians, which is so just face-meltingly wrong that I felt like I was going to explode reading this. I don't want to disparage this person's historical knowledge, but I believe it all came from television shows.

Leila: Well, okay. And, so, the Twitter, or the social image that generates if you share this on a social media with the article, is from the BBC 1990s Pride and Prejudice, of Mr. Darcy [crosstalk 00:50:13] at the ball. And isn't that when Darcy was shitting on all of the women at that party?

Rebecca: Yes.

Leila: What?

Rebecca: Yes. Yeah.

Anna: That's why I thought that it was, I thought it was satire. But I don't think it is. I think it's earnest.

Leila: Yeah, I don't think it is.

Anna: So yeah, sure. Let's have men today take lessons from Victorian men, who were so boarish and persistent and generally horrible that women who had to be out in public took to wearing extremely long, sharp hair pins so that they could threaten the men to leave them alone on the trolley or whatever. Let's take lessons from them.

Rebecca: And don't forget that even when all of these roles exist, they only apply to certain women. And all other women are basically not quite women, so poor women are not quite women, women of color are not quite women, and any women who cannot keep the men around them in line are not quite women.

So much of the whole idea that we have not escaped, that men are so terrible, that we require all of these social rules for them, because they can't deal with women as people, and then also that it's women's job to make sure that men follow all of those rules, is straight out of the Victorian playbook that this article is talking about.

This is literally what created our particular modern brand of misogyny. That's not to say misogyny didn't exist before that, but this particular brand of men are terrible, we need social rules to stop men from being terrible and women have to enforce them, is pure Victorian wackadoodleness.

Anna: Well, yeah. The other thing is that the stuff that she talks about, the bowing and hand kissing and being introduced formally, and whatever, chaperones and all that stuff. Those all come from deeply oppressive gender roles that were sort of nailed down and codified in this period, in part to make sure that if women were going to go out in public, they did it properly, and weren't speeding through the streets on bicycles, smoking cigarettes, and generally wreaking havoc upon London or whatever. But that-

Leila: Trying to vote, stuff like that.

Anna: Goddamn. They're always trying to vote.

Leila: Well, and you just don't think a solution to men harassing women in public is to look to some sort of nostalgic past through rose-colored glasses, that we have to imagine a radically different future. Not look to this nostalgic past.

Anna: No. The past is garbage. Let me tell you, I know. I'm a historian. You don't want any of that. You should read more science fiction and less Jane Austen if you're looking to change the world. Seriously.

Rebecca: Jane Austen would probably be ashamed of you. Let's also be real, because she all thought it was ridiculous and hilarious, and that's why her books are about people being ridiculous.

Anna: Yeah. If you're going to read Jane Austen, then do a good job of reading Jane Austen. I don't know, don't completely miss the point, maybe, I guess. I don't know.

Leila: Yeah. Not everybody was Mr. Bingley, just so you know.

Anna: Yeah. And I just have to harp on it once more. Either that's just a willful misreading of what we know about this era to assume that all men were just chivalrous in public. They were not. They were harassing women all the time, all over the place. They were supposed to do these things, this is what is in etiquette books, and periodicals that are teaching you how to live in the modern world. They did not do these things, and you know how we know? Because women told us that they did these things to them.

Rebecca: It's like most of the things described in the op-ed are things that our social standards say are not good. But it goes to show that you can have social standards for things, and women still get sexually harassed.

Anna: So is it not, maybe we have gotten down the rabbit hole, but it is not socially acceptable to harass women, then or now. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen. So you're talking about reality, and then this layer on top of constructed social norms that may or may not be paid attention to at any given moment, and you can't conflate the two. Because they're not the same thing.

Anna: You have to talk about how they interact, and I think this op-ed is just talking about that sort of surface layer, like, "Remember when we had rules?" No, we do have rules now. They're still not being followed. So, we can't talk about that anymore. We have to have a different approach.

Rebecca: Rules aren't working. Maybe treating women as humans would work better.

Anna: I don't know about that.

Rebecca: That's going too far.

Anna: That seems a little ... Yeah.

Leila: I think that's a good place to wrap up today. So, if you liked our episode today, leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcast so that new listeners can find us. Questions about any of the segments today, tweet us at @LadyxScience, or #LadySciPod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea, and more, visit Ladyscience.com.

We are an independent magazine, and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon, and don't forget, through June and July, we're having our summer pledge drive. Or you can support us through one time donations. Just visit Ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @LadyScienceMag, or on Twitter, at @LadyxScience.

In this episode, guest host Deanna Day, who first made her appearance on our Star Trek episode, joins in to discuss the bonkers, bizarre, and dangerous things men have believed about women and women's bodies. Listeners sent us examples from history and the present day, and we compiled their submissions into a chronological timeline of to illustrate how women's bodies have been persistently pathologized. For show notes, further reading, and a transcript of this episode, click here.

01:15:22

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Marilyn Ogilvie 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies 

For this episode, the hosts explain the history behind the Great Man Theory of history and discuss how it has marginalized and completely left out women, people of color, and other disenfranchised communities from our re-tellings of history. Historian of science Marilyn Ogilvie joins in to talk about her long career in recovering the voices and scientific work of women who had been lost to history. 

On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle 

Marilyn B. Ogilvie

Searching the Stars: The Story of Caroline Herschel by Marilyn B. Ogilvie

Marie Curie: A Biography by Marilyn B. Ogilvie

The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science: Pioneering Lives from Ancient Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century edited by Marilyn B. Ogilvie and Joyce Harvey

A Dame Full of Vim and Vigor: A Biography of Alice Middleton Boring, Biologist in China by Marilyn B. Ogilvie and Clifford J. Coquette 

Mark Zuckerberg’s charity is giving $30 million to help kids learn to read—and love it by Jenny Anderson

Zuckerberg, Chan donate $30 million to literacy effort by James Vaznis

Masculinity in Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History by Bryce R. Covert

Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science

Feminist History of Philosophy

Transcribed by Kimberly Daley, Edited by Anna Reser

Possible CW: Internet Harassment

REBECCA: Welcome to Episode Seven of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history of popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

ANNA: I’m Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science. I am a writer, editor, and PhD student studying 20th century American Culture, and the history of the American space program in the 1960s.

LEILA: I’m Leila McNeill the other founder and editor in chief of Lady Science. I am a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet, and I’m currently a regular writer on women in the history of science at smithsonianmag.com.

R: I’m Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science’s managing editor. When I am not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet, and managing research projects at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

L: So, Before we get started on what we’re going to talk about today, we want to thank everyone who left us a rating and review on itunes this past month. So your ratings and reviews increase our visibility so that new listeners can find us. But also it was just really to nice to see so many of  you are enjoying the podcast, so thank you. And as promised, those who wrote a review between February and this episode have been entered into a drawing to win a free Lady Science tote bag.

So, without further ado. Drum Roll!!!!

Okay, so the winner is someone with the name CheesyGal, which I can get behind that, I dig cheese, if that’s what that means. So, Cheezy gal, she wrote, or he wrote, or they wrote, whoever…:

“I can’t get enough Lady Science. Their brilliance translates perfectly from the page to the podcast. I love the ruminations on the UFOs, and I love their guests who bring such interesting stories with them. Now all we need is a Youtube or Twitch channel and we can get our Lady Science always all the time.”

*Laughter*

L: I can’t make any promises, I don’t want anyone to see me speaking ever on YouTube, so.

R: We appreciate the sentiment all the same.

L: Absolutely, thank you so much! So, if this is you, please get in touch with us and send us an email to [email protected] so we can get your mailing information and so you can let us know which tote bag you want, which logo you like. Either the oil lamp, or the burning bra logo. So, again, [email protected]. Let us know if that is you. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to leave us a review. We really appreciate it! Please continue to leave us ratings and reviews, even if we are not giving away stuff.

L: So, next month for the April podcast, episode 8, we’re going to be talking about the ridiculous, bizarre, and downright bonkers things men have believed and continue to believe about women’s bodies throughout history,  so things like how male physicians used to believe that if women did too much thinking their uteruses would shrivel up. So we want to hear from you guys on this! If you’ve come across a weird thing that men have said about women’s bodies from history to the present day, send it to us with a source link. We’ll compile your submissions and feature some of them on April’s podcast, and we’ll even give you a shoutout for sending it to us. So,  email your weird thing to [email protected] or tweet us at @ladyxscience.

R: SO, for our episode today, we’re going to be talking about the Great Man Theory of history. So since March is Women’s History Month, it might seem like this is maybe a  weird topic to have for this episode. But we wanted to do this because we think by explaining historical roots of Great Man Theory and showing how it has permeated all corners of academic history and popular culture, we’ll get a solid understanding of why we continue to need Women’s History Month at all. After we chat for a bit, we’re going to have a pretty special guest joining us: Marilyn Ogilvie is a historian of science who was part of a group of women’s historians in the 1970s that began to recover the stories of women in the history of science.

So let’s get into it, what exactly is the Great Man Theory of history?

A: Okay, so essentially, the great man theory of history is the belief that history is made and structured by the influence of great men or heroic figures, who possess a variety of traits that made them natural leaders. So this theory of history was popularized in the 19th century by Thomas Carlyle. In his lectures on historical heroes-- which were very subtly titled On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History-- Carlyle wrote that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” So he lists off a series of great men throughout history to try to demonstrate his point, men like the Prophet Muhammed, Napoleon, Shakespeare, you get the idea.

So he also believed that the traits that made for a great man, a history making man, were more or less the same for all men. These traits, I’m sure you can guess, include things like intelligence and genius, political and military prowess. So, Carlyle says that these men should always be seeking higher truth, which he described as “a sort of savage sincerity — not cruel, far from that; but wild, wrestling naked with the truth of things”. *Laughter* So these naked wrestling men are supposed to be *Laughter* valiant and virtuous and inspire all other men to achieve and embody the characteristics of these great men. And so this is essentially your masculinity how-to guide for 19th century men.

L: So, this theory obviously has a lot of problems. And it has really influenced who we see as being worthy of being included in the historical record. So obviously one of the big problems with this theory is that there is just, there is no room for women in it at all.

A: Right, and I think we can even back up a little bit and talk, sort of at a maybe a little theoretical level about, about what is history? Is history the past? Or, is it a set of stories we tell about the past? And who decides, you know, which stories we get to tell about the past? Because you can’t tell all of them. We can’t create a complete, high resolution record of everything that has ever happened. So, there is a lot of selection going on. So, who decides how to tell stories and about whom we should tell stories, and understanding that the history of that process is its own field of study as well. So, there is all kinds of like, crunchy theoretical stuff that we don’t necessarily need to go into, but I think it is important just to, ooooh I am going to use the word, to problematize. *laughter* of history itself because that helps us to see that there is not like one objective way of telling stories about the past. People made decisions about how we should do that. And often those decisions leave out a whole bunch of people, particularly women.

L: Yeah, and I think it, that it, in this theory also is an idea of history as progress and because the people that get these kind of heroic histories, or, are considered heroes, people, who in this view, have moved the world or whatever, forward in some sort of way. So, if we are looking at someone like Napoleon or Shakespeare or something like that, that there is a perceived forward movement and the work for the influence that they had made, which we don’t agree with here.  *laughter*

A: Just because now I have pegged myself as being this person in this conversation, we should also think about who decides which direction forward is, and

L: And for who

A: Yeah, that is socially and culturally constructed idea about what is progress and what counts as progress, you know. Industrial progress means a huge regression for like, workers, so anyway. Things like that. Go ahead Rebecca I didn’t mean to jump on you.

R: Oh no no no problem. Just one thing I was thinking about as you guys were talking was the other reason why this is super important, I think, that it is easy for people to say, well you know, history of various marginalized people, history of women, history of people of color, no one meant to leave them out, it was just that like, those sources are harder to find, and so we talk about great men because that was like the top of the deck, and like we are making out way, like, through the deck. Looking at something like great men theory, looking at the way 19th century folks thought about history goes to show that none of that was inevitable and that that was based on a certain idea of the way that history should work and what kind of sources were valuable and yeah, that those were all value judgements, not just a matter of people started by research the easier stuff, then research the harder stuff later.

A: It is also not inevitable that there aren’t sources about marginalized people

R: Right! Oh,

A: Cuz they didn’t have access to like, what about people who, who couldn’t read or write, or people who weren’t allowed to be in positions where it was important for them to correspond with other people, so we have letters about them, you know, things like that. None of this is inevitable, is what we are driving at.

L: Yeah, and the characteristics that this theory inscribed on people worthy of being recorded obviously are things that are traditionally associated with men. Military prowess, intelligence, those types of things, and so when we look at a historical record, to make choices about whose story we are going to tell, that if we think those are the characteristics that we think are worthy of recording, those are the people we are going to pick out. Those types of things have determined who we have decided to include. And when that comes to women, and we are trying to recover the voices of women, that we have also picked out the women that most resemble those traditionally masculine characteristics. Definitely come back around to it when you talk about feminist criticisms of this but,

R: Yeah, and the other thing that I always find fascinating about this is the reminder of how much this approach to historical thinking is very recent, like the 19th century wasn’t that long ago, and these great men theories of history come out of that, and also ideas about histories moving in a progressive way come out of that, and we are, we are in some ways still trapped by all of these crazy Victorians and their ideas about how the world works.

A: And the fact that like, the modern discipline of history as we sort of understand it now comes from the 19th century and it comes from people like Carlyle, who, they see themselves, these Victorians, as sort of like riding the quests, the crests of the wave of progress into the future, and they have some kind of like, heroic duty to preserve all of the heroic things that they’re doing. And so, they just like, there is like a lot of self serving, individualistic, I guess, impetus, behind designing this kind of historical practice. And I think if we can use words like, designing, to talk about it as being like, an intentional thing that's, its not just they scooped up this method out of the ether *laughter*

L: Right

A: This is something that they are interested in doing because it impacts on their own work as well, if we can remember ourselves as being historic, then our names will live on.

L: Yeah, and I think that that’s important to emphasize is that, history, the way we tell history, that they ay we narrate it, those things are choices that people make. History, just like science, isn’t just like, fall out of the sky into our laps and we just like, repeating facts. That there are people involved, and that means people are making choices. I think that is something really important to keep in mind if we’re doing this kind of, meta thinking about you know, the field of history, which, feels like grad school again *laughter* Maybe we will have an episodes about what is science. And then

R: Oh god

L: And then it will be a second year of grad school.

A: Are we going to make me read Butterfield again? *laughter*

A: Inside history of science, baseball for you *laughter*

R: So, because of this theory’s many, many problems, we’ve been laying out, it has largely fallen out of favor with academic historians. Though god knows it feels like it hasn’t fallen out of favor as much as academic historians like to  think it has, but that is a whole other thing.

L: Considering I still tussle with academic historians about this very issue on Twitter.

R: Exactly, and they would be horrified by the idea that they were still influence by Carlyle’s ideas about the world.

L: Right.

R: But, thankfully, there have been a lot of other models that have come to the fore. Cultural historians, Marxist historians, feminist and women’s history historians have all worked really hard to dismantle this hegemonic way of looking at history and the world.

R: And a lot of this came out of the 1960s, when a lot of people and scholars started talking about “history from below” or “people’s history.” And these are the ideas that you should approach the study of history from the perspective of non-elites of various kinds, of disenfranchised people, of people who live on the margins of society.  “History from below” is a particular phrase that is widely used, that became widely used after historian EP Thompson wrote about it, in an essay titled, appropriately, “History from Below.” He was a Marxist historian and he studied the modern history of England through the lens of the working class. And their experience and influence on English society. And so the phrase “a people’s history” is still widely used to identify this kind of particular history from below approach. So we have books like A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which probably has a wider popular reading than a lot of these kinds of history, but also A People’s History of Chicago by Kevin Coal, or A People’s History of Computing by Lady Science’s own Joy Rankin, which is coming out in October of this year.  

R: Whoo hoooo

L: Yay Joy!!!

*Laughter*

L: So, some of the feminist responses to this, there has been many of them, and I am just going to cover a couple, and kind of highlight the ones we cover or approach a lot in the magazine itself. So, one of these, and this has been popular culture or popular history writing, and this is called  the “Her-Story” type of history. This tackles the assumption that women just weren’t there doing stuff that mattered at all. So, her-story approach to the history of science elevates women like the Marie Curie’s, I don't know if you have heard of Marie Curie, Anna, Rebecca, *laughter* the Ada Lovelace's,

A: Wait, is that Pierre Curie’s wife? Sorry *laughter* I couldn't help myself, sorry, *laughter* I am just going to mute my microphone while you’re talking. *laughter*

R: We are a pro-snark podcast.

L: Oh, yeah.  

L: So elevating these types of women and so on is an attempt to show that women were in fact there doing important work, they were in fact there doing science, but have been typically overlooked by a narrative of history that, that favors men. So, an example that I am going to use because this comes up every time the Nobel committee hands out its prizes, when we look at the list of Nobel Prize winners in science, it is mostly men, and lots of people still, I can’t believe there are still men out there that do this every single time the list of Nobel winners comes out, they’ll say “see, women’ weren’t doing science!” Just because they didn’t win a Nobel. So, a herstory response would be to elevate those women who did, which includes Marie Curie, twice. *laughter* and this also includes  what we call recovery work, so the recovery of women who have been overlooked in our traditional retellings of science and, a little later, like Rebecca said earlier, we’re going to talk to Marilyn Ogilvie whose early work included this type of stuff on a pretty massive scale.

L: So another feminist response to look at this superficial assessment of women’s work in science and critique it in the way that it was the structures that favored male scientists over the women. So continuing with my Nobel example: this critique would not only looks at the gender bias that could be baked into the Nobel committee itself, but looks beyond even that to the larger social and cultural structures in place that kept women from practicing science on the same level as men. And this is something that we, we do a lot in the  magazine.

L: And then another response is challenging the misogynistic and sexist interpretations of women that have been embedded in the historical narrative because it has been largely written by and about men. So this one confronts the misogyny of scientific institutions and well-known male figures, like Charles Darwin or Richard Feynman, who referred to women as “skirt” *laughter* and it argues for a gender analysis of scientific theories and scientific practice. So, Charles Darwin is a good example of that and how he integrated a lot of his own beliefs and you know, 19th century cultural beliefs about women into his theories about sexual selection and natural selection, more broadly. So that is yet another approach that we often utilize in the magazine is applying a gender analysis to scientific practice.

L: There are certainly others, but these give you an idea of just how much work goes into tearing down this great man narrative of history. Because it is literally everywhere. Even we have to structure our work considering it.

A: Yeah, so I think, this is with regard to what we do in the magazine. The herstory approach is something that we typically, we don’t do. Especially about figures that are already well known like, we don’t talk about Marie Curie unless it is to talk about how much we don’t want to talk about Marie Curie. Like, what I am doing right now. *laughter* but it also goes back to what Leila was saying about the way that, if you, if you pursue this kind of herstory revision of history, you end up looking for only women who have the same qualities of the great men. So there are very limited number of women who were able to reach the same level as men in certain period of time, and it gives you this false impression that there were only a certain number of women doing anything at that time, because you are looking for a very strict set of qualities that usually only applies to men. So I think that one of the most important things that we talk a lot about in the magazine is broadening our sort of search criteria for women and for us that means also broadening what we mean when we talk about science, because men mostly have decided what you mean when you say science. So that is something that feminist histories of science can redress as well as the definition of science. Which then, then you’re starting to talk about housewives and women who edited their husband’s books, things like that, as being practitioners. The herstory approach is like, it’s an essential first step. You have to be able to at least find some women to talk about at all because you need, you need those historical case studies to start building theory that you can use for other things. But, that is definitely a first step, and for the magazine at least, we try to push beyond that as much as possible.

L: Yeah, and I think that we do recognize that there, there is a lot of work out there that has already gone into recovering some of those really prominent women scientists that, that we know and because people are already covering them, I feel like it is really important to not let them take up all of the real estate in our public consciousness and to look beyond seeing history as the making of single people and single individuals. So if we’re, like I said, like Anna said, there are essential first steps, like recovering individual women like that. But if we are just switching out a female scientist or a female leader for, you know, putting that in the place of like, our male leaders or great man history, we are doing great women history. We are going to bump up against a lot of the same problems. Because at that point we are still going to be covering mostly white women, mostly upper class women, women who had the privileges that other women don’t. We are still overlooking huge classes of people as groups and so I don’t think that just switching out men and women in our historical narratives is going to really redress the misogyny that is built into you know, the historical record.

R: Yeah, I especially, we are taping this, right, the day after, two days after, international women’s day. And there was once again a lot of the quote, “well behaved women rarely make history,” going on around the internet, which is like, my bugaboo, fury point. Because it’s such a good quote in its actual context, which is, for those who don’t know, “Well behaved people rarely make history,” was a commentary by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, from I think a paper she wrote in grad school or something? Funnily enough. But a commentary on what we are talking about now, which is that everyday women, women who weren't elite, don’t end up in these traditional masculine historical records, and that is a problem, and so we should redefine what we think of as history so that well behaved women get recognized as well. And that does it mean that all of the ill behaved women are not worth studying, but it is important to rethink the structural issues underneath all of this.

A: Maybe a synthetic way to say that is that it requires, generally speaking, a lot of privilege and social and cultural advantage to break boundaries. So if we are only going to be focused only on people who are able to do that, we are only going to be focused on only a certain like, select elite slice of society.

R: One thing where I see this really structurally like, like literally structurally shows up is in historic preservation. The thing about a lot of funding and recognition in public history is that you have to spend a lot of time arguing about significance. That is not necessarily bad. It is good to like, prove why the government or anyone else should give you money to study or preserve or interpret a certain historical figure, but significance of course has built into it all of these great man ideas of history that we have been talking about. Including in, I am going to talk about in particular, National Historical Landmark Status. There is various historic preservation statuses, in the federal government, and that is the highest one, and it basically means that you can’t destroy something or you can only, like, you can, there’s something, you can like get your private residence on historical, national historical landmark status, it doesn't mean that it is publicly owned in any way, but it does mean that you can’t change it or you cannot significantly change it because it represents a historical something or other.

R: And there are a number of specific criteria that it is built on first and like, it, the, the criteria can be a combination of things, but the [three] main ones are, “sites where events of national historical significance occurred or 2. Places where prominent persons lived or worked, or 3. Icons of ideals that shaped the nation.” and then there are three more that are a little more social history friendly. “Outstanding, examples of designer by outstanding construction, places characterizing the way of life, or archaeological sites able to yield information.” So, as you can guess, its prob, it’s a lot easier to get especially the landmark status based on the first couple, then it is one the other ones.

R: So what does that mean for whose stories we can tell in kind of the built environment. It limits us, and, what I find most interesting is where different national historical landmarks or national register sites that are dedicated to famous sort of, famous women that sort of, great women of history types of places have been able to say, okay we are a museum, we are able to preserve because of this important herstory, but we are going to use that to talk about marginalized people. There is a few different historic houses that do this, one that I am going to mention real quick right now, is the Harriet Beecher Stowe house in Connecticut, is really interesting because they have a, you know, it is a historic house, you can go and take tours, and learn all about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s life and writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. You can also go to lots of programs about both contemporary and the history of various racial and social justice initiatives. They spend, their mission is specifically focused on, in kind of, in the spirit of Harriet Beecher Stowe's interests in racial justice, we are going to keep talking about racial justice and marginalized people, so I think there are interesting ways that herstory approaches can be used to also critique and discuss these larger narratives that I think is really interesting.

A: By way of wrapping up, we just wanted to talk a little bit about the ways that this, as Rebecca and Leila both said, this stuff is still everywhere, this is still, we are still arguing about great man history on Twitter, of all places, maybe we can just talk a little bit about, the problem that I have with this still being so prevalent and sort of having to do, historical like public history whack-a-mole about it, is that how much oxygen it takes up from other projects like this. That we could be talking about or, lending our support to, So, I don’t know if you guys have any good examples of things that you have seen recently that has made you want to tear your hair out.

L: I do *laughter* because I-

R: Go for it

L: I’ve been grappling with this on Twitter the last couple of days. So the stuff that I do for Smithsonian magazine is I cover one woman a month, which kind of veers into the herstory thing that I was actually just criticizing a minute ago. But I really do try to choose women who have, who don’t actually fit into the herstory thing. So, for example, I’ve got a piece coming about, out about a woman who was doing science and cancer experiments in her barn, and so how she was operating on a kind of the fringes of, of science and of institutions to do the work that she wanted to do. So I try to add in kind of those critical feminist components, even if I am writing about individual women. Because I don’t choose to write about Marie Curie again and again and again and again, I get kind of, I’ve been criticized for that lately so, I guess not criticized, but more of the “well actually-ing” of everybody on the internet. So for Women’s History Month, they collected the articles that I have written and a few others have written about women in the history of science over the past year and made a collection out of them and they promoted it at the beginning of Women’s History Month, they bumped it on International Women’s Day, but on International Women’s Day, I got just, you know, people saying well, don’t forget about Marie Curie! Or don’t forget about Caroline Herschel! Or don’t forget about Maria Mitchell! Or don’t forget about, it just went on of all of these women that always without a doubt will pop up on a listicle of the “ten unsung women of science.” Like, we know about them. We know who these famous women are now. We can’t keep calling them unsung, when they each have like, you know, 100 dedicated biographies about them, when they are the only ones that appear on unsung lists, those are not the stories that I am interested in telling, but its like, if I don’t mention them, it's like, somehow an oversight on my end rather than a conscious choice for me to not write the same story about the same women over and over and over again. That’s been really frustrating for me anyways, the last couple of days, is just, I’m not even responding to those comments anymore. Or engaging them because I think that it’s silly and there is a lot of well actually component in it  coming from men, that they know one famous female scientist and they want me to know about that.

*laughter*

R: In case you haven’t heard of these people

*laughter*

R: In case you are unaware.

L: One thing that Leila and I have talked a lot about and a little bit of public writing about is the cumulative effect of historians or history buff type people, like, I don't know, riding around twitter on their steeds of justice myth busting about Darwin and Galileo, it is like taking up more energy and time away from you know, histories we could write about unknown people or marginalized people and just spending so much time shrieking at people the temerity to believe something they read once about Galileo saying something to his tribunal that he shouldn't of said. And it is just like, huge discourse and publishing industries that revolve around these great man figures you've got your Darwin industry, there is a Galileo industry it is just one part of it. There is also this like, the way that it feeds into our conversation and our collective consciousness in, in the form of this like, minutia policing that is just overwhelming, so then, not only does the academic discourse become all about men, the popular history publishing industry becomes all about men, but just our sort of day to day impression of the history of the world is just about people defending Galileo from misinterpretation, or something like that. So I think it is important to think about it in terms of being prevalent at all levels of how we think about history, even just your sort of like, casual mention of some figure while you’re talking on Twitter and then someone gallops in there to tell you you’re wrong.

A: But they never gallop in there to tell you about a woman you never knew about, you know?

R: But they will gallop in to tell you about a woman that you are calling a scientist who they dont think is actually a scientist, which is the other thing that takes so much energy out of everything, is, you know what? I have complicated feelings about Ada Lovelace and how she is represented in popular culture, but like, can we talk about something besides arguing again about whether or not she was a computer programmer? And maybe just like talk about what she did do! Or, like, what she was actually like, or like, her crazy bat shit history because again, Victorians were crazy. But, instead, its like, oh do we have to wring our hands about whether dudes on the internet agree like, have agreed that we can call her a computer programmer?

A: And when you are talking about terminology like that, the people who I have seen in there being the most vocal about that, are really bringing a knife to a gun fight, because they are arguing with historians about this kind of terminology, like, if you want to have that argument with a historian, you're gonna have to do a little bit of reading

*laughter*

A: You can't just say that she wasn't a computer programming because you don't want the founder of your profession to have been a woman. You have to, if you want to have that discussion, then you need to, you know, you have to have tools to do it, and bring some nuance to it. Not that, you know , think that there’s some certain elitist about history, there is, and I don’t want to defend that, but, those are like actual historiographic discussions that you can have about, use of terminology from today for people in the past and things like that.

L: Right, I see this a lot with like, Hedy Lamarr, who this lead to some real interesting harassment of me on twitter last year, but so the, I mean, for a bite sized tweet, it typically goes around, “Hedy Lamarr invented wifi,” right? So we've kind of got two problematic things going on right there. Invented, and wifi.

*laughter*

L: And I, I appreciate that and I do think there needs to be some nuance there, but I think we also need to think about why we have to feel the need to describe women as inventors and discoverers and those types of glorified positions for us to care about them. We feel like we have to do that because that’s how we have cared about men. Those are the men that have gotten recognized, those are the ones that we love, those are the ones we care about, those are the heroes, whatever. So this is our attempt to get women the same recognition by ascribing those characteristics to them. And I think Hedy Lamarr is a really good example of that.

A: I think in the case of Hedy Lamarr, I think it is extra pernicious and extra sexist, the way that she is talked about, because you get these sort of narratives, I just listened to a review of the documentary that is coming out about her, yesterday and the way they were describing her is like, Not only was she a great beauty, which is apparently just not enough you know, you can be literally, she was called the most beautiful woman in the world, We still talk about, not only was she a great beauty, she was an inventor, which means that she’s extra worth our notice. Like, not only was she, she had a whole career as an actress, but now she is really worth our notice now, and we should recover her story now, because we have been able to label her as an inventor and that is something that we value. We don’t, as much as we think we do, we don’t actually value women for being beautiful, that’s not, we don’t consider that a contribution. This is a, you know, this is a real contribution, she is an inventor.

Right, and it doesn’t help that the movie is called Bombshell. Wasn’t that the name of Richard Rhodes book, too? Was Bombshell?

A: I think that’s what it’s adapted from.

R: I think so, that sounds right.

L: Oh, okay. Well, I mean, the cover of Richard Rhodes' book had her like, straddling a rocket or something, didn’t it?

A: A torpedo…

L: A torpedo! So, you know.  I mean. So sure.

*displeased noises* *laughter*

R: Yeah.

L: We saw that it also happened with, oh just a funny anecdote, when Science Friday put out a tweet about Hedy Lamarr and described her as beautiful, and I like, jumped on that right away, and they changed it! They, they went and they changed the copy on, on that piece about her, so. Appreciate that, good on Science Friday. If you would like my consulting on your other stories on women in science, I am happy to step up for that! *laughter* But I also remember in Cosmos, the Neil Degrasse Tyson one, women got one episode. *Laughter*

R: The Lady Episode. Yep.

L: The Lady episode! And with Cecilia Payne and they described her as a beauty. I think it was,

L: Like, its just, its, its really, its *laughter* the way we talk about women in pop culture, women scientists in pop culture is really gross. *laughter* So I guess that’s a good place to end this segment and go ahead and bring in our guest.

L: So, our guest today is Marilyn Ogilvie. She is curator emeritus of the history of science collections at the University of Oklahoma, Professor of Bibliography Emeritus, and Professor Emeritus in the History of Science department. And she is the author of 3 books: Marie Curie: a Biography and Sweeping the Stars, The Story of Caroline Herschel, and the two volume Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science. And she is the co-author of another, A Dame Full of Vim and Vigor: A Biography of Alice Middleton Boring, an American Biologist in China.

L: It’s kind of special for me and Anna because we went to the University of Oklahoma for grad school, Anna is still there, and so, and that’s where Dr. Ogilvie hails from. Welcome to the podcast!

M: Thank you very much! It is good to be here!

A: So we have been talking about great man history, which I guess is the opposite of the kind of history that you write, and so, we just wanted to talk to you a little bit about your work and I guess the best place to start is where you started and, and if you could tell us a little bit about how you got into, how you, decided to become a historian, and were you always interested in studying women in science, in particular, maybe there’s an origin story there, a revelation you had, or a mentor, something that sparked your interest?

M: Okay, well, I got into the history of science by accident. I had been in East Africa for two years teaching, and we came back to Normand in order to, I thought, pursue, me pursue a PhD in Zoology. Well, and, I had, at that time, I had just one, 6 month, 6 month old baby, I thought that would be a good thing to do that, so I took a couple of zoology classes, then wandered over into the history of science collection, for somebody told me, they had a nice, a lot of books, interesting books, and so I thought I would take a reading course in that. And so anyway, that’s what happened and I got hooked. But the history of science that I took, I was totally, I totally bought into the Great Man Theory, because by our definition of science, well its, it is the attempt of man to explain natural phenomena by using, by creating a theory that explains a phenomena. Okay, I believed that, and after I did my dissertation on, actually, Robert Chambers and The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, I thought I would be a historian of biology probably, We moved to Portland, Oregon, and I taught a class and it was a survey course in the history of science. And I assigned a paper, as is my wont, and I told them they could write about whatever they wanted to, but they should clear it with me. Well, a couple of girls came up after class and said, we thought we would write something on women in science and I thought, well that’s a good idea! Come back tomorrow, or our next class meeting and tell me what you decided! So, the next meeting after class was over, they trotted up to the front of the room and said, well, you know, we could only find one woman of science that we would like, and that was of course Marie Curie.

*Laughter*

M: And I thought, Hmm, that’s strange, that’s the only one I can find! And so anyway, I thought, well that can’t be right, that just can’t be right. And now this had to be, let’s see, in, the 1970s. And, so, I thought well, I’ll just see what I can find. So I began the search to see if I could find some women in science. And  that's what began, what, the first part of it culminated in the first biographical dictionary that I wrote by myself, and that one was published in 1986, and I came back to Norman, and how do you go about it? Well, I found, first of all, I had to have names, who were they? So I found a book that was published in 1913, I think the first edition by H J Mozans, called Women in Science. I can't remember exactly. But it was a pseudonym, he was a catholic priest, and he had gotten all of the names of these, of the women in science. Well, a little biography of them. So I started out there, I began making a list. I made a list of those and I found other biographical dictionaries and particularly women in medicine. And Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead was one in history of medicine, women in medicine, so I wrote those names down, and then I began a huge search and no computers. So, I would find, it was kind of a footnote trail that we were, know so much about, we would find one, and then you would follow the path to a, and that gives you a little bit of clues of where you’re gonna go, and by this time, it's beginning to be a kind of an in thing to do, I didn’t know it, when I was doing it to start out with, there were a lot of people beginning to work on women in science. So I found all of the secondary literature there, followed that up, used their bibliography footnotes to , to go to the primary sources pretty much. And then, any biographical dictionary that I found actually, the bibliographies helped me British Museum and the Bibliotheque Nationale and then the Library of Congress told me their works so then I would work with that and then all of the women in the ancient sources in plenty, and found these little squibs of information and I wanted to get as much as I could from there so I ended up with, I'm not sure how many, 180 some women in science when this biographical dictionary was published in 1986. And I had really good luck with getting that published because I met June Goodfield who you all may know who did a lot of work in women in science, and she was in Norman Oklahoma and I was in some sort of a party where she was, and we got to talking, and I told her what I was doing and she was like, Oh! She says, May I see it? And I said, Well it is kind of not in any shape to be seen yet, but sure! And she said, Why don’t I come over to your house for breakfast the next morning! *Gasp* Junie Goodfield in my house for breakfast, oh boy! So she did come over and she was so helpful. She’s British. And she said, well I know Everett, Everett Mendelsohn at Harvard. So she talked to him and that's when I got, He suggested that I try MIT Press and that is when the very first bio-bibliography  I guess of women in science was out. But after that got published, there was so much known, particularly by this time, Margaret Rossiter has published the first of her three volumes on women in science and she had got around to every archive that you could imagine and got information there. So of course thought, that is an excellent thing, so I latched on to what I could from her work and began to get a lot more women and I thought my 180 some women that I had started out with, that's just skimming the surface, and so Routledge Press contacted me and said, we would like to have a dictionary of about 2,000 women in science, and I said, Okkkay I'll do it. And then of course obviously I was not going to be able to do the research on all of these so it became an edited volume and my good friend Joy Harvey was interested in it as well so she and I, worked, I don’t know how many hours getting the, writing the, biographies, and then we would ask other people to contribute to it, and we had a lot of contributors to it as well, so we got very close to our goal there of the numbers, its just, its amazing how that field has changed. So. That is sort of a brief something or other of how I got to where I got.

*laughter”

R: Well, speaking about how the field has changed, I am curious, what was the, what was the reception to some of the work that you and your colleagues started doing about women in the history of science and do you think that the reception to work like that has changed over the last 40 years or so?

M: Oh yeah, I think it definitely has. Again, I, I was sort of naive, I was a newly minted PhD when I started all of this. I, it, here it certainly, we were not teaching any courses at the University of Oklahoma, that had to do with women in science, because actually women weren't scientists, you know, *laughter* that was kind of an oxymoron. And so, I, it was so gradual that I began to go to the history of science society meetings and they began to increase their interest in women in science and there were various sessions, but they were kind of segregation sessions actually, mostly women, mostly women, in the women in science sessions and, but again, it has changed to such a great degree I think it, I think what has been done, there is lots of biographies now, in  fact I have one out, going to be published, I should be having the proofs right now, on Margaret Nice who was an american ornithologist, and there are lots, so many biographies on women scientists that are there today, and we have to, it means we broaden our definition of what science is. We talk about not just what the actual theoretical science is but all of the things that make this science possible, and so many women are involved in that. It would be impossible to do a biographical dictionary, and thank goodness for computers to get everybody there. And to even the, after our 2000 one, we missed I don't know how many women, up to our cut off point there. So.

A: So I wanted to ask a little more specifically about evidence and sources and we were talking about how part of the reason we have this great man history is that all of these great men have so many letters and their own published works and just, so many sources to draw and a lot of times like you just said we are talking about women who were not considered to be practicing science anyway, so if they had correspondence it wasn't saved because they were just secretaries so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what kinds of sources we have to look at when we are trying to recover these women’s stories.

M: That is so true because even in the, the biographical dictionaries, general dictionaries, for instance, Poggendorff, which has all of the European scientists, there are very many, there are very few women in there, I had to search through it all, and also in the college archives, often times they didn’t save the works of the women scientists, they just weren't there, and you had to really work around that to find anything and of course some, from some antiquity, women used men’s names in order to get their works published and we don’t know how many of those were there, we know that Lavoisier’s wife probably did an awful lot of the work that he was credited for, we also know that in Plato’s academy, there were a couple of, at least supposedly, there were couple of women who dressed as men and so that they could be accepted at Plato's academy, and then we had there were, women had different strategies, some very clever in order to get their works published, and then there was the idea of women’s work. And home economics was an area where women could do chemistry. It was acceptable there and they could even get academic positions. Women could do observational kinds of work in astronomy, particularly thinking of the Harvard College Observatory who hired a bunch of women computers to do their work. Well, by digging into that, we were able to find, or I was able to find some biographical information, there is some very very, wonderful, there is a wonderful recent book on those computers. Thats out now and, and I really appreciate that because it was so difficult to get to that when I was working on them. And then Britain, the same thing, the women’s colleges where the history of men gave an awful good idea of how and why women were not being accepted but, if you dig in you would find out that they were! Tremendously complicated situation, they are there, but finding them, and its, seeing what strategies both the women used to get their works published or out there whether it was published or not and also another thing was the idea of collaborating with a male partner, usually it was a husband, maybe it was a brother, and but the women very seldom got the credit. The male partner did. But then you got in, and when you would look at their actual works, and I tried to do that, you would see wow, is that what she did?

R: Early on, both earlier in the, just the three of us were talking and when you were talking about your work, Marie Curie has come up a lot, in terms of the one, like, woman in science that people think of, and thankfully because of the work that you have done and scholars like you have done, there are many other women that are recognized both in scholarship, but even a little bit more in popular culture as important women in science, are there any figures that you, in particular,  like, what, who is someone, a woman from the history of science that you wish was more popularly known or understood?

M: Well, I am going to tell you Margaret Nice.  *laughter* She was a woman who, her father was a history professor and her mother was well educated. She had gone to Mount Holyoke and had gotten a degree, but her major interests were society things that women, proper women’s work that they were, and then, but then the kids, she had, Margaret had a number of siblings and they kind of ran loose and had all kinds of things, and but her mother’s goal was for her to marry and have a family. Well, she wasn't going to have any of that. So, she went to Clark College and was majoring there but, she met her future husband, they married, and she ended up having five little girls, and she never finished her PhD, and he did, he was a physiologist, but he eventually got a job in Norman Oklahoma, so that’s how margaret came to come, came to Norman, and she, its amazing at how she managed to kind of, I want to say con her male colleagues into accepting her, because she wasn’t, she was neither too obnoxious about it all, but she was very sneaky and got their, and got their help. She never finished her degree, but she became the expert on Song Sparrows and she, well, she was well known, internationally, with Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, they all let the well known well known animal behaviorists thought that she was just, the cat’s meow, but I’m old. So she became very good friends of theirs and Anged Meyer, so all of these relationship between her needs to be out there, it shows that she was able to juggle the family and the research as well. Now, one of her daughters didn't think she did it as well as she might of, she wrote an account about mommy dearest autobiography about her mother, but it, but her children and grandsons, who are now still around, had been very very helpful in this. She is just a fascinating person because of all of the strands that she managed to juggle and that is something we find throughout history. They are not just scientists, the men pretty much can go ahead and do their thing, but women, no! *Laughter*

L: Well I have just one last, I guess, wrap up question, do you , I mean, where do you see the field kind of going next? Like, what work do you still see that needs to be done or what is really the historians need to be doing to continue the work?

M: Well I think that basically we need to keep doing what we are doing, not so much the biographical dictionary, the kind of thing that I started out doing, but working in detail of the scientist life, women or men, and seeing how the cultural, how culture is accepting, will accept women. I think it has changed so much just within my lifetime and its, which is a good long one, but I remember when I was a graduate student at KU, I didn’t know whether I wanted to go on, but I couldn’t go on for a Ph.D there because women, our major professors, didn’t think women had any business there, cuz they are going to get married and just waste all of that money and time you put into them. Besides, one of their requirements for these field scientists was to spend the summer in Mexico, and it was not a good thing cuz the women, well one woman, she couldn’t go in there with all of those men, what would you do about a bathroom? Honestly, that is what he said. So. *laughter* Anyway. So, things have changed, Things have changed and I think they will continue to change, I hope, and, but, it does, and I think it is more not just having a separate women in science field, but have women integrated into the entire history of science. Their place is there, it is not an isolated sub-section of it, but I think it is a very integral part of the history of science. So I think that is where, I hope that is where we go, and again it is part of the general cultural involved there too.

R: That seems like a fabulous note to end on

L: Yeah I think so, it was such a pleasure to have you on, thank you so much for talking with us about your work and the field that we care so deeply about.

M: Well thank you so much! It's been fun! It's been great fun! And you’re doing great things I think.

ONE ANNOYING THING

A: At the end of every podcast, hosts will unburden themselves with one thing in the news, their work, or the world in general that’s just annoying the crap out of them. So, this is one annoying thing.

L: The annoying thing that I have for us to talk about today is Mark Zuckerberg's 30 million dollar donation to Harvard and MIT for literacy programs. So, according to a reported piece from QZ that describes this “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), which Zuckerberg co-founded with his wife Priscilla Chan, is giving a $30 million grant to the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Integrated Learning Initiative to launch Reach Every Reader. The program is a five-year initiative to build a web-based screening tool that diagnoses reading problems before kids can even read, and to develop a set of home and school interventions that personalize literacy support for kids, parents, and teachers…The group’s will create a web-based assessment that will initially be given to about 2,000 students, identifying issues like poor phonological processing (related to memory and retrieval), vocabulary problems, and listening comprehension. Struggling readers will be identified and tracked into the future to see whether the interventions they get actually help, and whether the original diagnosis was correct.”

L: GO! *laughter*

R: So, there is a very telling quote in the press release on the Harvard Graduate school of education site from the MIT president about what they are hoping this will do that I think is going to sum up pretty well everything that we have wrong, everything we think is wrong about this. The quote is, “ At MIT, we approach problems as scientists as engineers. By seeking to understand the brain science about how learning happens, and by building innovative technologies and solutions to help.”

A: Great. I think this idea that approaching a scientist is the not only is it the, the assumption that it is the best way to approach a problem, but it is the most, it is the approach with the most moral clarity. Like, we are scientists, and we will take care of this. Okay, trust us. AHhhh You can’t just build an app for everything. You can’t. There are somethings that an app is not the solution for. I mean, obviously, this is something Zuckerberg would be interested in right,? A web screening app that will solve all problems. He is clearly invested in this idea that you can just build web technology and solve people’s problems because that is how he made his fortune and all of his problems were solved that way.

A: It strikes me as a technocratic solution to a social problem, which, to me, is probably about paying teachers better? And alleviating like, poverty, for these students, those things would probably contribute much more to improving their performance in school and reading. But as usual, in this country, that is not something we would prioritize when we can, instead of spending however much it would cost to pay all of the teachers in this country appropriately and alleviate poverty for children in the wealthiest country in the world, we can just have Mark Zuckerberg dump 30 million dollars on two of the most well endowed universities on the planet, and then we don’t have to think  about all of the social stuff underlying what's probably going on here.

L: Another thing about this, is this idea of testing to see who is going to have testing with literacy before kids can even read is a big problem because the things that affect a person’s and a child’s literacy has a lot to do with social environments and putting an app into someone’s life when they are living in an impoverished neighborhood or a neighborhood that has a lot of violence and stuff like that, that’s not fixing the social ill that is interrupting this child’s ability to have lieracy, is not taking into the whole picture of what makes a person and what makes a person be able to have a literacy and good education and this just you know, of course, like, you said it Anna, a technocratic solution to a social problem.

A: It is also a medicalized solution to a social problem. They are talking about diagnosing this children and pathologizing their inability to read when they are too young to read, so not only is that cruel and it relocates what our social and environmental concerns on to the body of the child themselves. They are also talking about tracking this into the future, and like,  this is like it will become a stigmatized diagnosis that will stick with these kids throughout their education. They were identified as poor readers before they could even read and they had to have all of this extra intervention and it will go in their file and you know, I have personal experience with this. I like, not, in a different way, I wasn't pathologized as a kid, but I was labeled as gifted and talented, but it is still another way of creating a difference among kids, it's like rooted in something they have no control over. So you are sort of sorting very young children into groups based on these...

L: Arbitrary measurements

A: Yeah, arbitrary measurements, this quantification of these abilities that haven't even fully manifested yet. Its gross! I find this very upsetting.

L: Right, and giving it to Harvard and MIT students as like a fun little research project.

A: I should just say that Harvard’s endowment is 37 billion dollars, and I think Harvard could fund its own project themselves if they wanted to. Zuckerberg could give his money to someone who doesn't have 37 billion dollars. BILLION. DOLLARS *laughter*

R: Yeah. And okay so you diagnosis the kids. Diagnose, and I want to throw up a little putting it that way, but what do you do next.

L: So I am glad you both are talking about what comes next. Because I am going to tell you what comes next.

R: Oh god.

A: I am terrified now.

L: Once the child has been diagnosed, the personalized learning kicks in. The group will develop and deliver two interventions. One for kids and caregivers who are reading at home, and one for kids and educators. Both interventions will have an app that is personalized for children and adults. Children can choose the content they want, reading about athletes, musicians, or scientists, for example. The app will also  deliver content tailored to reading problems identified in their screening.

R: I mean,this goes back to your point earlier, to like, what we were kind of circling around and discussing earlier, about the reason why kids, a lot of kids don't, don't like, like there is poor literacy in a lot of schools and is because the kids are dealing with like, violence and hunger and home insecurity and racism and all of these things that make like, learning to read not maybe as important because you gotta like, if this is some like real basic like Maslov’s  hierarchy of needs shit, like you're not gonna think, put that much like, cognitive work, consciously or unconsciously into reading when you are a very young child who is like, afraid for -

L: Yeah, and that's also, this is also assuming not just on the teacher end, that they have an iPad for every student. I mean,  a lot of, if there is a school that does have an ipad, sometimes it is one iPad for an entire class of 30 kids right. But also like, on the  parents side of this, like, a lot of times, when I was working in schools and a lot of schools that I worked in in one part of the city, a lot of the students were bilingual, but a lot of the parents only spoke Spanish, and so like, how are parents supposed to know how to you know, work this intervention when there's somewhat of a language barrier there. Like, it is really, I mean there is just so many different factors going on here, that they are making assumptions about what these schools look like, what these homes look like where these kids are coming from.

R: And one more thing that occurs to me just going back to kind of our, our regular theme of Silicon Valley reinventing things that already exist. So, basically this is just testing reading levels, giving kids more stuff to read, that is at their reading level, that they might want to read. *Laughter* This is very very very basic idea of how to solve childhood literacy that educators have been doing in various forms successfully and unsuccessfully, again depending on the social context for forever. And, it is just honestly super duper basic and like, it goes back to you know, whole reading theories and all the stuff about like give kids lots of time reading and they will be able to read better. Which inherently is not a problematic idea, there is actually a lot out there, if I remember correctly, says that it is a good thing, that it actually does help, but just the fact that they are putting this shiny tech sheen on it, on a very basic idea of how we can improve literacy is just classic Silicon Valley.

A: Yeah, and well so next there will be a special Uber for kids to get to school instead of school buses.

A: Uber but for your school bus.

L: Well maybe that is what we will be able to talk about!

R: Yeah, dare I say it.

L: So, that’s a good place for us to put a pin in it. So, anyway.If you liked our episode today, leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts so that new listeners can find us. If you have questions about any of the segments today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod. For show notes, episode transcripts, to sign up for a monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea, and more, visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine and that means we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon through a one time donation or, nope, that's it. That's all we got.. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on facebook @ladysciencemag and on twitter @ladyxscience.

~*music*~

01:07:51

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Deanna Day 

Producer: Leila McNeill

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies

In this episode, the hosts talk about gender and sexuality in the various iterations of the Star Trek TV series, discussing what the show gets right--and wrong. Guest Deanna Day joins the hosts to talk about our favorite Starfleet android, Data, and emotional labor in "The Next Generation."  

The Sum of Our Programming: Finding Humanity in Emotional Labor by Deanna Day

Warped Fantasies: Dr. Leah Brahms and the Illusion of Consent by Robert Davis

Spending 'Queer Time' in Space by Rebecca Ortenberg

Twenty Years of NASA/TREK by Anna Reser

Hearing Women of Color in Space by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and @MrDrChanda 

Queer Time: The Alternative to "Adulting" by Sara Jaffe

NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America by Constance Penley 

Transcribed by Kimberly Daley, Edited by Anna Reser 

Possible CW: discussion of homophobia, objectification of women, non consensual pregnancy

REBECCA: Welcome to Episode Six of the Lady Science Podcast. This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history of popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

ANNA: I’m Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science. I am a write, editor, and PhD student studying 20th century american culture, and the history of the american space program in the 1960s.

LEILA: I’m Leila McNeill the other founder and editor in chief of Lady Science. I am a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet, and currently a regular writer on women in the history of science at smithsonianmag.com.

R: I’m Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science’s managing editor. When I am not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet, and managing research projects at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

L: So, some of you listening may know that we sell some pretty awesome Lady Science merch on our website. We have t-shirts, burning bra lapel pins, and tote bags. Um, and so this month of February, if you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Itunes, I actually don’t know what it is called anymore, but those things, umm, you will be entered to win a tote bag with the logo of your choice. Either the burning bra logo, or the oil lamp logo. We will randomly choose one of the reviewers and announce them on the March episode. So do us a solid, help us out with those reviews, and we will give you cool stuff in return.

HOST SEGMENT: GAYS IN SPACE

L: So, this month on the Lady Science blog, we have been running a special series on Star Trek with a particular focus on wender, wender, women and gender *laughter* On women, gender, and sexuality. For this episode today, we’re going to talk about some of those issues that come up in the series, and then a little later, historian Diana Day will join us in the conversion.

L: So, Rebecca’s going to kick us off talking about a segment we are calling GAYS in SPACE. YESSSSSSSSS GAYS IN SPACEEEEEEEE.

R: Um, so early in the um, folks one of the reasons we are doing this series is in part because we all love Star Trek and we wanted an excuse to write about it but also because of this month Star Trek: Discovery wrapped up its first season. Early on in the promotion for Star Trek: Discovery, the powers that be reveal that the show would have at least one main character who is openly gay. And you know, this was back when we were full of hope about the new Star Trek series coming out, *laughter* and that got me even more excited. Because I am also a musical theater nerd, I was extra excited when in turned out the character in question was going to be played by Anthony Rapp who is most known for starring in a little musical people have probably heard of called Rent. He is fabulous, he is pretty fabulous on the show. And, this was exciting because now we finally have GAYS IN SPACE! YAYYYY and while Discovery has not been everything that I think I had hoped, or that many of us had hoped it would be, I really enjoyed Anthony Rapp’s performance and I think his character is one of the more interesting characters on the shows, and he has been given interesting plot arcs to work with, so that is nice. But anyway, what I am really kind of here to chat about with you guys is that casting um, got me thinking about how queerness and LGBT issues had been represented in the Star Trek universe generally. Paul Stamets is the name of Anthony Rapp’s character. Also a character on the show is Dr. Culber, I couldn’t figure out if they had ever given him a first name. But Dr. Culber is his husband, partner person, played by Wilson Cruz, and the two of them are the first explicitly out gay characters in a Star Trek series. But I would argue that gender and sexuality and queerness have been themes throughout Star Trek, or at least in other instances in the Star Trek universe. And so yeah, I was wondering what you guys thought of that.

L: Well, this one is kind of low hanging fruit. There is the obvious one in the last movie Beyond when they show Sulu embracing his husband and their child.

R: Yeah, uh, when I was thinking about this, I was like, someone is going to get mad at me if I don’t mention Sulu was mentioned as gay before Discovery started. But, whatever. Like, it was great, but it was not necessarily a significant part of anything that had happened.

L: Yeah, Yeah exactly.

A: Yeah, it is such a tiny moment, and they are literally walking away from the camera. And it is never spoken of again. And it doesn’t have any material bearing on what anybody does in the movie. But, it’s like, they still got, you know, the filmmakers still got huge plaudits for doing the literal bear minimum. *laughter* We showed two men hugging so you have to give us an award for like, for how inclusive we are.

L: And, I mean, it’s funny that people like us think that that’s really, that it isn’t enough. And like, No, you don’t get a cookie for like, showing two men hugging on screen. And that was still enough to make the awful fanboys lose their minds about it.

R: Seriously

L: You know? Ohh you’re ruining the show, it is no longer that masculine frontier type of thing that we loved about it. And, um, which I guess this actually gets back to your original question Rebecca. Of well, that's not the first time that Star Trek has explored these issues in way more detail than they do in that one moment. And how are you mad about that and you haven't been mad about the rest of the series?

R: Yeah, it's kind of like, the other thing that got thrown out, What are you putting politics in Star Trek? *laughter*

L: Right, right.

R: It is literally a communist utopia that was created by a rather liberal and somewhat political dude

L: Yeah, Like, there-entire episodes are just about like, diplomacy. Like, *laughter* Yeah, What do you mean?!

A: Yeah, the show is basically politics in space, like, that is what its about really.

R: Yeah

L: Yeah

A: And then some occasional hjinx with oil slick monsters and weird things like that *laughter*The basic premise, like, even just the idea of like, exploring and making contact with other civilizations, like, that's politics! Like, *laughter* There's politics involved there!

L: In a show like this, especially I think with what they started doing with Next Generation, that it would have been a ship dedicated to exploration and seeking out new civilizations and new species and things like that, if they didn’t confront issues of gender and sexuality in the way that they are culturally constructed across the galaxy, then that would have been a huge oversight in a show based on first contact and you know, exploration.

A: Well yeah, and so, when they really fall down on that, like, it is even more, it really sticks out when they sort of lose the thread and do something like, really stereotype heavy or, yeah. Ignore the sort of gender politics of what they are talking about. Cause, I would say, usually, Trek does a pretty good job of that until, you know, like I said...

L: Until they don’t *laughter*

A: When they don't, they really don’t. Yeah, like when they have what’s her face just like,  changing in front of Kirk in the shuttle. *Laughter*

A: It's like, I'm sorry, what’s going on? Why did she take her shirt on? What’s happening? Why did she have to change clothes anyway?

L: That was, was that Into Darkness? That was the Khan reboot, right?

R: Yeah that was the one

L: With a charming British man,playing a man named Khan, which was one of the issues with that movie. But Felicia Day, I think it was Felicia Day, when that movie came out, she had a good critique not just about that woman changing in front of Kirk, and we get a full up and down male gaze shot of that, um but she also made a really good point about how there were no women involved in the decision making that was going on in that film. And so like, yeah there was the male gaze stuff but like, more importantly I think like, in a real straying from Star Trek the series, that women were not involved in any of those major decisions at all in that film.

L: But anyway, we need to get back to GAYS IN SPACE! *Laughter*

R: So, so one thing that  I read when I was doing some research for this was, that I guess for a long time, or at least for a decent amount of time, for like some the run of next gen, Gene Roddenberry really wanted a gay character, uh, and the network was like, No This is a family show. we can't have gay characters and he was like, but, but, the future, and equality, and exploring the universe. And they, I read a thing, that yeah they got really close to having a recurring character who was gay, and then Gene Roddenberry died, and there basically wasn’t someone to advocate for that plot anymore, and they cut it. And then Kate Mulgrew also really wanted a gay character on Voyager, but, again, like the network  was like, no you’re supposed to be a family friendly show.

A: This idea of like, it’s a family friendly show, so we cant, we cant have any gays on it. There’s all kinds of like, fairly family unfriendly things on Star Trek, like, I don't think that is a really good defense.

L: No

A: I cannot watch any of the episodes where Data dates or has sex with anyone. Just, It's a Brent Spiner thing, not a humans and androids things. *laughter*

L: Poor Brent Spiner!

A: But like, I don't know, He is just so oooohh. He’s so weird. I love you Brent Spiner if you are listening to this, which is a thing that happens occasionally on this podcast,

*laughter*  

R: As we have recently discovered.

A: But I don't know, so like, but there's all kinds of like, ugh, horrible deaths and I just want, thats a bad excuse, it doesn't make any sense, especially not if you have like, straight characters who are having sex and getting married and having relationships and doing whatever.

L: One of the first episodes that got me thinking about gender and sexuality and in the series was in an episode of The Next Generation and it was, I guess it was season 4, called “The Host” with Crusher and the Trill, and...

R: Right, yeah.

L: So in that episode a Trill ambassador comes onto the ship and in a male body, and um, crusher and him fall in love, and he dies, his symbiont doesn't die inside of his male body, but the male body that she, the outside of him that she fell in love with is no longer there. So the Trill gets transferred into Riker, which makes for some really weird moments of her trying to figure out if she is going to continue being with the symbiont, who is inside of Riker now, but also like, its Riker, *laughter*  she can’t really get past that. And then at the end, the Trill planet sends another trill to take the symbiont in, and it is the body of a woman, and Crusher as a straight woman, can, does not feel like she can continue that romantic relationship. And it got me thinking about gender and sexuality in the first time that I saw this I was rather young, so as a rather young child, trying to understand some of these bigger issues that they were dealing with. Because, with like, a symbiont who is a genderless, sexless thing, gets put into a gendered and a sexed body and that determines how other people interact with that species.

R: I think it is the first one where they introduce the Trills as a concept. Which then, like, I think that they are never consistent about exactly like, how trills work. *laughter* but that is okay.

L: Yeah, I think that they introduced it then, and didn't come back to it in The Next Generation, and then they made Jadzia Dax Trill the main character in, one of the main characters in Deep Space 9, then they explored that culture more in depth, right?

R: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it is really fascinating, yeah, it gives them the chance to, at least around the edges play with having kind of a, like there are a few different times, when in Star Trek they will run across some culture that doesn't have gender, or like, is different in some way, to do a big metaphor about something. But yeah, it does seem like they inadvertently almost, have then what becomes one of the main species that has in some ways a fundamentally different idea about gender and sexuality because of the whole like, Trill/Host symbiont thing where especially the person, the you know, the sexed body person does have a personality and a life but once they get the symbiont, they um, they have all those memories associated with the symbiont, and that means they have experiences of being other genders or being attracted to various kinds of people and while they are rarely explicit about it--they are never explicit about it [actually]--it definitely plays a role in the way that Jadzia interacts on DS9 and this is what my essay was about for Star Trek Week. And its neat, yeah, there is definitely an exploration of what like a subtext exploration of what gender means to her. Both in terms of the fact that she just flirts with everyone, but also in the way that she sort of, her interactions with people are sometimes gendered based on when she knew them previously, I feel like her relationship with the captain Cisco, who knew Dax in the previous form, and he was, Curzon Dax was Cisco’s mentor, and their relationship, while not the same as that, is informed by the fact that they had a different kind of relationship previous. And things like that come up. I didn't quite realize what made it so special when I was a kid, but I think it was neat to have that.

L: One of the things you say in the piece is that you talk about that as “queer time” and how that is different than some of the other characters that are maybe just gay. I am just curious if you could explain a little bit what “queer time” in this series means for you.

R: Yeah, so this is something that I just, queer theory concept, that I very recently came across thanks to a great article in JSTOR Daily. And the idea of “queer time” is essentially that because for most of the 20th century and most of history, the kind of markers of adulthood, marriage, kids, career, buying a home, retirement, were not necessarily available to out queer people. And so, adulthood becomes constructed differently, it is also related to the idea that because social spaces are different for queer people, there isn't the same kind of like, you do certain things when you are young and not when you are middle aged. Like, the article talks about how dance club culture is important in a lot of queer communities in different cities, and middle age people go to the clubs too because that is where queer culture happens, that is not just like a thing for kids. I saw that, and I read that, and I was thinking about doing an article about Dax, and I realize that so you know, the symbiont is, 400 years old. And has been like, married multiple times in different bodies and has had kids at different times and different bodies and has wildly different careers, so those markers as sort of markers of adulthood are meaningless I would kind of say for the symbiont  because it is just seeking new and interesting things to do is kind of the symbionts goal, and it is going to include some of those things but they exist on a much wider, a much longer life. And on the other side of that is for Jadzia, where you see her become a new person in her 20s when she is joined with the symbiont, and I think that can in some ways, some of the ways which that is presented mimic the coming out process for some people. Where they, where you come out and you go okay now I have to redefine all of these things, or I have to redefine to the people around me all of these things, and even if it is a positive redefinition, it is still a complex process. Finding your identity in adulthood is a great, grand theme in literature for a reason, so its not necessarily unique, but, but yeah, there is something in there that connected for me.

L: Just in case people are not familiar with DS9, or the Trills, so Jadzia Dax : Jadzia is the name of the body, and Dax is the name of the symbiont, so that's why her previous, the symbionts previous name was Curzon Dax, so Curzon was the name of the body person, and Dax is always tagged on to the end. But I think that, the Trills make just like, kind of an ideal way to explore gender and sexuality, especially as we so often talk about those things lying on a spectrum, that her character in DS9 is able to embody that spectrum. But also, one of the things that you bring up in the piece is how she still is written to be acceptable to men.

R: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

L: So, can you talk a little about the ways that that happens in the show?

R: I mean, part of it is that I have read that Terry Farrelll, the actress who played Dax, had to deal with some terrible, men being horrible on set all the time because previously she had been a model, and like they basically saw her as the pretty face, and like, the sexy legs, which sucks and I think often leaks into the show in really annoying ways, really frustrating ways, and you know, at the end of the day, all of her relationships are with men, expect for the one exception, there is an episode: “Rejoined,” where she ends up running into someone who was her wife in a previous host, when the host was male, now both of them are women, which lets the show feel like it is being very progressive, but it is really a representation of a straight relationship, and they do,again, with the grand metaphor thing, they cant be together but it is not because they are both women but it is because there is a stigma in Trill society about like, rehashing romantic relationships from past lives, or from past hosts.

L:What are some other, I don't know, besides Jadzia and the and besides the Trills, what are some other issues of gender and sexuality and stuff that you guys, that stand out for y'all?

A: I mean, there's the, that ghost one, with Dr. Crusher, but that is a whole other thing.

L: What ghost one with Dr. Crusher?

A:What is the entity?

R: I know there is a ghost yeah, like I know there is a thing

A: It's like a ghost, but it’s not, it’s an alien, but it behaves the way you would imagine a ghost, and they go to this planet that looks like Scotland? *laughter* You know, how there is a planet that looks like Scotland? There is a planet that looks like Ireland, um, and, then, its like, its like, one of those like, like yeah highland among the moors romance situation, but it is like a ghost alien?

*Laughter*

A: And you know, not that like, I mean a ghost alien is like, it could be a queer paranormal thing but it is a dude ghost so... you know.

L: Yeah, I remember that one now.

A: I was joking I really don't know what to say about that one expect that it is a really bad episode and you shouldn't watch it.

L: It was weird as shit.

A: Because like, she basically gets walked in on as she is masturbating. Speaking of family friendly.

L: It’s that candle thing, right?

A: Yes the candle thing. You have these mechanisms that Star Trek is able to do because of its sort of, its, its setting and all the possibilities that it provides so you can invent, you know, a species that lives in these bodies and has these all experiences that can be very queer, but as we have been saying this whole conversation, then there are other times where they like, they just ignore like, the infinite possibilities of writing in the Star Trek universe, and do horrible things like, there is that episode in TNG when Troi basically gets impregnated by that alien?

*gasp*

L: Yeah, it is the first episode of season 2.

A: I am trying to remember how that episodes actually goes and if there is any kind of good plot there. But that whole alien impregnation thing is very upsetting, because it does happen without her knowing, so you know, I don't remember exactly what happens. Is that the one where the baby grows really fast? Or is that a different alien impregnation?

L: Yeah, no, it's that, yeah, its that one because it like rapidly goes through the whole growing up process to experience it? And then dies within 48 hours or something. And the whole thing is that it basically uses Troi not only like, her body so that it can go through a birthing process for its own amusing and edification, but also makes her like, raise this child as her own and then grieve its loss for its own like, edification, like, that's messed up

A: And if I remember correctly, there is no real analysis of that, of the dynamics of that. It is just like, oh, aliens! Whoa! That was weird!

L: Yeah, that one was really weird. And there is another really bad one with troy when that one guy, I think he is also a Betazed, or part Betazed, or Betazoid sorry, and he comes on board and he doesn't reveal around him that he can influence their emotions as an empath and he uses it in negotiations and stuff, but he basically emotionally abuses her and she ends up in this abusive relationship with this guy, and they don't even really deal with how upsetting that can be to a woman? Like?! I feel like she she can get some really bad treatment in some of these episodes and they don't really like, unpack the gendered issue going on in there

A: Oh absolutely, and you can tell they have no interest in thinking about that by the way they costume her. And like, up until she gets a uniform basically, which is like in season 6.

L: And the way they that they have her get into a uniform because the captain who took over for Picard told her to and he wasn't going to have her in anything else on his bridge, its like, what is happening.

*laughter*

A: I mean like, her outfits get a little better as the things go on, but like, the first two seasons, it's like embarrassing what they have put her in. And it must have been embarrassing for her. Yeah, you’re just like monochromatic, like slinky dress with matching tights and same color shoes, and then yeah. Her communicator barely hanging on to the edge of her neckline. It's like okay. Boy.

L: Oh god, and in that same episode with that guy who was basically abusing her, that is the one where they have her and Crusher doing Jane Fonda exercises for the camera. *laughter* in leotards.

A: In case you were worried that these two professional women aren’t as babely as you were hoping, here was have them in patterned spandex doing stretches. TNG is still my favorite but it like, you have to skip the first season and most of the second. And there are a few episodes that I always skip. Like I said, no Data dating anyone, I can't do that.

L: Yeah, I skip the ones with Geordi and Leah Brahms because I can't deal with a male engineer fall in love with his creation on the Holodeck. And just, I can’t

A: Now my brain is getting into gear and I am thinking of all kinds of different interesting examples of, more interesting explorations of gender and sexuality. Like,obviously, and this goes back to The Original Series, there is the whole of idea of Pon Farr.

R: I was gonna say, it is hard to call it a family friendly show when one of the most iconic episodes of the entire, any of the series is basically Spock needs to go home because he has to have a sex ritual.

L: And like, that he becomes like, sexually violent and stuff during that time period is really alarming.

R: It is so weird!

A: Pon far is terrifying. The way that it is portrayed in Voyager is very upsetting.

R: Yeah

L: I would like to note that there is just a funny thing, I think it is Thinkgeek, sells um, Pon Farr cologne for men.

*laughter*

R: Well, they have the corner that market.

R: I do kind of love, speaking of the, yeah, the Voyager Pon Farr story, which wraps up with solving the problem via Holodeck, as one does in Star Trek, but I do in this hilarious way appreciate , like in Next Gen, they invent the Holodeck, and people use it for very, like, practical and like, G and PG reasons, and then in DS9 and Voyager they are like, you know guys, if you can have a Holodeck, it would just be 95% porn, 5% like trashy novels. And that is basically what it is.

L:Well, and then DS9, What's his name, running the bar,

R: Oh Quark

L: Yeah, Quark! He is the one who is in charge of the Holodeck, and he writes the programs for them. And he is always pushing it on the men who come into his bar.

R: Oh, yeah, it is real clear that this is porn. But I kind of like, in a hilarious way, appreciate that you know what? People are people even in space.

A: I think that is actually , that's like a really important develop in the later series. So I wrote about, for Star Trek week, I wrote about Constance Penley’s book Nasa/Trek, which is a very strange book that I love. It is very odd. But the second half of the book is about um, she does this sort of like, early ethnography of Star Trek fandom, particularly like erotic slash fandom, and one of her, I think one of her most important conclusions is like, first of all, to give credence to what fans are doing and to take seriously the sort of what she I think concludes is like a utopian project of writing slash fiction, and her, she -

R: I think I need to read this book

A: Oh you would love it, it’s great! She sort of concludes that there's something really important and restorative I guess about writing this kind of, she is talking about specifically Kirk/Spock fan fiction, about writing this kind of erotic fan fiction and expanding the Star Trek universe if fans doing that for themselves because they are reintroducing or reinterpreting or rewriting the idea of desire into the Star Trek universe, and that like, you cant you can’t have a totally free liberated you know, communist space utopia if you are not free to pursue and express and understand your desire and that's sort of a deeply human way of being or way of interaction with the world that is missing a lot from our myths or stories or understandings of science and technology and like, that is, that is why Star Trek is the site for like, making these kind of utopias and the way to do them is writing Kirk/Spock fanfiction. The book is amazing.

*laughter*

A: But I think this idea of these later series just being like, like, yep, there is porn in the Holodeck, its fine,  is a step in the right direction to recognizing a more fully rounded humanity out there galavanting across the stars that probably you know needs to get laid sometimes.

GUEST: DEANNA DAY

L: That feels like a perfect place to stop and bring in our guest. Talking with us today is Diana Day, Diana is a historian of science and a current research fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia though you are in Los Angeles, right?

DEANNA: That's correct.

L: Yes, okay. She is writing a book about the thermometer’s history in american medicine, showing how it laid the intellectual and material foundations for our current approach to self tracking technologies. Deanna is also a contributor to the Lady Science magazine. She wrote for us last spring and contributed a piece to the Star Trek series that we have been talking about titled: “The Sum of Our Programming: Finding Humanity in Emotional Labor.” Welcome to the podcast!

D: Oh thank you so much for having me on! I've been a big fan for a long time so it's like a dream come true!

*laughter*

L: That's us! Making dreams come true!

A: That's so nice!

L: Um, well, we have been talking about having you on the podcast for a while now, so we are happy to have you and happy to be able to talk about this fantastic piece that you wrote on Data and emotional labor. Could you give us of a little bit of a run down of what your piece was about?

D: Sure! So, I am relatively new to Star Trek. I've pretty much only seen The Next Generation all the way through. I saw the Man Trap episode of the original series and noped out of there so fast that I think the TV spun around on its little axis. And, so when I was watching The Next Generation for the first time, obviously Data was my most favorite character. Because he made explicit all of the really hard work that it takes to learn how to be a person. And I was talking to, I don't even remember now, I was talking to someone about Star Trek, maybe Rebecca it was even you, and someone said something that Data is showing how hard it is to learn how to be a man. And I said, actually, Data is showing how hard it is to learn how to be a woman, because there was something so familiar in the ways he was working really hard to learn how to relate how to other people, and understand what people were doing, and to take care of them and learn how to be himself in this particular way that I think women are way more often trained and expected to learn how to be then often men are. So, that was sort of the inspiration behind the piece was that moment of thinking, well what kind of person really is Data really learning how to be. And so for the piece, what I wanted to do was talk a little bit about this particular concept called emotional labor, and what that means in this context. And then, go through a couple of examples from several seasons of The Next Generation to talk about particular ways that Data enacts this concept.

L: Can you define for everybody what emotional labor is?

D: Yeah, so, emotional labor is this sociological concept that essentially when you really boil it down means work that a person does to manage and take care of the emotions of other people. Sort of the fundamental example from the literature is flight attendants. So, a huge part of the job of a flight attendant is to manage, in part the anxiety levels but also the comfort levels of the people who are in the plane with them and that is incredibly hard work, it is incredibly sophisticated work, you have to do so much interpretation of body language and vocal tone and you have to have incredible situational awareness and you also have to manage your own emotions and basically suppress your own emotions in favor of expressing outwardly emotions that you think with sooth the emotions of the person you are with, so it is really complicated and obviously really gendered labor that is often not, before this concept, even considered to be work.

R: You mentioned in your piece, and yeah, you go through some different examples of Data performing emotional labor throughout the show, so could you just share some of those, some of your favorite examples perhaps?

D: So, I think, the one I talk about most in the piece is his relationship with his daughter. So, in an episode called “The Offspring,” Data creates a daughter, her name is Lal, she gets to pick her own gender which I think is spectacular, and he goes through all of these scenarios with her, teaching her about recognizing the emotions of the people of the crew and learning how to interact with them and the work that he does teaching her how to perform emotional labor is kind of like itself a kind of emotional labor, which has a recursivity that I really like. Another good example I think is the episode in which Data goes on a date. In which Data dates I believe her name is Jenna, which is, I get the sense kind of a, an episode that is looked down on a little bit, but which I thought was really beautiful. *laughter* because he was working so hard to understand what she was feeling. And maybe that comes from dating a string of bad guys who didn't care at all to understand what I was feeling, but to see someone like, recognize oh like, this is a skill. Like, learning how to be in a relationship is a skill, and it is one that I can work at, and try to get better at and I can listen to my partner. There is a wonderful scene where she gives Data this sculpture as a gift. And he thinks, oh I know, I will put it in a place in my quarters where the light reflects beautifully off of it and it accentuates how beautiful the statue is. And she looks a little disappointed, and he sees that in her face. And he recognizes that she is disappointed and says, oh but there are other meanings to human gifts, and maybe it would be more meaningful if I put it in a place of prominence in the apartment so that other people will know that the person who gave this to me is important. And I was like, this is such a wonderful, literal like discussion of what your emotions and thought processes should be when you care about another person, and I like how explicit Data makes all of those negotiations that sometimes when I know I have been kind of socialized to do that care work for other people, that I do it unconsciously, and I like that Data does it consciously because it makes it bvisible.

L: Mmmmhmmm. That was really obvious in that one episode where he is father of the bride to Keiko and she wants to call off the wedding and she asks him, like the worst person ever, to deliver the message to O'Brien that she doesn't want to get married.

A: Oh right!! *laughter*

L: And he has to like, constantly adjust how like, he thought that, well it’s gonna make her happy to not be married to him, and if he is invested in her happiness, he will also be happy that she doesn't want to get married to him. So he has a specific kind of programming of how people will respond, and then he has to reprogram after that is not the predicted response that he had. And a lot of that episode is him managing other people's emotions and figuring out how to keep people comfortable and how to keep people happy the way he tries to learn to be human is not a selfish thing it is not a selfish desire in a lot of the ways that it is demonstrated. That he really is trying to care for the people around him.

R: Yeah, I loved when you made that point in the essay cuz it definitely like, it's, as someone who grew up with Star Trek, it brought something together for me that, I had not ever thought about in quite that way. I feel like one of the great things about the universe that is build by Star Trek is on the one hand it is this very rational, individualist, the individual matters, there is a reason why the Borg are big bads, and often other baddies have some kind of lack of individuality, but there is this really strong through throughout Star Trek about the importance of taking care of the whole, and I really loved your point at the end of your essay about, if Data and other characters like Data are there to explore the nature of humanity, what does it mean that some much of that exploration is about what is the best way to relate to people with goodness and kindness so that we can exist in society together.

D: Yes. My heart is like swelling up as you’re talking because I am in such agreement. And another aspect of that that is related to this anti, not quite, a conception of humanity and self that is not all about one individual’s conscious and like, directedness, which is that they occasionally play it for jokes that Data doesn't understand that when people say things, sometimes they don't mean what they say. And sometimes that is a joke, but often times, he never takes it as a joke, He takes it as, oh this is another interesting aspect of humans. Sometimes they say things but they mean different things and I can use other clues like the context of our relationship , or their body language or their tone of voice to interpret what they mean in this really full, really human way that often. I think people have the tendency to denigrate as a mode of communication, all of the other kinds of interpretive work that we do. And I just love that about him.

A: So, I really love, at the beginning of when we started talking that you said that someone had said to you that all of this is how Data learns how to be a man and you said NO this is how Data learns how to be a woman. And I like that turn around a lot. And I wonder if like, I guess in the context in representing this kind of emotional labor on television if it is, do you think that it is important that Data is male and not a female character? *laughter*

D: Uh, yeah! I think in purely as an audience member, as someone who is watching it, I think it is super important that someone who looks like and presents like a man is doing that work, just because I think that the more men-looking people we can have doing it the better. And I think that there is also, there is a nice turn around about that like, Data is the robot, he is not a robot but he's the robot and to see that hyper masculine symbol doing this kind of work, like the way he is with his cat, which I didn't even talk about the cat in the essay. But it's incredible. I think that is really powerful to see a man do that. And then in terms in the world of the show in particular, I think it's important because the other primary examples of emotional labor on next generation are sometimes Dr. Crusher in her capacity as a doctor, but also Deanna Troi, whose literal job is literally emotions. And they pull her in-

R: And her magic power.  

D: Yes

D: Oh I feel something! Which is both ludicrous and like, I love her! I have so many emotions! But in that context, I think it is even more important to have a man also engaging in the same practice. So it is not just the ladies.

L: There was a comparison that you made between Data and women in the last paragraph when you say “Data, like all human women, has struggled to prove himself a sentient being in the eyes of the law. But this is only a necessary, not sufficient, condition for humanity.” And that just, to me, encompassed, like it reminded me of the episode in season 2 when he is actually on trial to prove his sentience and his humanity and himself as a legitimate lifeform, but it really reminded me of a lot this stuff that is going on now with like, #metoo and #timesup and the stuff that happened with the gymnastics, the US gymnastics coach, and a lot of this is a lot of the behaviors that has come out with the #metoo stuff might not be, you know, don't really touch the legal system in a significant way, but a lot of this is about women advocating for their humanity, not just in instances where it is a violation of the law, but where it's a violation of what we feel is our humanity and we have to somehow argue that.

D: Yes. Yeah, thank you for saying that and for bringing that up because I think as I was writing the article I went back and rewatched “The Measure of a Man” episode and I found it, I found it both more and less emotionally affecting then I had the first time that I had watched it. So the first time that I had watched it I thought it was powerful to see all of these friends rallying around Data to prove that he was a person, and then rewatching it again it seemed so insufficient, like that moment where Riker thinks, oh no I have almost proved that Data is not a human because I took his arm off of his body? Seemed so weak sauce as an argument.

L: And the way that he says it, Like, Pinocchio’s strings have been cut, or something like that.

D: It was so bogus, after you had like, six more seasons of exploring and understanding Data and his internal self and his external self the relationships they had with him. It was striking to go back to it and see how, even the scene that first time through seemed powerful, was ultimately really reductive and really just about Data’s body in this way that was so dehumanizing. And that I really related to watching it, like, oh well your body means you're not a person and as a woman I really felt that strongly not because I felt like, oh yeah Data’s body makes him not a person but rather, look at all of these people, all of these mostly men who they think this is such a powerful argument, who think the nature of his body is so important and everything else will fall in the face of that, like irrefutable proof. It really was, it shook me up. Watching it.

L: Yeah, and there's the part where Guinan, where Picard is having the conversations with Guinan, and I think it is significant that they have her deliver the line about if we decide that Data’s not sentient and he's not, you know, he doesn't have autonomy, then you have a whole generation of disposable people. And that really revolved around the body argument. And I think it's really significant, the one black woman character on that show delivering that line, I thought that it was powerful, more powerful when I watched it as an adult than certainly when I watched it as a kid.

D: Yeah, and loathe as I am to give a white man credit for anything, I thought that Picard’s reaction in that moment *laughter*

R: Picard is the one white man who I think is acceptable. And Patrick Stewart for that matter, go on,

D: No no you’re fine. I think it was powerful the emotion that read on his face in that moment was embarrassment. I can’t believe I didn't think of it this way before, this was really terrible of me. And I thought that was a powerful moment too.

L: Yeah. Star Trek delivers the feels *laughter*

R: It is interesting one of the things we were talking about earlier is that because Star Trek is so often so good and revolutionary, that sometimes when it disappoints us or steps in it, it feels even worse.

D:Yeah!

L: Yeah! It is like a personal betrayal somehow!

D: Exactly!

R: So, basically, yeah, I understand that kind of feeling, everything about this. So much about this is amazing, but there are some fundamental things wrong here that feel shallower than they could be. Because unfortunately science fiction is a reflection of the people writing it and the culture they live in and that means that the utopian societies we imagine are limited in that sense too.

L: Mmmmhmmmm

D: Yeah

R: Which, you know, Deanna and I have spent a lot of time talking about that the last year for other stuff sorry.

*laughter*

L: Are there other instances in the series besides Data may be where you see where emotional labor maybe falls disproportionately to certain characters rather than others? Obviously not Deanna (Troi), but, do you see that in other characters as well?

D: Hmmmm. Well I think Guinan does a lot of that work. Umm, and I think that there are some unfortunate gender and racial implications of the fact that they have her in that role, but also she is so spectacular in that role, that um, just her performance is incredible. And she often, as the sort of bar keep, kind of figure is often the one listening and reflecting back to people things they may not realize in what they are saying or giving them that push, like she gives Picard that push when they need it. So probably I mean, as much as or maybe more than deanna troi, Guinan fulfills that role.

A: I was thinking also about Kess and the Doctor in Voyager, and how the relationship that you describe with Data and other people and Data doing all of this work to understand himself and to forge and maintain these relationships is like, that is really reversed in Voyager because Kess basically has to like, she has to like, browbeat slash handhold the Doctor into being a person and she has to do all of this work to like, comfort him and buck him up and occasionally snap at him to get him to stop being so cold to his patients and things like that, and so that was another instance of that labor going in the opposite direction.

R: I was, I was also thinking about Data and learning emotional labor in conjunction with sort of, the thing that people sometimes say which is every Star Trek has a Spock. Every Star Trek has a character that is there to kind of examine and criticize and interpret humanity from a step removed and that character is often now that I think about it in this framework, learning or analyzing or trying to understand emotional labor, so you know, a lot of Spock’s character, similar to Data, has to understand and value emotional labor, he doesn't want to value emotional labor but he is surrounded by some very emotional people and has to deal with it. And the other thing that I was thinking about kind of going back to sort of balance between individualism and appreciating the whole of Star Trek the DS9 character that is often held up as the Spock character is Odo, but one of the interesting things there is that he comes from this species where they are all, they spend most of their time as collective goop and only like, take on individual form when they have to deal with individually formed people. And they think this whole being, most of them think that this whole being individual life form is terrible and inefficient and pointless, why would you want to do that when you can just know and feel everything someone does by becoming goop with them. But there is an expiration of the value in having to work to know other people versus just like being able to do it unconsciously.

D: Yeah Rebecca that really reminds me of “Data’s Day” episode when he is shepherding in a Vulcan woman and he is expressing all of this frustration with her because I think he, I think what he says is that on one level he relates to the vulcans and understands the vulcans, but on the other hand he finds it frustrating that they don't try and they don't make any effort or see any value in anyone’s emotions. And so, I related to him in that moment.

L: I think one of the things across all of the characters that are supposed to be that, you know, questioning humanity character that you were talking about Rebecca, is that one of the main points of that, positioning that character in each one of the series does is showing that being a person requires a conscious effort, and that's how you form relationships that are meaningful and how you become a fully realized person is that it is a conscious effort. It is not just something you know how to do.

A: I think that is why obviously there is plenty of discourse about emotion in Star Trek because that's like, the main dynamic from The Original Series revolved around emotional Kirk and not emotional Spock. But I think what I really like about your piece Deanna, by framing it as emotional labor, you get what Leila saying about how it is a conscious effort and that, then the condition of personhood is one that you produce yourself and it is not inherent in your body or your goo or anything like that. It is something that you do, not something that you are.

D: Yeahhhhh I really like that

A: You enact personhood. That is a really liberating way to think about work and personhood. I like that a lot. I think that was what was really like flowing under the surface of your piece for me that I really enjoyed.

ONE ANNOYING THING

A: So at the end of every podcast, hosts and sometimes guests like today, will unburden themselves about one thing in the news or maybe our work or the world in general that is just really annoying us, and so this is one annoying thing. And our guest is going to introduce our annoying thing today, so take it away Deanna!

D: So, as Rebecca reminding us before we started recording, there is this thing called “raw water” that apparently tech bros are super psyched about. It means just drinking water out of streams and other notoriously potentially contaminated bodies of water. That can cause you to become very very very ill if you drink them. I think the ostensible idea behind raw water is when your water is full of living bacteria, that is somehow better for your body that drinking “sterilized” water from the tap. I think there is something about fluoride being bad in here? Anyway this is ridiculous, it is super annoying, what do you guys think?

L: I can’t stand it. *laughter* I can’t stand that people are paying more money for water that has possibly animal poop in it. I can’t deal with that.

A: Like it definitely has animal poop in it.

L: And maybe human poop in it too!

A: Probably!

A: The thing that I love about raw water is though-- *laughter* -- that I love that it is it's like a gateway into the conspiracy theory psyche of all these tech bros. Because like, the fluoride thing? Man if you tug on that thread, it leads straight to the flat earth. Like, the fluoride thing turns into chemtrails, like you can go down a whole rabbit hole of what these tech bros believe is going on in the world and they are going to disrupt it by drinking cholera water. I love it because I think this is their just desserts and if you are going drink poopy water, can I buy tickets to come watch you do it? Let’s go.

L: Yeah, what is their weird masochistic impulse to keep doing things that make them vomit violently? There was the Soylent stuff that made them vomit, they are all going to die from the awful bacteria you get from drinking stream water, and they are doing that weird fasting stuff? They have some weird masochistic complex over there.

A: Wasn’t one of the things with Soylent literally like, anal seepage? Which you should read the Wikipedia article for what happens to you when you have cholera, and maybe you just didn't get enough of that, so you decided to start drinking water out of a pond. Because that is what will happen to you.

D: You guys I don't understand masculinity. I just don't get it.

A: I think this kind of thing , I was just going to say that this kind of thing has been brewing for a long time, like how long have we been talking in rapturous songs about your microbiome and playing Jamie Lee Curtis's song the new yogurt and stuff- PUT more microscopic creatures inside your bod! It will make it better! This is the apotheosis, just scoop them right out of their habitat and drink them.

D: Well it's like, the apotheosis of only not trusting science when science also helps poor people, if the science is sanitation and clean water for everyone? Then you got to be skeptical. But if science is like, software developers, software development that only creates artificial intelligence that makes you rich, then it's okay. And...

R: I was literally just going to say, here we are being the ones who are like, just accept progress!

D: I think my literal tweet was, Far be it from be to defend science but…

R: I think you're on to something Deanna, and not just with the “we don’t care about poor people,” but also we don't care about anything that might be a collective good in some way? Really I feel like it reveals that tech bros are less interested in tech and more interested in libertarian philosophy. If tech or lack of tech gets them closer to their libertarian hellscape they want to live in the better it is.

D: This brings it right back around to Data and valuing the experience of the singular man over the experience of the collective and caring for other people.

L: All right, well, Deanna thanks for joining us, not just for your talking about your wonderful piece on Data and Star Trek, but also for ranting with us about raw water.

END BUMPER

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R: yayyyyyyyyyy

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