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Sep. 27th, 2009 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raxYesterday I attended and presented at the MIT Women's and Gender Studies 25th anniversary conference, "Futures of Science, Race, and Gender." There were some introductory remarks, three panels, and then a reception for faculty and presenters with a celebration of the department's 25th anniversary. I'm going to talk primarily about the three panels, although I have a couple of things from the reception I want to share as well.
The first panel was called "Mentoring Women: Four Generations of Women Scientists at MIT" and featured Molly Potter, Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe, and Liane Young. All four of them do Brain and Cognitive Sciences work, though it seems like there was some variance in the amount of psychological versus neuroscientific focus between them; I'm sufficiently ignorant in the field as to have basically nothing useful to say about their research, unfortunately. They all seemed to be, at least to some extent, rock stars in their field, and the reason they were brought together for this conference is that each was the advisor of the next youngest either as a graduate student or as a postdoc. The conversation started with a presentation about women at MIT at a very broad level, showing when the percentages of undergrads, grad students, and faculty changed, and correlating those changes with various events (such as reports to the Dean about gender bias, &c.). This provided a good background for the part I found most interesting, the discussion of mentoring and in particular the potential value of being mentored by a woman. Personally, although I'm somewhat uncomfortable with this, I do tend to prefer women mentors, and also authority figures in general (doctors, therapists, professors, &c.).
The panel participants, particularly the younger ones, didn't seem to think the gender of their mentors mattered, which was interesting; in fact, the two younger participants did not seem to think gender mattered very much at all. Saxe, in particular, said "All of my mentors have been women, but it was just coincidence; I was working with the people I thought were doing the best research in my field." (Not exact quote.) That certainly may be true, but I found it surprising, perhaps just because it's not what I'd expect to hear at a Women's Studies conference. Unfortunately, neither Saxe or Young said very much at all; I had hoped to hear more of their perspectives. On the plus side, we were treated to some great banter back and forth between Potter and Kanwisher, including some stories about graduate school and the difficulties Kanwisher faced that sounded a lot like some things a few friends of mine have been going through. The fact that she got through them was very encouraging.
In the comments portion --- and this conference was great in that it provided 20-30 minutes for audience comments for each presentation --- a woman brought up the question of race, and why it hadn't particularly been included in the panel. This seemed like a reasonable question, especially given the title of the conference; the main response was "There weren't four generations of women that included more people of color, in fact this is the only instance we know of." (Young is Chinese; the others are white.) Potter talked about the MIT Committee on Diversity and also the effects of affirmative action; the panel acknowledged that there was a problem here. One of the panelists --- I think actually this might have been Kamwisher but my notes don't say --- said "these issues came up in the 90s, when we showed that people were not consciously misogynist --- I thought we had figured out that you didn't have to intend to disadvantage someone in order to disadvantage them. Hearing the same 'But we're not trying to be biased' argument around racism ten years later is very disappointing."
One woman got up to challenge them and accused all four of them of being white; while what she said about Asians being a "model minority" had merit, I think it was pretty rude to tell someone of color that they were white. (Young's facial expression was very much "Ummm... what the WTF?") This audience member did bring up the good point that, if there's a change in the load of unconscious discrimination that each generation is carrying, there's a risk that people will say "Oh I don't have the problems the previous generation had" and stop paying attention. When the conversation shifted completely, I was tempted to feel like "You're kinda derailing, and the next panel is called Racialized Bodies, so... yes this panel is just about gender and science but the next panel is specifically about race and the third panel deals with race." On the other hand, why shouldn't it have been discussed? It's not like all three panels couldn't have discussed race, gender, and science; the other two discussed all three. I'm glad the conversation happened and it's something that I need to chew on.
(Also written in my notes was "Are all of them straight?" which seemed true based on talk about husbands, but (a) that doesn't necessarily mean straight and (b) there's the same "this is the four generations of women we have" argument.)
The next panel was called "Racialized Bodies" and featured Pilar Ossorio (University of Wisconsin, Law School), with respondents David Jones (STS), and Amy Marshall (MIT Alum). The one sentence summary of Ossario's talk is "The way race is used as a categorizer when doing scientific studies is a problem, and not only that, the conversation surrounding it is a problem; instead of using race as a standin for genes, which is not terribly effective, we should be keeping track of it in cases where it may reflect population differences we don't know about to consider." A lot of this was fairly hard science having to do with genes versus gene expression, the process by which certain genes are or are not converted to RNA and at what times. (Genes use four different bases, ATCG, in three-character strings that translate to complementary RNA molecules with three bases, which are shaped so as to encode a different amino acid each. The DNA opens up, RNA binds to it, RNA releases, RNA binds to the relevant animo acids, RNA relases, congratulations you made a protein. If I remember my biology corrrectly. Maybe just go read Wikipedia's DNA page instead.)
Ossorio presented an example that was very helpful for me in understanding the difference between genetics and genetic expression, which I will share here. She showed a picture of five mice of identical fur pattern but very different color, ranging from a light brown to a dark brown. "These mice," she said, "are genetically identical. However, their mothers had different diets while they were gestating, and now they are all different shades, because there was a variable amount of genetic expression based on conditions in the womb." Wow. My mental model of how genetics worked was waaaaay too simple. She also talked about how winning at things, or being successful, causes your body to produce more testosterone --- and they've actually verified it's the winning that does it, not that the winners had more testosterone to begin with. This is social positioning reflected in biological expression, and offers a model how race might be relevant biologically without being an innate biological fact. If race, as a social construct, leads to behavior patterns in the aggregate that affect pathways like this, it could still be relevant in hard biological or genetic expression research. Ossario compared this to standpoint theory but at a biological level, and called for a careful consideration of the role of race categorization in scientific studies. Awesome stuff; her website lists a bunch of papers if you'd like to read more.
Jones spoke next; apparently Ossorio's paper hadn't been sent to him or to Marshall, so his presentation was largely just another talk on the same topic with less detail and a different set of examples. A couple of different things came up that I thought were really interesting, though; for example, that environmental effects were just as likely to cause variance as pharmacogenetics but many fewer people were studying it, and patient non-compliance has more effect than either and is still studied less. He also called attention to the work of Pardis Sabeti in terms of natural selection --- suggesting that natural selection was primarily either about immunity to various diseases, or about skin and hair color and texture, although it's apparently quite controversial. Perhaps the most interesting to me, partially for being local, is that the Boston Public Health commission stratifies all of its statistical data by race, rather than other categories like location that might potentially be more useful. (In fairness this is only public graphs; for all I know all of the data is available in huge spreadsheet form somewhere. But while some of the charts did seem usefully framed by race, others really seemed like they would be better framed by different variables. It's certainly interesting that they emphasize race so strongly as a statistical factor. Also my apologies if I am butchering the terminology here.)
Marshall only spoke briefly, but gave examples of genetic theory being used in medicine and in criminal justice. In medicine, there's a drug called BiDil that is being marketed primarily to African-American patients as a heart disease preventative. Apparently it provides a 43% decrease in mortality, but on the basis of only one study with an ill-defined sample group --- what constitutes African-American in this context? This study may have fallen into the "correlation is not causation" trap. Unfortunately my notes are illegible on the specific criminal justice case described, but she did, borrowing from one of Ossorio's papers, talk about how there was a high possibility of reinforcing antiquated folk notions of race when using race as a selection mechanism. The main thing I took away from the audience discussion was that I should look up the Council for Responsible Genetics, in particular for refuting the human biodiversity nonsense I've seen going around lately. [1]
The third and final panel, "Race, Gender, and IVF in Ecuador: A Reproductive Economy," featured Elizabeth Roberts (University of Michigan, Anthropology), Corrine Williams (MIT Alum), and Rachel Dillon (ESG, MIT Alum, me). I don't have good notes at all, because I was noting things to talk about, not things to write about here; I had also read her paper in advance, although I am pretty sure I am not supposed to share it, or I would. The one sentence explanation is "In Ecuador, in vitro fertilization is used by people of various classes and races as a way to economically obtain whiteness through the act of childbirth, in ways not limited to but sometimes including actually having whiter children."
If you google "Elizabeth Roberts Ecuador" you will turn up a few papers, including this one, although they're marked as drafts so someone was being sloppy. (I assume it was other people who she sent conference papers to, which is why I am not putting anything up. :) My personal favorite was "Extra Embryos: The Ethics of Cryopreservation in Ecuador and Elsewhere." [2] Suffice to say that her presentation was awesome and if the topic interests you, lots of additional reading is available.
Williams's presentation was also great --- she started where Roberts left off, basically, and asked about the ethics of doctors having so much power, and about the ethics of sex selection of embryos. Apparently the organization that makes recommendations on these things --- unfortunately I don't have a copy of her slides --- decided that whether or not it was OK to select for sex depended on whether or not you were already doing IVF and already doing genetic testing. That didn't make sense to me as a justification: "Oh, well, since I'm already here and already checking some things, why not give you a child with the sex you want." (Not the same as the gender you want! Although I've managed to restrain myself thus far from sending people cards like "Congratulations! It's Probably A Girl!" becuase that just seems rude. [3]) I mean, is it OK to pick the sex of your kids, or not, ethically? The reasons that they came up with for doing so or not doing so seemed orthogonal to me. (The speaker's and mine matched much more closely; she and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eredien and I had an awesome conversation that touched on this and other topics later.)
In my response, I covered the three topics I really wanted to: values hierarchy, economic self-construction as normative, and assisted sterility. In the first part I talked about "Extra Embryos" and basically cited some of Roberts's other research about how Ecuadorians with different values systems were more or less opposed to cryopreservation and donation of extra embryos. One thing in particular I found fascinating is how Catholic communities find justifications for handling extra embryos in a way that doesn't involve giving them away to other people and thus causing them to leave the kinship group. It really drove the point home to me that humans do not bend our moral structures to fit new technologies as much as we bend our new technologies to fit our moral structures, and I think I managed to express that point cogently to the audience. If nothing else, I made people laugh. (Actually, I made people laugh a whole lot while I was talking. I guess I just do that.)
The second thing I wanted to cover was also the hardest. Throughout the conference, no one had made any mention whatsoever of queer, genderqueer, or trans issues --- among both the things I care most about in the field and the things I would have wanted to include in the "future of gender." I was hoping to talk about digital identity construction, the shifting ground of authenticity, the increasing availabilty of optional surgeries, muddling and jamming of the binary... but those were not discussed. I saw a lot of parallels between the economic self-construction of Ecuadorian women and families through IVF and the economic self-construction of transsexuals through surgeries, and I managed to bring them up in a way that contributed to the conversation and --- this was the hard part --- pointed out that the conference had not engaged with these issues at all without shifting all of the focus onto trans issues, since the conversation about Ecuadorian IVF was legitimate and important. Based on the conversations I had with audience members afterward, I actually managed to do this, which I feel really good about, even if I sort of stumbled on the last point.
The last point --- that it's much harder to get assisted permanent sterility, and that no one questions your decision to have children, just your decision to not have children --- was sort of old ground. I think there was a bunch worth saying surrounding surgical sterility specifically, and the difficulty of accessing that as compared to ads for IVF in the newspaper, and the difference in ease of access for men versus women, but I didn't come to the conference as prepared to talk about that as I would have liked to. It wasn't the material that I expected to be talking about, it was an extra point I decided on during the day, so I didn't have as many notes on it; I would have liked some numbers or at least anecdata. But people seemed to think it was a good point, so maybe no one except me thinks I botched it, I don't know. :)
In general I got a lot of positive responses, which was awesome, did some great networking, and picked up a bunch of citations for books and papers I should really go read. The celebration had a bunch of speeches and readings, mostly not worth commenting on because I don't have notes (although I have to say that the same largely-invisibility of queerness and non-binary gender seemed to be present in the speechifying, which I was really surprised by), but the fiction reading by Helen Elaine Lee from her upcoming book Life Without just completely blew me away. Like, wow. You can't pre-order it yet, but I'll let you know when you can, because, damn did that hit me like a brick.
Aaaand... I am now caught up on conference posts. Sadly I am not caught up on 8000 other things. But these took me like eight hours, and now they are done.
[1] Incidentally, damn does TSRoadmap have some pagerank.
[2] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120127053/abstract may help you find it.
[3] And it's not like you're guaranteed to get the sex you want, either, although you can maybe control some types of variance I think?
The first panel was called "Mentoring Women: Four Generations of Women Scientists at MIT" and featured Molly Potter, Nancy Kanwisher, Rebecca Saxe, and Liane Young. All four of them do Brain and Cognitive Sciences work, though it seems like there was some variance in the amount of psychological versus neuroscientific focus between them; I'm sufficiently ignorant in the field as to have basically nothing useful to say about their research, unfortunately. They all seemed to be, at least to some extent, rock stars in their field, and the reason they were brought together for this conference is that each was the advisor of the next youngest either as a graduate student or as a postdoc. The conversation started with a presentation about women at MIT at a very broad level, showing when the percentages of undergrads, grad students, and faculty changed, and correlating those changes with various events (such as reports to the Dean about gender bias, &c.). This provided a good background for the part I found most interesting, the discussion of mentoring and in particular the potential value of being mentored by a woman. Personally, although I'm somewhat uncomfortable with this, I do tend to prefer women mentors, and also authority figures in general (doctors, therapists, professors, &c.).
The panel participants, particularly the younger ones, didn't seem to think the gender of their mentors mattered, which was interesting; in fact, the two younger participants did not seem to think gender mattered very much at all. Saxe, in particular, said "All of my mentors have been women, but it was just coincidence; I was working with the people I thought were doing the best research in my field." (Not exact quote.) That certainly may be true, but I found it surprising, perhaps just because it's not what I'd expect to hear at a Women's Studies conference. Unfortunately, neither Saxe or Young said very much at all; I had hoped to hear more of their perspectives. On the plus side, we were treated to some great banter back and forth between Potter and Kanwisher, including some stories about graduate school and the difficulties Kanwisher faced that sounded a lot like some things a few friends of mine have been going through. The fact that she got through them was very encouraging.
In the comments portion --- and this conference was great in that it provided 20-30 minutes for audience comments for each presentation --- a woman brought up the question of race, and why it hadn't particularly been included in the panel. This seemed like a reasonable question, especially given the title of the conference; the main response was "There weren't four generations of women that included more people of color, in fact this is the only instance we know of." (Young is Chinese; the others are white.) Potter talked about the MIT Committee on Diversity and also the effects of affirmative action; the panel acknowledged that there was a problem here. One of the panelists --- I think actually this might have been Kamwisher but my notes don't say --- said "these issues came up in the 90s, when we showed that people were not consciously misogynist --- I thought we had figured out that you didn't have to intend to disadvantage someone in order to disadvantage them. Hearing the same 'But we're not trying to be biased' argument around racism ten years later is very disappointing."
One woman got up to challenge them and accused all four of them of being white; while what she said about Asians being a "model minority" had merit, I think it was pretty rude to tell someone of color that they were white. (Young's facial expression was very much "Ummm... what the WTF?") This audience member did bring up the good point that, if there's a change in the load of unconscious discrimination that each generation is carrying, there's a risk that people will say "Oh I don't have the problems the previous generation had" and stop paying attention. When the conversation shifted completely, I was tempted to feel like "You're kinda derailing, and the next panel is called Racialized Bodies, so... yes this panel is just about gender and science but the next panel is specifically about race and the third panel deals with race." On the other hand, why shouldn't it have been discussed? It's not like all three panels couldn't have discussed race, gender, and science; the other two discussed all three. I'm glad the conversation happened and it's something that I need to chew on.
(Also written in my notes was "Are all of them straight?" which seemed true based on talk about husbands, but (a) that doesn't necessarily mean straight and (b) there's the same "this is the four generations of women we have" argument.)
The next panel was called "Racialized Bodies" and featured Pilar Ossorio (University of Wisconsin, Law School), with respondents David Jones (STS), and Amy Marshall (MIT Alum). The one sentence summary of Ossario's talk is "The way race is used as a categorizer when doing scientific studies is a problem, and not only that, the conversation surrounding it is a problem; instead of using race as a standin for genes, which is not terribly effective, we should be keeping track of it in cases where it may reflect population differences we don't know about to consider." A lot of this was fairly hard science having to do with genes versus gene expression, the process by which certain genes are or are not converted to RNA and at what times. (Genes use four different bases, ATCG, in three-character strings that translate to complementary RNA molecules with three bases, which are shaped so as to encode a different amino acid each. The DNA opens up, RNA binds to it, RNA releases, RNA binds to the relevant animo acids, RNA relases, congratulations you made a protein. If I remember my biology corrrectly. Maybe just go read Wikipedia's DNA page instead.)
Ossorio presented an example that was very helpful for me in understanding the difference between genetics and genetic expression, which I will share here. She showed a picture of five mice of identical fur pattern but very different color, ranging from a light brown to a dark brown. "These mice," she said, "are genetically identical. However, their mothers had different diets while they were gestating, and now they are all different shades, because there was a variable amount of genetic expression based on conditions in the womb." Wow. My mental model of how genetics worked was waaaaay too simple. She also talked about how winning at things, or being successful, causes your body to produce more testosterone --- and they've actually verified it's the winning that does it, not that the winners had more testosterone to begin with. This is social positioning reflected in biological expression, and offers a model how race might be relevant biologically without being an innate biological fact. If race, as a social construct, leads to behavior patterns in the aggregate that affect pathways like this, it could still be relevant in hard biological or genetic expression research. Ossario compared this to standpoint theory but at a biological level, and called for a careful consideration of the role of race categorization in scientific studies. Awesome stuff; her website lists a bunch of papers if you'd like to read more.
Jones spoke next; apparently Ossorio's paper hadn't been sent to him or to Marshall, so his presentation was largely just another talk on the same topic with less detail and a different set of examples. A couple of different things came up that I thought were really interesting, though; for example, that environmental effects were just as likely to cause variance as pharmacogenetics but many fewer people were studying it, and patient non-compliance has more effect than either and is still studied less. He also called attention to the work of Pardis Sabeti in terms of natural selection --- suggesting that natural selection was primarily either about immunity to various diseases, or about skin and hair color and texture, although it's apparently quite controversial. Perhaps the most interesting to me, partially for being local, is that the Boston Public Health commission stratifies all of its statistical data by race, rather than other categories like location that might potentially be more useful. (In fairness this is only public graphs; for all I know all of the data is available in huge spreadsheet form somewhere. But while some of the charts did seem usefully framed by race, others really seemed like they would be better framed by different variables. It's certainly interesting that they emphasize race so strongly as a statistical factor. Also my apologies if I am butchering the terminology here.)
Marshall only spoke briefly, but gave examples of genetic theory being used in medicine and in criminal justice. In medicine, there's a drug called BiDil that is being marketed primarily to African-American patients as a heart disease preventative. Apparently it provides a 43% decrease in mortality, but on the basis of only one study with an ill-defined sample group --- what constitutes African-American in this context? This study may have fallen into the "correlation is not causation" trap. Unfortunately my notes are illegible on the specific criminal justice case described, but she did, borrowing from one of Ossorio's papers, talk about how there was a high possibility of reinforcing antiquated folk notions of race when using race as a selection mechanism. The main thing I took away from the audience discussion was that I should look up the Council for Responsible Genetics, in particular for refuting the human biodiversity nonsense I've seen going around lately. [1]
The third and final panel, "Race, Gender, and IVF in Ecuador: A Reproductive Economy," featured Elizabeth Roberts (University of Michigan, Anthropology), Corrine Williams (MIT Alum), and Rachel Dillon (ESG, MIT Alum, me). I don't have good notes at all, because I was noting things to talk about, not things to write about here; I had also read her paper in advance, although I am pretty sure I am not supposed to share it, or I would. The one sentence explanation is "In Ecuador, in vitro fertilization is used by people of various classes and races as a way to economically obtain whiteness through the act of childbirth, in ways not limited to but sometimes including actually having whiter children."
If you google "Elizabeth Roberts Ecuador" you will turn up a few papers, including this one, although they're marked as drafts so someone was being sloppy. (I assume it was other people who she sent conference papers to, which is why I am not putting anything up. :) My personal favorite was "Extra Embryos: The Ethics of Cryopreservation in Ecuador and Elsewhere." [2] Suffice to say that her presentation was awesome and if the topic interests you, lots of additional reading is available.
Williams's presentation was also great --- she started where Roberts left off, basically, and asked about the ethics of doctors having so much power, and about the ethics of sex selection of embryos. Apparently the organization that makes recommendations on these things --- unfortunately I don't have a copy of her slides --- decided that whether or not it was OK to select for sex depended on whether or not you were already doing IVF and already doing genetic testing. That didn't make sense to me as a justification: "Oh, well, since I'm already here and already checking some things, why not give you a child with the sex you want." (Not the same as the gender you want! Although I've managed to restrain myself thus far from sending people cards like "Congratulations! It's Probably A Girl!" becuase that just seems rude. [3]) I mean, is it OK to pick the sex of your kids, or not, ethically? The reasons that they came up with for doing so or not doing so seemed orthogonal to me. (The speaker's and mine matched much more closely; she and
eredien and I had an awesome conversation that touched on this and other topics later.)In my response, I covered the three topics I really wanted to: values hierarchy, economic self-construction as normative, and assisted sterility. In the first part I talked about "Extra Embryos" and basically cited some of Roberts's other research about how Ecuadorians with different values systems were more or less opposed to cryopreservation and donation of extra embryos. One thing in particular I found fascinating is how Catholic communities find justifications for handling extra embryos in a way that doesn't involve giving them away to other people and thus causing them to leave the kinship group. It really drove the point home to me that humans do not bend our moral structures to fit new technologies as much as we bend our new technologies to fit our moral structures, and I think I managed to express that point cogently to the audience. If nothing else, I made people laugh. (Actually, I made people laugh a whole lot while I was talking. I guess I just do that.)
The second thing I wanted to cover was also the hardest. Throughout the conference, no one had made any mention whatsoever of queer, genderqueer, or trans issues --- among both the things I care most about in the field and the things I would have wanted to include in the "future of gender." I was hoping to talk about digital identity construction, the shifting ground of authenticity, the increasing availabilty of optional surgeries, muddling and jamming of the binary... but those were not discussed. I saw a lot of parallels between the economic self-construction of Ecuadorian women and families through IVF and the economic self-construction of transsexuals through surgeries, and I managed to bring them up in a way that contributed to the conversation and --- this was the hard part --- pointed out that the conference had not engaged with these issues at all without shifting all of the focus onto trans issues, since the conversation about Ecuadorian IVF was legitimate and important. Based on the conversations I had with audience members afterward, I actually managed to do this, which I feel really good about, even if I sort of stumbled on the last point.
The last point --- that it's much harder to get assisted permanent sterility, and that no one questions your decision to have children, just your decision to not have children --- was sort of old ground. I think there was a bunch worth saying surrounding surgical sterility specifically, and the difficulty of accessing that as compared to ads for IVF in the newspaper, and the difference in ease of access for men versus women, but I didn't come to the conference as prepared to talk about that as I would have liked to. It wasn't the material that I expected to be talking about, it was an extra point I decided on during the day, so I didn't have as many notes on it; I would have liked some numbers or at least anecdata. But people seemed to think it was a good point, so maybe no one except me thinks I botched it, I don't know. :)
In general I got a lot of positive responses, which was awesome, did some great networking, and picked up a bunch of citations for books and papers I should really go read. The celebration had a bunch of speeches and readings, mostly not worth commenting on because I don't have notes (although I have to say that the same largely-invisibility of queerness and non-binary gender seemed to be present in the speechifying, which I was really surprised by), but the fiction reading by Helen Elaine Lee from her upcoming book Life Without just completely blew me away. Like, wow. You can't pre-order it yet, but I'll let you know when you can, because, damn did that hit me like a brick.
Aaaand... I am now caught up on conference posts. Sadly I am not caught up on 8000 other things. But these took me like eight hours, and now they are done.
[1] Incidentally, damn does TSRoadmap have some pagerank.
[2] http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120127053/abstract may help you find it.
[3] And it's not like you're guaranteed to get the sex you want, either, although you can maybe control some types of variance I think?