In March 2016, a journal article about glaciology, of all things, was widely circulated and heavily mocked on the Internet. The paper, Glaciers, gender, and science:
A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research, appeared in the January 10, 2016 issue of Progress In Human Geography. It was mocked and criticized across the Internet for its often absurd efforts to pigeonhole glaciology research in feminist terms.
However, one of the authors of the article–University of Oregon’s Mark Carey–told Science Magazine that his and his co-author’s research was being distorted,
Professional research is published in journals for specialists in a given field. When removed from that context and described to nonspecialists, the research can be misunderstood and potentially misrepresented. What is surprising about the brouhaha is the high level of misinterpretations, mischaracterization, and misinformation that circulate about research and researchers—though this has, unfortunately, been happening to scientists for centuries, especially climate researchers in recent decades.
Certainly valuable research is often mischaracterized by the time it reaches mainstream audiences, but was this the case for Galciers, gender and science?
Claiming that the use of ice cores to analyze paleoclimates was an offshot of US/USSR military competition in the 1950s, the authors write,
Structures of power and domination also stimulated the first large-scale ice core drilling projects–these archetypal masculinist projects to literally penetrate glaciers and extract for measurement and exploitation the ice in Greenland and Antarctica.
Yes, that’s apparently sexual innuendo that only a PhD–and perhaps Beavis and Butthead–would truly understand. I guess we can just be glad there wasn’t a sidebar about Tetsuo: The Iron Man in there.
In another part of the article, the authors discuss “Alternative representations” of glaciers that “seek to unsettle dominant Western assumptions, narratives, and representations which tend to privilege the natural sciences and often emerge through the co-constituted processes of colonialism, patriarchy, and unequal power relations (Harding, 2009).”
Visual and literary arts reposition and reenvision glaciers as greater than their usual status as passive research subjects and into various cultural fields comprised of social myths, images, characters, performances, and artworks. . . . by approaching ice through feeling and affect, emotional response, sense of place, the personal and the intimate, kinship and family rather than through the attributes and characteristics of the dominant, masculinist scientific glaciology often characterized by control, prediction, ice penetration, measurement, and quantification.
Scientific analysis of glaciers is inherently masculinist. Exploring social myths and art about glaciers is inherently feminist. I can’t imagine why more young women avoid STEM careers.
The authors of the article offer a couple of examples of artists who explore glaciers in non-masculinist ways. For example, they cite artist Katie Paterson’s 2007 work, Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull as such an alternative. Here’s how Glaciers, gender, and science describes Paterson’s piece,
Paterson chronicled the ordinary sounds of [three glaciers] . . . in Iceland, and then transferred the audio tracks to LP micro-groove vinyl ‘ice’ records . . . she then played the frozen records simultaneously on three turntables as they melted.
Maybe listening to sounds of glaciers on melting vinyl isn’t your thing, so the article also approvingly mentions American poet Sheryl St. Germain’s 2001 ‘To Drink A Glacier,”
The author interprets her experiences with Alaska’s Mendehall Glacier as sexual and intimate. When she drinks the glacier’s water, she reflects:
That drink is like a kiss, a kiss that takes in the entire body of the other . . . like some wondrous omnipotent liquid tongue, touching our own tongues all over, the roofs and sides of our mouths, then moving in us and through to where it knows . . . I swallow, trying to make the spiritual, sexual sweetness of it last. (St. Germain, 2001: 201).
Well, at least no poor glacier is getting penetrated by a long, thick ice core drill there.
Contrary to Carey’s claims, the problem here is not that this is too difficult for nonspecialists to understand, but rather that the article was transparently stupid. In a world facing increasing risks from global climate change, juvenile nonsense comparing ice core sampling to sexual intercourse is rightly derided and mocked.
