Have you ever wondered what famous, ground-breaking math/science papers would sound like had they been written by gender scholars? Luckily (or unluckily, depending on your point of view,) HBD-blogger EvolutionistX has undertaken to find out:
I. Distance, Surface, Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies: A Relativistic Critique of Maxwellcentric Conceptions of “Knowing” Bodies, by A. Einstein
In Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton examines the sensory and cognitive, mathematical processes involved in rendering bodies in motion as remaining in motion and bodies at rest as remaining at rest, using the language of infinitessimal, geometric calculus. Maxwellcentric social norms emphasize differences, rather than similarities, between moving electrodynamic bodies, creating perceptions of asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. In this paper I focus on a particular subjectivity and a particular spatiality. The subjectivity is that of dominant Western Maxwellcentric electrodynamics. The spatiality is the specific organisation of spacetime through which that subjectivity is constituted and through which it sees the world, a problematic described here as a relativistic space of electrodynamic self/knowledge. Take, for example, the reciprocal, non-patriarchal electrodynamic action of a magnet (“masculine”) and a conductor (“feminine”). By introducing the “infinitessimal” metaphor, Newton enables theoretical development in how cultural norms and sensory perceptions shape the social construction of spacetime curvature around the action of the magnet and conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary, phallocentric, Maxwellian view draws a sharp, “othering” distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion. In the process of electrodynamic attribution, cognitive filters guide our attention to certain features of bodies marked as different (e.g., spin, charge, mass), while priming us to ignore other features of bodies (e.g., shape, velocity). The move from a structuralist account in which “electricity” is understood to structure activities between magnets and conductors in relatively homologous way to a view of hegemony in which electrodynamic powers are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of space structure, and marked a shift from a form of Maxwellian theory that takes structural, atomic totalities as theoretical objects (eg, photons, electrons,) to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of unified spacetime structures inaugurate a renewed conception of electrodynamics as bound up with contingent bodies.
Continue reading “Guest Post: EvolutionistX: What if Famous Scientists wrote like Gender Scholars?”
Lawrence Glarus 