Searching across boundaries for new knowledge

Abolish narrow social categories! Reality doesn’t know any disciplinary boundaries. That is the call to arms from the new research field of post-humanist gender studies.

Cecilia-Åsberg

Research needs to move on from the traditional categorisation into nature and culture, heredity and environment, biology and society, body and mind, human and non-human. This is the challenge in the growing research field of post-humanist gender studies.

Cecilia Åsberg, senior lecturer at the Division of Gender Studies at Linköping University (LiU) is the representative for post-humanist gender studies.

“For a long time feminist research had to brace itself against biology. The difference between sex and gender was necessary,” she explains.

“We feminists have studied gender, the social conceptions of gender, as opposed to biological gender. We focused on gender as a social power relationship. We asserted a claim against biological determinism that biological differences are not deterministic for social ones."

Now it is time to go back to biology and the physical reality with this knowledge and a critical gaze. Humans are not just social and cultural creatures they are also biological. There is interdependence between body and mind.
Humans are also part of something bigger than themselves. It is also about getting away from the anthropocentric world-view, to place the study of humans and their conditions in a wider context.

Åsberg continues, “This is not completely natural for humanists and social scientists, who traditionally cultivate human interests.” However environmental threats and climate change deem that it is becoming obvious to increasing numbers of people that we cannot be so narrow-minded and self-interested.

Nature is not just a passive resource for humans and their activities, it’s an actor in its own right that we humans are dependent on. And this applies to all of physical reality: technology, machines, animals and the environment.

This is how Cecilia Åsberg describes this challenge in a recently published article:
“The most obvious problem in today’s feminist research is that the dominant discursive and social-constructivist approaches cannot bridge the dichotomies of nature/culture, nature/nurture, reality/discourse, body/mind and sex/gender.” The article was co-authored by LiU researchers Redi Koobak, Division of Gender Studies, and Ericka Johnson, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change.

This development of gender research, from a mainly social and humanist science to a more inter-disciplinary approach with a tendency towards the natural sciences, is also called the material, post-humanist or ontological turn.

bananfluga

It is a broad approach, to say the least. Cecilia Åsberg’s goals with her research include understanding Alzheimer’s disease as a post-humanist phenomenon, i.e. as something that is not just physical but also exists in the mind and in the surrounding society and that can be studied from humanist as well as biological aspects. She also wants to understand how biochemists and neurobiologists work with animal models, human samples and visualisation techniques to analyse what happens in Alzheimer’s cases.

“I want to understand what a biochemists’ interpretation of Alzheimer’s disease can contribute to feminist research regarding relationships between animals and humans,” she says.

The animals in question are primarily transgenic fruit flies.

“This may sound arbitrary, but transgenic organisms, especially the small Drosophila flies, have been the key to the wealth of new knowledge in 20th century microbiology, biological chemistry, cell biology, genetics and protein research. Now it is high time to creatively develop new approaches together!

This means that post-humanist gender studies are located in the tension that arises between the natural and cultural sciences,” she adds.

Åsberg leads a research group that has garnered international attention and has been visited by several guest researchers.