Letters-Biosecurity project

Intervening in the Science of Security: a Feminist Perspective on Bioterrorism and Biosecurity

Introduction

The proposed project examines the embeddedness of cultural norms in scientific knowledge production, focusing specifically on how assumptions about gender and race shape the scientific production of biotechnologies for “national security”. The proposed postdoctoral research is an extension of my dissertation work, in which I focused on cultural productions of gender and race in popular scientific discourse pertaining to post-9/11 “biosecurity”.

After 9/11, the U.S. government refocused “national security” policies with new fervor into an official “global war on terror”. Biotechnology in particular has played an important role in operationalizing new forms of surveillance and security. In the post-9/11 U.S. securitized politic, efforts to protect against “bioterrorism” diseases—diseases such as anthrax and smallpox recently defined as potentially of use to the would-be “bioterrorist”— focused on increasing laboratory security procedures on the one hand and research into these diseases and their technological “countermeasures” on the other. While there has been a fair amount of scholarship from scholars in the medical humanities and social sciences on the consequences and ethics of the new technologies and laboratory regulations enacted to protect against “bioterrorism” (McBride 2002; King 2003; Guillemin 2004; Rabinow 2004; Lakoff and Collier 2008), none of these examine the issues from a feminist science studies perspective focusing on the central roles of gender and race. Mainstream bioethics concerns have focused mainly on privacy issues raised by the use of surveillance technologies and biological research laboratory regulations enacted to protect against “bioterrorism”. Even more striking than the minimal attention to how assumptions about gender and race are embedded in laboratory security procedures is the complete absence of any scholarship on how they shape the research and development of “bioterrorism” disease countermeasures.

The proposed research aims to examine how assumptions about gender and race constitute the very scientific theories and models upon which the research and development of “bioterrorism” countermeasures are based. I approached the study of scientific discourse as constituted by media, culture and other features of social and historical context as much as by practices occurring in the circumscribed realm of science proper. Through a feminist science studies lens, I will examine questions of how broader cultural ideas about the normative disease carrier--both the notion of the "Middle Eastern bioterrorist" and the trope of "women and children" victimized by disease embedded in the scientific production of “bioterrorism” countermeasures. I will utilize primary scientific literature and popular media coverage of the scientific research and technology production, engaging in textual analysis of the language, methods, and stated purposes of the countermeasures in achieving what has come to be known as “biosecurity”.