Kelly Caldwell, Untitled.

A researcher walks into a lab—and no, this isn’t the beginning of a joke in which you realize by the end that the researcher is not a man, but a woman. Remember the one about the father and son who get in a car accident? The one where the father is killed? When the boy is rushed to the hospital for surgery, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate; this is my son.” This stumps people simply because they can’t imagine a female surgeon. I guess this isn’t a joke exactly, but a riddle that gets at our cultural stereotypes about gender. 

Another answer to the riddle: people don’t think about the possibility of, say, two dads.

Anyway, a researcher who happens to be a woman walks into a lab. It’s not her own lab; that’s not the kind of researcher she is. I shouldn’t say she “happens to be a woman”; her gender is far from incidental to her work. Angela Willey, a scholar of feminist science studies, is going to watch scientists who are conducting research on prairie voles—or, I should say, on the “genetically monogamous” prairie vole. 

The concept of natureculture, developed by prominent interdisciplinary scholar Donna Haraway, recognizes the inseparability of nature and culture in ecological relationships. In her work, Willey is invested in a “naturecultural shift away from the nature/culture debate and toward an embodied politics wherein the inextricability of desire from context is taken for granted.”

Willey wants to see what these scientists are up to, how they design their research, how they make their claims. She wants to see science in action. 

About a decade ago, in Seattle, a friend named Kate and I were out to dinner at an Italian restaurant with our male partners. I should mention that this was three cities ago for me, and two relationships ago—before I met Kelly, before I came out as queer. Over warm bread and olive oil, Kate and I began to speak facetiously, provocatively, in part to see how the men, our partners, would respond. We told them we didn’t particularly believe in science, or we said something to that effect. We didn’t necessarily trust, we told them, the so-called facts that the scientific community purported to be undeniable. Our partners were confused by our statements—after all, the four of us were politically leftist secular urbanites who understood at least some