I have been in school in some way since I was about two and a half. Finally, this semester I am graduating from my PhD program. While I am always going to be learning, this milestone serves as a key transition from officially being a student to being a “professional” of sorts. As I figure out what comes next, I have personally been wrestling with how moving beyond the student space will change how I relate to my identity, and how I define myself when people ask, "What do you do?" or request, "Tell me about yourself." To put it succinctly, defining this next phase is still a work in progress. As I worked on a project that was supposed to be exploring public engagement with science and inclusive practices in science, the young professionals I interviewed ended up sharing that they were similarly rediscovering how they define themselves and relate to their work. They are all doing great work related to activism and inclusion that led me to speak with them. The overarching theme across our conversations, however, became the way we all work to fit our research, activism, and self into our field. And further, how our academic fields limit and influence what exactly we feel we are allowed to pursue. This piece then, is a reflexive reckoning with my own positionality as a scholar, and an exploration of how three of my colleagues are also (re)discovering their own identities.

For this project, I spoke with three women in the sciences, broadly defined. By this I mean I spoke to women who are social and natural scientists, though I am now questioning whether I would even include myself in this broad definition of scientist at all. We talked about what led them to the field they study, how being a woman has affected their experience, the mentors they’ve had through their careers, the ways they have engaged with communities within and outside of academia, and how their own definition of who they are affects all of these other topics. I will also be including my own responses to the questions I asked of these women as is relevant, so I will often be using second person plural to refer to the shared experiences and reflections of myself along with the women I interviewed.

It quickly became clear that who we are outside of our fields of scholarship significantly impact how we approach our research. We could not separate being a scientist from our experiences as women, of a certain race, living in a certain country, some of whom identify as feminist, and some of whom identify as activists. These identities together make up our intersectional identities. Intersectionality refers to the way the multiple aspects of identity interact in the way a person experiences the world, and was originally theorized as a term to describe the way the concurrent identities of being a woman and being of African descent synergistically affect experiences of African-descended women in the United States (Crenshaw, 1989). Building on this term, sociologists have recognized the way intersectionality can be group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. The original use of the term takes a group-centered approach, analyzing the intersectional oppressions experienced by being both black and a woman. The process-centered approach to intersectionality looks at how power operates largely through “context and comparison…as revealing structural processes,” emphasizing a larger scale of the impacts of certain processes like immigration or higher education access rather than the marginalization of specific groups. The system-centered approach looks at an even larger scale, how “intersectionality shapes the entire social system,” recognizing that history shapes the processes and groups that are marginalized (Falcón, 2016: 16). This recognizes intersectionality as not just personal, but rather a “complex system,” disrupting the idea that a singular aspect of identity defines any aspect of society (Ferree and Choo, 2010: 136). The way the following identities interact largely was discussed with the group-centered approach, but some of our discussions also looked at the system-centered approach to intersectionality as well.

Being a scientist and a woman

“Women are perceived as not being able to do certain things. As not being as good. It comes across in so many subtle ways”

The intersectional experiences of being a woman in science were clearly described as distinct to experiences of men. There was a palpable frustration that came across in having to navigate a system designed for men’s success, and trying not to blame oneself for trying to find success as a female in such a system. Even getting to call oneself a scientist came up as difficult to claim due to the ideas of what credentials you need to be a scientist, and how the internalized expectations of masculinity have limited these women’s abilities to relate to being feminine and a scientist. This arose both in how being in a female body affects the research women can safely do in the field, and in their sense of ability to be feminine within the laboratory setting. There was a sense that not being tough enough or not being able to make it through the same situations as men was not an option. This reveals how male-oriented science continues to be. Women feel they are expected to abandon their femininity and identity as a woman in order to succeed, even at the cost of their own safety, let alone identity. Further, the disenfranchisement of microagressions also reveals the way a “normal” scientist is still seen as a (white) male. Particularly for women who are interested in quantitative sciences or fieldwork, they have been led to question if they belong in the sciences due to gender-based microaggressions. More of this discussion can be found on the subpage "Women and Science."

Being a scientist and a woman of a specific race or culture

Two women also spoke about how race and culture play into the experience of being a woman in the sciences, both abroad and in the United States. One woman who studied and worked abroad shared how different cultural expectations of students led to a sense that, “people didn’t know how to respond to a confident, assertive, independent, strong woman who will challenge her host professor, in the way that we’re used to doing in the US, or even in Europe. Where you have passionate discussions about research, you don’t just defer to them…so I feel like people didn’t know how to deal with me, as a woman, and as a foreigner, and all of those other things. I thought it was challenging being a woman, in the sciences, in [an East Asian country].” Another woman revealed the contextual and relational fluidity of race, expressing how in the United States she is seen as a woman of color, and experiences marginalization in her field because of that. When abroad for research, being seen as White in a certain community in which she hoped to research led her to change her project because her whiteness in this international context would “make [her] stand out very much.” Even within the US, she expressed how depending on whom she is with she gets treated differently. Further, she expressed how the whiteness and maleness of her field of study has affected the scholarship available to her, and who she has mainly had to look up to in the field.

For me, as a white woman, doing research on social justice in the United States, I am continually reflexively assessing what my motivations are for my work. I ask myself often how my work is promoting my own career versus those from the communities I am trying to work with and support. In an effort to not further “white saviorism” in research and activism, I have tried to focus my work on communities I already have relationships within the United States. Historically and arguably still today, white women in particular have used this “white woman’s burden” to “help” people of currently or historically colonized nations (Burton, 1992). In an effort to address legacies of colonialism and my own implicated associations with these legacies, I directly address colonization in America in my work, and ask myself, “Am I further colonizing this space with this work?” Also, because I work on justice issues, I very directly end up studying how racial and ethnic identities affect experiences of injustice. In an effort to not “speak for others,” I discuss my motivations and research with community members with whom I plan to work, of multiple ethnic and racial backgrounds (Alcoff, 1991). Additionally, I do my best to work in the background of movements and resistance led by people of marginalized or minoritized identities, such that I let them speak for themselves and I can be an ally on their terms rather than as I see fit. Moving forward, I plan to continue to doing this in my research, working from design, to collection, to analysis and communication alongside community members.

Being a scientist and a woman of a specific ethnicity…and a feminist?

For one woman, her relationship to ethnicity directly affected the way she viewed feminism in the United States and why she did not identify as feminist herself:

“At least the women I’ve encountered who are feminists, I feel like their definition of feminism, it excludes some of my views. That’s why. Especially when I met feminists in [the Global South] I realized there’s more to feminists’ movements than what I’ve been hearing. Again, I come from [a] white, male-dominated [field] where there’s feminist [subfields] but I haven’t been working with [them], so my frame of reference is limited. A lot of feminism I had to learn on my own. But when the first women’s march was happening, I felt like I was like, ‘I’m not going to go to that. It just didn’t feel like anything to me.’ I’ve been trying to reflect on why I felt so disconnected from feminist movements here is because I feel like it is so white-washed to me.”

“It bothers me when people talk about ‘women’s rights,’ because that means no acknowledging that you’re still not that oppressed. Even though you’re a woman, you’re still not that oppressed…To me, yeah, as women we can all share in that oppression, we can relate, but it’s still not the same. I think the American feminist movement is really narrow sometimes. Sometimes. But again, when I went to [a Global South country] I got to see another side of it, that was different. The issues there are very different.”

This woman articulated the long-standing critiques women of color and women from the Global South have continually made of the Western feminist movement discounting experiences of women of color and other marginalized identities. While I am white, this interviewee expressed a lot of the tensions I have also felt in deciding whether I identify as feminist. With the example and legacy of the dominant narrative of feminism in the United States and Global North, I personally could not identify as a feminist until I encountered the term intersectional.

The two other women I interviewed, both of whom are white and did identify as feminist, also emphasized the need for an intersectional approach to feminism:

“I think it’s funny to be anywhere in life and hear people scoff at the idea of feminism, and in my science hubs, I think it’s funny to see what people project on to that word...At the base of it, it’s this radical idea that all people should have equal rights. And that includes females, and I think that feminism has to be intersectional, so when I say people, I really mean feminism can’t just be about empowering females it has to be about empowering all these other different marginalized groups of people.”

Similarly, the third woman I spoke with explained what feminism means to her:

“It just means respect as a person, and that women should absolutely be treated equally to men. That all human beings should be treated equally, however you identify on the gender spectrum, actually. So, I’m feminist, and I’m all the things, you know what I mean? It almost feels sort of limiting to say feminist, because I want to advocate for people who are nonbinary, gender nonconforming, and that we should be proactive in elevating everyone who’s been oppressed until now. So I don’t passively mean letting things be equal, and waiting for them to be equal, but fighting for them to be equal.”

Being a scientist and a woman of a specific ethnicity…and a feminist? And an activist?

For me, the emphasis on advocacy that arose in our conversation of feminism cannot be separated from my other identities, including being a scholar. In speaking to my colleagues, they all shared that they have transitioned towards such an emphasis themselves, though with varying degrees of support in their fields. While some of us have intentionally already found a way to integrate activism into our other identities, others are wrestling to find how it best fits, and how it is ‘allowed’ to fit, within certain disciplines. For myself and one other interviewee, we definitely have struggled to find a way to maintain the distance and objective perspective that is often expected of scholars. I recently have encountered the work of Mari Castañeda, a Latinx communications scholar and Associate Dean, which has encouraged me that it is possible to do work that is both "rigorous" by academic standards and engaged in meaningful, transformative community change as the community desires. Another interviewee shared that while she has maintained the expected objective perspective, it has limited her sense of connection and passion for her work recently, and that rather than invigorating, she now finds her work “soul extinguishing.” This was a great conversation that is more fully discussed on the page “Activism & Academia.” For the purpose of this discussion, however, the key takeaway was that we all felt the need for our work to be engaged: shared with the public in intentionally inclusive ways, making a positive impact on the community in which the work was conducted, and/or going beyond writing academic papers. While we all relate to activism and academia in different ways, we all hope to continue to move to a more praxis-oriented approach to our work to make a difference.

Bringing these identities into our scholarship

For all of us, unsurprisingly, curiosity and passion drove us to our fields of research initially. Two of the women actually explicitly named reading National Geographic as a child as significantly influencing their interest in the environment. For two of us, this passion related to wanting to make a difference in the world, and the others had dived into the field purely from a genuine curiosity perspective. Since we all entered into the post-secondary education environments, we have evolved in our fields of study, and are continually re-evaluating how we relate to our intersectional identities in our fields. One woman shared that her understanding of femininity and science has evolved “just because of confidence. I don’t think that, if you had asked me 10 years ago, about what it means to be a female in science, I think I would have said, ‘I see those as two separate things.’ And now I see them much more so as one thing.” This emphasizes how thoroughly we can change the ways we relate to our sense of self and scholarship. Our identities are dynamic and relational, and how those identities relate to our scholarship is always evolving. For me, the most definite ways I see my identities of being a white, transnational feminist and scholar interact in my scholarship today are in the literature I am reading, the conferences I attend, and the research questions I ask. But for myself and the three women that were a part of this conversation, it seems how our identities influence our work is particularly dynamic at the moment. What this conversation revealed was whether we think about the way these identities are shifting or not, the different spaces we are in and with whom we interact leads us to reckon with different aspects of our identity, and relate to them differently. Currently, we are all in a state of flux; intentionally rediscovering and defining who we are as scholars, women, and people.

An addendum

If you're looking to listen to a conversation about navigating one's relationship to their multiple identities, the podcast All My Relations, hosted by two Native women is an excellent listen. The first episode is particularly relevant to the topics brought up in this project, as it discusses relating to one's own sense of self along with adherence to ideas of feminism.

References

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