Beyond the Binary
Subramaniam’s own work is all about asking questions and resisting ideological binaries, so naturally the first course she taught at Wellesley was the cross-listed ES/WGS 238: Naturecultures: Feminist Futurist & Environmental Justice, organized around interrogating a series of binaries in Western thought. Here are just a few:
- Nature/Culture: What is nature What is culture? Where do gender and race fit in?
- Native/Alien: Who is native? Who is alien? Who decides?
- Wild/Domestic: Is the idea of “the wild” critical for our understanding of the “natural” world?
- Toxic/Pure: How do we deal with a future shaped by our toxic present?
- Male/Female and Straight/Queer: How have histories of science shaped views of normative sexuality?
- Human/Animal and Animal/Vegetable: The “great chain of being” managed to create hierarchies of organisms—what now?
- Science/Indigenous Knowledge: Are Indigenous knowledges sciences? How do we address the politics of naming and knowledge?
- Research/Activism: How can academics address real-world problems and challenge ideologies of value-neutral knowledge?
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