Making the Right Tools for the Job With Adele Clarke

Abstract

This essay is part of a Thematic Collection of Science, Technology & Human Values on the work of Adele E. Clarke (1945–2024).

Tools come in many forms. Adele Clarke gifted us brilliant analyses of the tools of biomedicine and she also created feminist science and technology studies (STS) tools that have shaped the work of many. My formative early encounter with Adele's practices was in 1999 at the annual 4S conference in San Diego. Adele found me as a newly minted PhD excitedly talking about the epistemology of vaginal self-exams, passing my baby around the audience so I could have my hands free to present. Afterward, she generously invited me into a conversation, offering stories of how she taught vaginal self-exam as a young women's studies professor at Sonoma State University in the 1970s, sharing insights from her background in the women's health movement. Her 1998 article with Monica Casper, “Making the Pap Smear into the ‘Right Tool for the Job’” (Casper and Clarke 1998) was hot off the presses, animating my own attempt to study the practices of the Californian feminist health movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Along with Virginia Olesen, she had just gathered together STS scholars and feminist health activists into the influential volume, Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Feminist, Cultural and Technoscience Perspectives (Clarke and Olesen 1999). I was honored that Adele noticed me, and was inspired by her scholarship's grounding in feminist activism. Ever since Adele's work and mentorship have been a guide. She created methodological tools for STS that circulate through her publications and she also modeled practices for how to be a feminist scholar and teacher that are less visible in her published work, yet deeply shaped a cohort of feminist STS scholars.

How does a technique or technology become the “right tool for the job”? This seemingly simple question belied the deeper methodological contribution Adele was making to the field. Writing about the pap smear, the diaphragm (her earliest publication), and RU486, Adele took on pivotal technologies of reproductive biomedicine that were shaping women's health (Clarke 1984; 2012; Clarke and Casper 1996; Clarke and Montini 1993). Having worked in the Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights on coercive sterilization, and writing for the most influential popular feminist health guidebook, Our Bodies, Ourselves, Adele modeled how STS research could be motivated by involvement in feminist social movements (Clarke 2021; Fletcher and Clarke 2018). It was important to me that Adele's feminist analysis was not about studying women as subjects, but instead focused on the tools and technologies that were shaping their lives. Her careful attention to tools and biomedical practices helped birth the emergent subfield of Reproduction Studies, giving shape to its central concerns. Her work purposefully took up “marginalized” tools that were stigmatized by their association with abortions, cervixes, and sterilizations. These tools, she showed, were caught up in the racist and sexist biomedicalization of reproductive life in the United States (Clarke 2010; Clarke et al. 2000). They were, moreover, tools that were well studied by activists, not academics. Her important book, Disciplining Reproduction, based on her PhD thesis and honored with the 4S Fleck Prize, remains the foundational text outlining the historical production of the reproductive sciences. In it, she argued that the reproductive sciences, with their gendered associations, had been marginalized within the sciences, and as a result also largely ignored by STS scholars “despite the discipline's importance to and intervention in millions of human lives throughout the world in even its most remote corners” (Clarke 1998, 21). Asking how the pap smear became “the right tool” was an insistence that STS turn its attention to seemingly mundane and normalized tools as questions about how power is exercised in social worlds. And an insistence that feminist analyses about reproductive technologies, in particular, could be both practically incisive and theory-generating for STS. In this way, Adele's research on the reproductive sciences would go on to feed what would become her enormous contribution to qualitative methods: the book Situational Analysis (Clarke 2005). If one dares to ask about the rightness of the tools, practices, and epistemologies of science, then one must also ask the very same questions of one's own research. How is STS to be done? How is feminist STS to be done? What are our tools?

In her introduction to the 2014 volume, The Right Tool for the Job, co-edited with Joan Fujimura, Adele asked, “What needs to be taken into account in order to understand a situation in which scientific work is being done?” Her answer, “Everything in the situation, broadly conceived” (Clarke and Fujimura 1992, 5). Everything in the situation—such a daunting invitation. Adele described a “situation” as including all social relations, and all the interactions within them. This relational and interactional understanding was a methodological prompt to scholarly responsibility: what one did was interactional with everything else. Nothing and no one stands apart. Rather than a network that emphasized actions and actants, the situation also included feelings and, perhaps most importantly, attention to that which is silenced or marginalized as inaction or absence. The situation, as Adele taught it, was complex, heterogeneous, and filled with conflict, and it was these features that had to be wrestled with and not put to the side. Adele's situational analysis developed through an elaborate iterative mapping practice that crucially and repeatedly provoked users to attend to the “sites of silence” and not just presence and action (Clarke 2005). While her methodological writings on situational analysis offer its practices as generalizable for qualitative research of all kinds, I see this methodological emphasis on accounting for silence, working against the production of marginalization, and taking up concerns that emerge out of social movement struggles as some of Adele's core contributions to feminist STS, kin to Joe Dumit's “Implosion” method, learned through Donna Haraway (Dumit 2014), and part of the flourishing of feminist STS in California.

Adele's Situational Analysis tools will continue to serve generations, as some of the “right tools” we have for implicated social analysis. Her toolbox, however, went far beyond her published work, and in many ways, it was these other tools that have influenced me more. Some of these tools reflected the particular scholarly technologies available to us in the 1980s and 1990s, before laptops were commonplace, before the internet, before online relational indexing of scholarship, and before email. Paper, not screens, was our key modality then. Conferences were important sites for meeting and organizing. As a student in the 1980s and 1990s, no journal of feminist STS existed, no index collected works on race and science, or colonialism and medicine. Paper syllabi and bibliographies were thus important hard-won tools for changing and building fields. They were treasured achievements, shared via photocopy or even mimeograph. In the 1970s, Adele innovated in developing some of the earliest feminist women's health courses at Sonoma State University. In 1986, along with her mentors, she published a Syllabi Set on Women, Health, and Healing that can be found in university libraries still (Clarke, Olesen, and Ruzek 1986). Even in the 1990s, there were only a few feminist STS courses in existence, and Adele's iterated course called “Gender, Race and (Post)Coloniality in/and Science, Medicine, and Technologies” at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), with its massive list of suggested readings was sought out as a guide to the emerging field. When we connected at 4S in 1999, I was working on my own bibliographic project with Evelyn Hammonds called RaceSci, which sought to publish every English language syllabus in existence on race, colonialism, and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). At the time, race was not included as an indexed term in bibliographies of the field. The whiteness of STS, both demographically and epistemically, was profound. Adele supported my work with other younger scholars, such as Kavita Philip and Samer Alatout, to do what we thought of as “guerilla programming,” insisting on inserting long chains of up to 16 panels on race and science or anti-colonial and postcolonial work into the conference. Adele was deeply committed to these efforts of field building.

Adele was a voracious and generous bibliographer, and this practice was one of her key tools throughout her career. One can see this in her published work. Adele's introductions to articles and books consistently offered complex genealogies of the field, including and honoring work that she sought to both critically move beyond as much laud. In interviews and articles later in her career, Adele offered complex schemas of the multi-sited emergence of STS, including Edinburgh sociology and the lesser acknowledged, but equally influential, West Coast Socialist Feminist Study Group that included feminist scholars such as Donna Haraway, Judy Stacey, and Gayle Rubin (Clarke 2016; Fletcher and Clarke 2018). For Adele, it was a scholarly responsibility to do this reflexive bibliographic and genealogical (might we say situational) work, and yet this work was not individual. It happened in classes, study groups, collaborative projects, and mentorship as well. Even her Situational Analysis work drew on and learned from the people who she had supervised and taught. As a mentee of Adele's, one was regularly gifted news clippings, articles, and citations by both mail and email relevant to one's own “situation” of relations. This hard-won, social, and political bibliographic practice is easy to lose sight of in our current era of Google and searchable relational online databases. We can today turn to scholarship such as Katherine McKittrick's (2021) work on the politics of citation or Max Liboiron's (2021) work on the politics of credit and authorship to help us with these efforts. Before this, I learned about the politics of thick and generous citations from Adele and other feminist scholars such as her, forging new arenas in the era of paper.

Adele created a bulging and generous mentorship toolkit. I quickly learned that I was not the only graduate student she had discovered at 4S. Adele modeled how attending graduate student panels and cultivating intergenerational relationships with emerging scholars from far and wide was a joyful responsibility. Attending to intergenerational relationships was a hallmark of Adele's career. Adele co-wrote with many people across generations, older, peers, and younger: not just myself but also Virgina Olesen, Ruth Bleier, Sheryl Ruzak, Sue Rosser, Monica Casper, Janet Shim, Jennifer Fosket, Jennifer Fishman, Lisa Moore, Laura Mamo, Theresa Montini, Vincanne Adams, Chia-Ling Wu, Joan Fujimura, Susan Leigh Star, and many others. Sociality, friendship, and mentorship were part of the work. Her extensive international network of collaborators is a testament to her commitment to a modality of scholarship that centered on relationship building. Hence, Adele was recognized for her extraordinary mentorship many times over, for example, through the Feminist Mentor Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction, and Faculty Mentor of the Year at UCSF.

As a mentor and collaborator, Adele brought two more key practices into the situation of her scholarship. First, she did not shy away from feeling. She described STS as a “love of her life” and it showed. Feelings were a welcome and necessary part of doing scholarship. Laughter and tears, fear and excitement were often in the mix, and contradictory feelings were needed to honor worlds, futures, and pasts. I was lucky to spend time with Adele focused on affect through our collaborative project, along with Vincanne Adams, on “anticipation” (Adams, Clarke, and Murphy 2009). Second, she fully embraced both critique and celebration. Critique might come in the form of extensive red-inked notes cutting across an article or draft, or a willingness to engage in disagreement, as happened in the Making Kin, Not Population project co-organized with Donna Haraway (Clarke and Haraway 2018). As Adele reflected in her own autobiographical writing, “I want to remember that STS including feminist STS reflects the many progressive science and medical criticism movements that seeded it, and it recognizes STEM as problem-creating as well as problem-solving” (Clarke 2021, 39) For her, the “tools” of feminist STS also have to be situated, their rightness and wrongness to be iteratively questioned. The critical work was by necessity ongoing, collaborative, and affective.

Celebration, on the other hand, often came in the form of joyful conversations with prosecco. Every time we saw one another, a celebration was in order. I often visited relatives in San Francisco who lived around the corner from Adele and, whenever I needed a break, she would kindly have me over. The very act of coming together in discussion and learning was to be treasured and a bottle of bubbly to be opened. Her home office was filled with bookcases from a life of reading, but more striking was the comfortable armchair in her living room, surrounded by piles of articles, drafts, and books that were her current concerns. Having become disabled in a car accident, working from this comfy chair was crucial, and showed me the long-game project of taking care of one's body and not just one's brain. I would sit across from her comfy chair with our prosecco, and we would joyfully get into it all, everything of the situation. In some ways, this lesson of celebrating has been one of the hardest tools to learn while undertaking justice-based research. To celebrate the small wins, the friendships, and the luck of our very absurd lives that landed us as scholars traversing worlds. The fullness of these tools as assembled by Adele is humbling. And I feel humbled here to try to describe what she accomplished and gave. They were tools big and small, tools under constant critical revision, tools that were never alone and always in relation, tools that could sometimes be ephemeral while others were concretized. Adele Clarke wove a giant web of relations in the field, threading feminist values through all she did. I celebrate her achievements here, not only the field-defining publications, but the many subtle, less-heralded practices that became the “right tools” of a kind that also changed so many of us.