The AmericanScience team is back from winter break! To start out the New Year, we’re putting down our ice skates and hot ciders (okay, our piles of grading and overdue chapters) and introducing a new feature to the blog. Besides our regular posts and reviews—and science links, which we’re Tweeting daily—we’ve decided to re-read The Classics in the discipline. Returning to some classic HOS texts and discussing them as a team, we hope, will be a way to both rethink old ideas and, on a more practical note, to read some texts that we haven’t looked at since generals.
To start out the series, we’re beginning with one of the most famous, and most famously impenetrable, essays in the field: Donna Haraway’s “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1938.” First published in Social Text in the winter of 1984-85, the piece became a key chapter in Haraway’s later 1989 masterpiece, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy,” and Haraway’s work in general, has become some of the most influential writing in the history of science, in postmodern readings of biology, and in critical gender and race theory. Over the course of a few weeks this fall, the AmericanScience team took some time with the essay, and came together to discuss our experiences with it, where it fits into current scholarship, and whether it really is impenetrable. We invite you to join the conversation in the comments section or on Twitter. On a purely aesthetic note, we’d like to point you to our current header—a timely, we think, image of none other than Carl Akeley working on his taxidermy at the AMNH in the 1930s.