Driving Evelyn Fox Keller's multiple, provocative analyses of gender and science in the 1980s were several strands of psychoanalytic theory, which she used to open up analysis of gendered scientist subjects, their different psychodynamics, and their different relationships to their objects of study. Although gender analysis and critique have become central to science and technology studies, associations made between psychoanalysis and STS analysis have been fewer and farther between. Meanwhile, many productive analytic linkages have been made between psychoanalytic theories and matters of science (scientists included) in literary studies, feminist theory, film and media studies, queer studies, and other interdisciplinary spaces adjacent to science studies.
This panel welcomes submissions from all disciplines and interdisciplines that read both across, between, and infra- psychoanalyses and sciences. Although the figures of Freud and Lacan are imposing ones when it comes to the sciences and psychoanalytic theory, papers associating analysis of science to other psychoanalytic theorists–Wilfred Bion to Donald Winnicott, Lauren Berlant to Elizabeth Wilson–are especially encouraged.
Topics of interest might include: science studies' resistances to psychoanalysis; affects and scientists; lifedeath drives; ambivalences of psychoanalytic theory as scientific theory; psychoanalysis into and against neuroscience; paranoid and reparative positions in laboratory life; sciences and/or psychoanalysis in colonial, postcolonial, and/or de-colonializing contexts; differences in/of epistemic objects, transitional objects, and objets petit a; making and doing psychoanalysis in clinical practice; play, control, and holding environments in the sciences; epistemophilic subjects and desires for science; relations between the 'relational turns' in psychoanalysis and STS.
