Author: Amelia Carter (University of Pennsylvania)
Editor: Ashton Wesner (Colby College)
11/24/2025 | Review
 

Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understandings of Animal Behavior is an endlessly teachable text and much-needed contribution to the history and sociology of animal behavior science in the 20th and 21st century. Brought to life by a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist (Ambika Kamath) and feminist science studies scholar (Melina Packer), the book’s case studies are presented through a series of STS frameworks, personal experiences with species, and historiographic critiques. This blend of registers lends the text a friendly sense of daring – like Kamath and Packer are letting us in on a secret. And in a sense they are, although it’s a secret that feminist science studies scholars have been trying to disseminate for generations. Nearly a decade after Donna Haraway insisted that “it matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with,” these authors take up the matter of animal lives and use their stories to suggest a new paradigm for understanding non-human behavior. Each of the seven chapters presents well-established evolutionary biology frameworks (drawn from popular textbook Animal Behavior, 11th ed.) alongside histories of their development and key concepts from feminist science and technology studies. This two-step forms the driving force of the analysis and makes for a satisfyingly rhythmic read.  
 

Chapter 1, “Dismantle by Building Differently,” opens the book by presenting three cold-blooded subjects: Coho Salmon, anoles lizards, and American green frogs. Through descriptions of these species’ reproductive habits the authors introduce their project: re-storying the lives of animals and the scientists who study them to make room for unruly possibilities and co-constructed contingency. This first chapter makes good on its titular promise to dismantle tenets of animal behavior science while offering alternative structures of thought – in this case the authors take “territoriality” to task by presenting a queer ecological critique of the framework’s founding narratives. They offer, in its place, a more expansive feminist story of queer kinship and connection beyond the binaries of toxicity and sex. 
 

Chapter 2 “Who We Are and What We Know” is a sound introduction to the sometimes-daunting world of feminist science studies and our many neologisms. Feminism in the Wild manages to make standpoint theory and situated knowledges both approachable and apprehendable to students regardless of their academic priors. This chapter does important inter/trans-disciplining work by putting Haraway, Harding, and Hrdy in dialogue with the ecological concept of “umwelt”, the species-specific sensory worlds of animals that we will never have direct access to. By both utilizing and historicizing conceptual frameworks across fields of inquiry, Kamath and Packer portray the intellectual lineage of which they are a part to be just as worthy of consideration/contestation as that of the scientists they critique. This reflexive synthesis makes this chapter a particularly fine candidate for teaching in both science and science studies classrooms of various stripes. 
 

Chapter 3 “Perspectives at War” makes quick work of a century-long debate in animal behavior science: do animals act at the level of the individual (organism or gene), at the level of groups, or across multiple levels of selection simultaneously? This chapter traces how promoters of the first level transmuted their once-debated theories into behavioralist orthodoxy to the point that any altruistic behavior directed beyond immediate genetic “family members” becomes “anomalous.” Our authors make their allegiances clear: they are with the multilevelists. Kamath and Packer bring Black Marxist and Queer Feminist critiques to bear on scientific assumptions of "kin" relations – a concept that refuses easy disciplinary translation. While this chapter begins with industrial laying hens and ends with counting crows, its claims fly far beyond the avian kingdom – claims that this historian hopes will inspire even more archivally-grounded analyses of these debates to take wing. 
 

Chapter 4 “Hiding in Plain Sight” brings another heavy hitter off the STS bench to interrogate the idea of “fitness” in natural selection. Feminism in the Wild both introduces Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm framework to new audiences and sufficiently problematizes it with over half a century of feminist critique. They then spend the rest of the book proposing a paradigm of their own,  “one that is grounded in co-constitution” (79) rather than the inevitable yet arbitrary logical revolutions proposed by Kuhn. They differentiate their project by centering the material stakes of knowledge production about animal behavior alongside feminist science studies scholars who understand paradigms ”to be shaped by systems of power…Which means that escaping a paradigm is always a political endeavor, and can never be a purely scientific one,” (65). By politicizing the paradigm, they move away from Kuhn’s ‘revolutionary’ framework in favor of building differently, as the first chapter suggests. The blueprint for this differential approach is perhaps best summarized by an earlier quote from their scientific collaborator Max Lambert: “Be open to surprises . . . biology will surprise you. Let the animals tell you something different about the world than what you thought,” (16). This openness to possibility defines the rest of the text.
 

Chapter 5 “Undoing Adaptationism” brings contingency and co-constitution to bear on animal behavior science's logical obsession with efficient evolution and “rational” adaptation. Kamath and Packer enlist insights from Disability Studies to ask: Who has what kinds of agency, and what a good life might look like as a means of destabilizing teleological adaptationist discourses?. By questioning what it means to live well, these authors argue that perhaps it is time to consider natural selection less as survival of the fittest and more as survival of the “good enough.” This insight sets up the final two chapters’ meaningful engagement with the history and legacy of eugenics in the lab, field, and beyond. 
 

Chapters 6 “Eugenic Entanglements” outlines the linkages between evolutionary biology and the eugenic movement since their very inceptions, while making a bold claim: the current sexual selection paradigm in animal behavior science is, no matter how you slice it, logically eugenic. While recent shifts to focus on female-mate choice may give a veneer of representational feminism, Kamath and Packer are quick to point out that both the “good genes” and “runaway” theories of genetic selection are classic examples of positive eugenics written into the DNA of disciplinary thought. 
 

In the concluding chapter, “Dismantling Determinism,” Feminism in the Wild unveils their new paradigmatic hypothesis: that contingency and co-construction are key to understanding animal behavior. They demonstrate this thinking at work in three final case studies; socialized (rather than sexualized) female mate choice in lace-tailed manakins, genetic expression in giraffes and pointers, and “binary” sex determination across the animal kingdom. In each case they explain how biologically determinist rhetoric limits interpretations of animal behavior to a small set of pre-determined causation models. They assert “Moving away from determinism and accounting for the contingencies of a female’s life and the forces of co-constitution—where she happens to roam, whom she happens to interact with, and what she happens to learn—leads one to expect variation among females in their choice of mate. When we make room for the vagaries of an animal’s life, our understanding of animal behavior expands. Expecting that animals’ lives unfold in unpredictable, agential, and relational ways allows us to turn decisively away from the rigid hierarchies and normative expectations that are central to theories of animal sex and that are rooted in the twin ideologies of eugenics and biological determinism," (117, emphasis added).
 

So, who is Feminism in the Wild for? The (extra)institutional homes of these authors make it easy to assume an expansive audience both in the academy and beyond. The translation of scientific and cultural theories are both carefully considered and will give researchers across the “Arts and Sciences” a window into both their colleagues’ fields and habits of mind. As a gold-star humanities scholar, I feel more equipped to ask questions about adaptationism and umwelt in my own research after this gracious explication by Kamath and Packer. 

This translation work makes the book particularly attractive as a teaching text. The bibliography is full of literature begging to be put in fruitful conversation on a Queer/Feminist STS syllabus in which chapters of Feminism in the Wild would form an engaging theoretical and historiographic throughline. While it’s more historiographic than archival, the scientific histories they utilize throughout could easily be brought to life in the classroom with a few key primary sources. And for anyone also teaching Animal Behavior (Rubenstein and Alcock, 2019) I can only imagine the discussions reading a chapter (or two!) of Feminism in the Wild might inspire.