Brown Bodies in White Coats: Maori Women Scientists and Identity

Abstract

The literature on women and science primarily targets issues of access and participation and it has tended to scrutinise structural barriers to participation, recover narratives of women scientists to raise their profile, and focus substantially on the history of science. While this literature has contributed much to our understanding of women and science, the role of colonialism and the embodiment of ‘race’ in women's participation in science have been rendered ‘invisible’. This paper is drawn from a wider research project that includes open‐ended interviews with 16 Maori women scientists. For this paper, I have focused on parts of the women's interviews when they were asked to discuss their identity in relation to their work. I draw on feminist, postcolonial, and poststructural theories to explore some of the conditions by which the subject ‘Maori women scientist’ emerges in the workplace and how the Maori women experience these conditions in relation to how they see themselves. I will argue that the term ‘Maori woman scientist’ appears to be ‘impossible fiction’ due to the fragmented nature of the identity, ‘Maori’, ‘woman’, and ‘scientist’.