Inside the Social World of Asocials: White Nerd Masculinity, Science, and the Politics of Reverent Disdain

Abstract

We use “reverent disdain” to capture contemporary ambivalence toward the sciences. Science is considered both largely irrelevant within the study of politics, culture, and history and, at the same time, the revered candle in the dark that needs to be kept lit, lest superstition overtake humankind. Reverent disdain reveals a great deal about public engagement with science since both reverence and disdain mark science as exceptional. We use hit TV show The Big Bang Theory to examine how the paradox operates, through racialized and gendered constructions of brilliance, to police the bounds of knowledge making about science's proper objects (nature, bodies, etc.). Race and gender are key mechanisms by which this paradox is naturalized, separating science from culture and, thus, practice from critique. For feminist science studies, as we begin to comprehend how racism and sexism shape the very definition of science, we must develop approaches that allow us to bring old-fashioned questions about “representation” and newfangled questions about “materialism” into the same frame.