Q&A with Meredith Reiches
The GenderSci Lab is glowing with pride at the news that our very own Assistant Director Professor Meredith Reiches has been awarded the 2019 Catharine Stimpson Prize for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship.
The Prize is among the highest honors available for scholars in women, gender, and sexuality studies. In her winning paper, “Reproductive Justice and the History of Prenatal Supplementation: Ethics, Birth Spacing, and the ‘Priority Infant’ Model in The Gambia,” Reiches documents the failure of prenatal supplementation studies in developing countries to acknowledge the effects of their interventions on women’s fertility. Reiches shows that the failure was both ethical and epistemic. Not only did scientists neglect to fully inform women about the risks of supplements, but they also ignored evidence that contravened their governing theory that a woman’s body always prioritizes the health of the infant. Reiches’ paper exemplifies the best of critical interdisciplinary feminist science studies scholarship, bridging the methods of several disciplines to deeply analyze the science itself while sustaining a transnational reproductive justice framework. In this Q & A, we ask Meredith Reiches about the process of writing the paper, its contributions to bioanthropology and gender studies, and her role in the GenderSci Lab.
GSL: Congratulations, Meredith! What led you to write this paper?
MR: The observation that pregnant women’s bodies, when undernourished, invest less energy in their own function in order to protect the developing fetus has long intrigued me. Even more curious is the finding that these very bodies, when given additional food, use some of it for their own health and the rest to get pregnant again more quickly after giving birth. They don’t, as researchers thought, funnel most of the additional energy to the current pregnancy. I set out to investigate this phenomenon as a curious case of women’s biology behaving differently from what scientists predicted, but I soon discovered that the disconnect between prediction and reality has had significant consequences for women. It became imperative to understand why scientists could discover something so important about women’s reproductive physiology and not use that knowledge in subsequent studies.
GSL: You are a biological anthropologist and a gender studies scholar. What was the process of researching, writing, and submitting this paper for publication like as a scholar who bridges these fields and disciplines?
MR: Producing this piece of interdisciplinary work required two big intellectual stretches for me: learning about the knowledge-production methods and standards of the disciplines the article engages—public health, nutrition, biological and cultural anthropology, demography, transnational feminist science studies, even a little history of science—and finding a theoretical framework that would be relevant to an interdisciplinary feminist audience. On the first score, I’m grateful to everyone whose name appears in the acknowledgments, and particularly to Dr. Jenna Tonn, who pointed out the importance of archival research to the project and gave me a tutorial in how to do it. The paper might not have seen the light of day without Professor Sarah Richardson’s insight that, to be legible to a feminist scholarly audience, the argument required an explicitly feminist theoretical framework. This led to my analyzing the empirical material through the lens of reproductive justice.
GSL: How do you hope that prenatal supplementation researchers might change their practices in light of your findings and arguments?
MR: In an ideal world, the public health and nutrition researchers engaged in prenatal supplementation studies would team up with biological anthropologists and feminist scholars to expand the focus of their studies beyond the fetus and infant and to a life course perspective on women’s health and well-being. This means including the women through whose bodies the supplements are intended to act at every phase of study design and execution, and it means focusing on women beyond the target birth and even beyond their reproductive years. In fact, in a truly ideal world, it means eliminating the sources of poverty and inequality that produce the need for supplementation! In pursuit of the first part of this goal, I have a paper forthcoming in the American Journal of Human Biology that speaks directly to the question of how a public health and anthropology partnership might be forged.
GSL: What can feminist science studies scholars and reproductive justice advocates learn from the case of the troubling persistence of the “priority infant” model, despite inconsistent and often negligible empirical support for it?
MR: As James Ferguson notes in his book The Anti-Politics Machine, the apparatus of development is mammoth and, in a structural sense, more invested in its own perpetuation than in dismantling the power relations that make its interventions justifiable. Part of the problem is scale: individuals set out to do good in the world—by helping women have healthier babies, for example—and the points of entry available to them do not solve the underlying problem. Challenging how they go about their work means questioning the training they have received, the institutions that employ them, their funders—in short, the entire premise of their will to help. Such challenges invoke resistance. Perhaps what feminist science studies scholars and reproductive justice advocates can take away from this vision is the knowledge that change has to happen at multiple levels, from individual researchers to international NGOs.
GSL: Could you tell us about your work with the GenderSci Lab? What is your role in the Lab and what sort of research do you do in connection with the Lab’s research streams?
MR: I am Director of Collaborations and Mentoring, meaning that I have the privilege of working with the disciplinarily diverse members of GenderSci Lab to identify and leverage our skills on projects, facilitate the development of new capabilities, and forge collaborations within and beyond the lab. In addition, I direct the research stream that targets “Context and Variation in the Evolutionary Ecology of Sex and Gender.” While the whole lab focuses on the science of sex difference, I’m particularly interested in cases in which evolutionary logic is used to make claims about gender and sex. I bring an anthropologist’s instinct for complexity to the topic, exploring how expressions of gender and sex vary within and among individuals and populations. One example is this blog piece, which highlights research that challenges the claim that men evolved to be attracted to women with small waists because they are healthier and more fertile. Stay tuned for work on testosterone, evolution, and masculinity!
Originally published at https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gendersci/blog/qa-gendersci-lab-assistant-director-meredith-reiches-winner-2019-catharine-stimpson