Problematizing Institutions of U.S. National Security: From White Scientific Masculinity to Biodefense
This blog was previously published on July 29th, 2016.
As I revisit this piece nearly four years later, the globe is struggling with a pandemic that has devastated public health and national economies. COVID-19 has drastically altered how people interact, gather, and congregate in institutional settings such as workplaces, schools, and churches. In the midst of such uncertainty and rapid social change, fear and blame abound, latching onto convenient scapegoats such as China, where the disease was first identified. One prominent topic of discussion is the origin story of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes the disease; some have glommed onto the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made, derived from a lab—possibly a bioweapons lab—that accidentally released the virus. While largely contradicted by scientific studies that show the virus likely originated in an animal host (namely, bats), U.S. President Trump has promulgated the idea that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a Chinese lab, namely, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Trump’s finger-pointing at China, in addition to being an obvious attempt to stoke his racist, xenophobic political base, also obscures the reality—that laboratory research on dangerous germs (including germ weapons) is a global phenomenon in which the United States is a leading participant. Trump’s deflection serves to shield U.S. research on germs and biological weapons (so-called biodefense research) from scrutiny. My original blog post (and article) focused on the 2001 anthrax mailings, which revealed both the dangers of U.S. biodefense research and how government authorities and mass media deployed raced and gendered discourses of national security to shore it up.
Biological weapons are neither the most accessible of topics, nor an obviously feminist issue. Yet, the anthrax mailings of 2001 both captured the U.S. public’s imagination, and sparked a nine-year criminal investigation brimming with implications about gender, race, and nation. The lengthy FBI-led investigation was noteworthy in that it resulted in the identification of a white male government biodefense scientist as the culprit. What’s more, as I show in my article, the investigation, and mass news media coverage of the same, produced profiles of the perpetrator that ultimately served to defend the authority of biodefense, government science, and white males—a complex I name “white scientific masculinity”—as trusted sources of national security.
I became interested in the anthrax mailings in late 2002 while conducting research on the role of the biosciences and public health in U.S. imperialism during the War on Terror. As my research led me to examine, for example, the social implications of heightened security regulations in biomedical research, in my everyday life I continually engaged in discussions with colleagues and friends about ongoing developments of the war on terror. A sporadic, if recurrent, topic was the anthrax investigation. For the investigation contained a great many curiosities—from its revelation that the source of anthrax used in the mailings originated in U.S. biodefense laboratories to its revelation that the most likely culprit was an elite biodefense scientist working, ironically, on countermeasures to bioterrorism.
As a feminist science studies scholar, the stakes of the investigation jumped out at me—these revelations had the potential to disrupt normative assumptions about the infallibility of biodefense and the assumed trustworthiness of white males. Yet, nowhere did I see a discussion of these important implications—neither in the mainstream press nor in the academic literature. While news media coverage of the investigation certainly focused on the rather sensational idea of the anthrax and the culprit being domestically-based, they went no further in delving into the deeply troubling implications.
The striking absence of such a discussion led me to the following inquiry: How, despite the shocking facts of the investigation that should have undermined the authority of U.S. biodefense and white masculinity, were profilers and journalists able to maintain both as pillars of U.S. national security? What I discovered, and what I show in this article, is that the FBI, profilers, and journalists wielded specific discursive strategies to shore up these unsettling revelations; and they did so in the very crafting of the language of the perpetrator profiles—from the initial profile put out by the FBI at the start of the investigation, to the two subsequent profiles that emerged in later stages of evidence-gathering.
In fact, as my article reveals, the successive perpetrator profiles collectively re-established normative assumptions that
white males are rational and safe, the only exceptions being the “loners,” a trope that has been deployed repeatedly to rationalize the excess of white male mass violence as attributable to disturbed white males (i.e., not your typically trustworthy white male);
science (especially government science) and scientists (especially white male government scientists) are trustworthy and infallible; and finally
if a white male government biodefense scientist is found guilty of a biological weapons attack, he must have done so for noble reasons—as a cautionary tale to the dangers of biological weapons.
The unbelievable, yet unsurprising, way that the anthrax profilers were able to mold dominant discourse to rationalize even the most egregious contradictions is significant for multiple reasons.
Photo by Sarah Pflug from Burst
Perhaps the most enduring point is the limitless malleability of dominant discourse to persist by absorbing contradictory evidence. Thus, one aim of my article is to increase our collective public understanding of how dominant actors (the FBI, journalists) reproduce problematic notions about gender, race, and nation. But my article also aims to draw attention to the problems specific to biodefense research. The anthrax investigation, despite the attempts of profilers to shore up its revelations, highlighted the ongoing dangers of biodefense research.
Even without the scenario of the rogue scientist, biodefense research is plagued by unintentional laboratory accidents. The most recent incident, gaining national coverage, occurred in June 2015 involving the accidental shipment of live anthrax by the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah to labs across the U.S. and internationally. As I discuss in my blog on the topic, these accidents are a problem inherent in biodefense research and can only be addressed if the field is deeply scrutinized, reduced, and/or eliminated altogether. In this context, white scientific masculinity serves as a powerful prop underpinning the authority of this industry, and obscuring its very real dangers. By demonstrating the constructedness of the authority of white scientific masculinity, I hope to also promote a deeper critique of the biodefense field.
Read the full article: ‘Defending White Scientific Masculinity: The FBI, the media and profiling tactics during the post-9/11 anthrax investigation‘
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Gwen D’Arcangelis is associate professor in Gender Studies at Skidmore College. Her areas of teaching and research include gender, race, and science; feminist science fiction; disease and empire; and feminist and anti-imperial praxis. She has published on the construction of white scientific masculinity in U.S. national security discourse, gendered Orientalism in the U.S. news media during the 2003 SARS disease scare, and nurse activism during the War on Terror. She has a forthcoming book, titled Bio-Imperialism: Disease, Terror, and the Construction of National Fragility.