(Hyper)/(In)visible Women: Deconstructing narratives of New Zealand women in science 1993-2017

Abstract

Formal narratives of New Zealand science prior to 1993 tended to focus on key men responsible for the emergence of a science community. The Women’s Suffrage Centennial Science Conference, organised by the Association of Women in Science (AWiS), and held in Wellington in September 1993, marks a notable discursive change in the ways in which women in science were and are described and celebrated. The book that emerged from the conference, Lives with Science: Profiles of Senior Women in Science, by Paula Morris, was the first text to centre women’s experiences, and ‘start thought from women’s lives.’ Considering narratives of women in science in New Zealand, this paper explores a transition from socially-sanctioned invisibility for women scientists prior to 1993, through the women-centred discourses of the 1990s, and critically engages with a contemporary culture of socially transgressive hypervisibility for women scientists such as Siouxsie Wiles, Nicola Gaston, and Michelle Dickinson (Nanogirl). Sanctioned or transgressive presentation or representation in a variety of narratives will be contextualised by a group of tropes within which women scientists’ visibility is coded. Perceived hypervisibility is as disadvantageous to women scientists now as invisibility was historically. The hypervisibility of women in science and technology discourses contrasts with the low uptake of science, technology, and engineering careers by women – and exploring the impacts of hypervisibility and invisibility in historic and contemporary narratives of New Zealand science provides an opportunity to explore issues of presentation and representation, via deconstruction of socially sanctioned compliance or socially unacceptable transgression.