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Our Day in Their Shadow: Critical Remembrance, Feminist Science and the Women of the Manhattan Project
Author(s) -
LeeAnne Broadhead
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
peace and conflict studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.116
H-Index - 6
ISSN - 1082-7307
DOI - 10.46743/1082-7307/2009.1096
Subject(s) - shadow (psychology) , legitimacy , reductionism , manhattan project , politics , narrative , sociology , gender studies , political science , environmental ethics , media studies , nuclear weapon , law , psychology , epistemology , psychoanalysis , art , literature , philosophy
Inspired by the publication of a book celebrating the role of the women in the Manhattan Project, this paper seeks to demonstrate that such an effort – to the extent it accepts and endorses the historical, political and scientific legitimacy of the Project – is both misguided and dangerous. An alternative feminist critique is presented: one respecting the views of those scientists (men and women) who refused to participate or who have sought to challenge the reductionist Western scientific paradigm from which the Bomb emerged. Illumination of the repressive and hierarchal structures requisite for the “birth” of the nuclear age is undertaken and views excised by the official narrative – the voices of wives, daughters and victims – are recalled. In constructing this “counter-narrative”, critical stress is laid on the multiple negative legacies of the Project and the positive requirement for humane, sustainable alternatives to the poisonous technologies often spawned by current forms of scientific inquiry.