The greenhouse of interdisciplinarity

A variety of concepts and metaphors are used when people try to explain that their research is involved with different discourses simultaneously. Webs, fields or networks of connections are rather popular, just as intersections, interdisciplinarity and the construction of conversations. Although interdisciplinarity seems the most academic label, it most aptly addresses the approach of this study. What does it mean to be or to move inter disciplines? And which disciplines are involved when a science fiction story is read by a feminist theologian?

In an article called ‘Science Fictions’, Corinne Squire energetically argues for linking feminist psychology to science fiction. In particular her ideas about interdisciplinarity wonderfully apply, mutatis mutandis, to feminist theology as well. Feminist theologians frequently express a desire to be more interdisciplinary, without it always being clear what this ‘vague yet ubiquitous concept’ signifies. ‘Does it mean adding one discipline to another, obliterating the boundaries that separate them or falling into the cracks between them? Is it a viable aim?’ Squire makes the remarkable suggestion to turn to science fiction's interdisciplinary ‘gossip status’ for orientation. Squire derives the idea for this qualification from a male protagonist in the science fiction story ‘The View from Venus’, written by Karen Joy Fowler. This person explains that the difference between female and male writers, ‘between Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad’, is the difference between gossip and insight.

Rendered freely, this translates into the hardly innovative thought that female authors merely conjecture, they work with intuitions, associations and suspicions, while their male collaegues boldly analyse reality, formulating their insights with razor-sharp wit. In other words, women have subjective and men have objective views. A familiar cliché. But notice the female protagonist's riposte, ‘I'm not sure a clear distinction can be made between the two. Who knows more about people than the gossips?’ And who could tell us more, I would add by extension, about God and the divine than the storytellers of all religions?

The most obvious parallel science fiction offers to both psychological and theological women's studies’ interdisciplinary status is its ambiguous scientific character. Science fiction hovers between science and fiction, between science and non-science.