Becoming a Weapons Scientist

Hugh Gusterson’s Becoming a Weapons Scientist highlights the importance of recognizing the situation of an ethnographer and his subject.  Gusterson, a self admitted antinuclear activist, decided to pursue his studies in anthropology by working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  His paper focused on Sylvia, a Japanese American nuclear warhead designer- a rarity both in the laboratory and the field itself.  I find it interesting that he makes it clear that his expectations and interpretations of Sylvia, her laboratory, and the nuclear design field are colored by his experiences as an antinuclear activist.  For instance, as a woman with Japanese ancestry whose life was influenced by Hiroshima, he was surprised to see that she was part of a lab that designed weapons, "Surely she of all people should know better" [than to design weapons].  To me, this came off as slightly presumptuous, as if being against nuclear weapons was the 'better' option.  I find his stance interesting because in many ethnographies I have encountered the authors with some personal opinions that shape their perspectives, however, I have not encountered many authors with a vested interest against that of their subject.
I also found Gusterson's role as an antinuclear activist key in shaping his expectations of a typical profile of a nuclear warhead designer.  As a female designer, Sylvia challenged his preconceived notions of a masculine field.  He spent a decent portion of his paper describing his encounters with the antinuclear weapons community as being dominated by female leadership.  As an anthropologist, his beliefs on what role femininity played in the nuclear warheads movement was challenged and I enjoyed seeing him face this and accept that his preconceived notions were misleading.  He discovered a new meaning of feminism, "I'm fighting for everybody's rights, not just women."
Finally, I appreciated reading this paper after reading the Pilgrim's Progress: Male Tales Told During a Life in Physics.  In Gusteron's paper, he described the way gender roles influenced Sylvia's experiences from schooling to her job at the laboratory.  He noted that in school, students were exposed to an environment where female professors were in the minority and were put down by their male counterparts (including chairmen of their respective departments).  Specifically, he said that women had lower salaries than male counterparts and were threatened to not get tenure because of their gender.  Traweek's paper described the stages of learning and how graduate school was crucial in learning facts and more about the people in the field and the way things worked for those who were engaged in the field (ie. professors). If graduate school is truly a place to learn the logistics of the field, this is a lesson students would pick up on.  The message this would send to students on gender roles would likely carry over into the researchers/post graduate stage (as classified by Traweek), and continue into a work setting, perpetuating the cycle of gender roles within a laboratory.