The ‘seductive scientist’: the emergence of a new persona centred on virility and joy in twentieth-century scientific memoirs

Abstract

This text investigates the twentieth-century scientific memoir genre from the perspective of two of its perhaps most influential contributors, the American Nobel laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, by using theoretical tools from masculinity studies and the studies of scientific personae. The term ‘the seductive scientist’ is proposed to describe the main innovation to scientific personae that Watson introduces and Feynman perfects: a scientist who is brutally honest, openly seeks joy and fun, and is interested in sexual conquests. To include these topics is deliberately provocative in relation to earlier scientific personae, most importantly ‘the reverential scientist’, aiming for gravitas and depicting the scientific life as revolving around awe. As is shown, however, the seductive scientist, for all its bravado, is actually a persona which only promotes mild, non-disruptive rebellion. Rather than actually challenging the system, it incorporates several aspects of counter-cultural critique against science, showing it to not be pompous, conformist and boring, but rather fun, exciting and full of life. This reconfiguration of self-presentations by scientists, then, strongly influences the scientific memoir as a genre, affecting the ability of scientists to speak in the name of science.