This engineering which is not one: Encountering Irigaray in heat and mass transfer

In a Heat and Mass Transfer class, seven female junior and senior engineering students were engaged with a rare, contentious, but potentially empowering feminist critique of fluid mechanics. French thinker Luce Irigaray's “The ‘Mechanics’ of Fluids” was taught as part of an NSF-funded project implementing liberative pedagogies in engineering education. The goals of engaging students with Irigaray's argument were to encourage them (1) to think critically about fluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer, and gender in engineering; (2) to learn to situate themselves within what is traditionally a male-oriented discourse, and take some ownership over it as a form of liberation; and (3) to re-imagine feminist engineering approaches to heat and mass transfer as a form of reflective action. We first motivate our approach of teaching engineering methods and their critiques in dialogue. We then introduce the work's theoretical positions in the context of later feminist critiques and describe how it can be in dialogue with engineering and that in spite surface readings to the contrary.