Abstract: I want to suggest that what is distinctive about contemporary feminist criticism of science begins with the identification of gender as an analytic tool in the study of science. Roughly ten years ago, studies of women per se, or of sexual difference, gave rise (with the kind of inexorable logic of feminist inquiry that has been exhibited in other fields) to the study of the more global symbolic and structural work of gender labels. Our purpose in this move was not to privilege gender as a social marker, conspicuous though it may be, but rather to underscore and respond to the de facto privileging of gender that is already in evidence, and that has indeed been evident throughout the history of scientific discourse. We have argued that the language of gender has been employed, at least since the origins of modern science, as a persistent and privileged marker of precisely those distinctions that have been most central to the cognitive and social politics of scientific growth. From the seventeenth century on, particular ideals of masculine and feminine have been persistently called upon to delineate and order the domains of mind and nature, reason and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. Only a virile mind, properly cleansed of all traces of femininity, could effectively consummate Bacon's ideal of a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature-a sacred contract for leading Nature with all her children to bind her to [man's] service and make her [his] slave. Our intent in signaling the role of gender in scientific rhetoric was not to reinforce but to defuse the force of this rhetoric. To this end, it was necessary first to uncover the uses of gender in science that were already in existence, to expose the presence (and force) of gender imagery that was so familiar it had become almost invisible. In other words, our
Publication Year: 1988
Publication Date: 1988-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 23
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