Love, Power and Knowledge

Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences

Hilary Rose

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745610016, 9780745610009
• eBook ISBN: 9780745668468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Hilary Rose develops new terms for thinking about science and feminism, locating the feminist criticism of science as both integral to the feminist movement and to the radical science movement.

Introduction: Is a Feminist Science Possible?

Science it would seem is not sexless; she is a man, a father and infected too.

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to beat him at his own game but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

To ask, ‘Is feminist science possible?’ is to return to our own history of struggle and the contradictory relationship of feminism to science and its changing definition.¹ For second-wave feminism, science and technology have not – with the almost single and certainly exceptional voice of Shulamith Firestone – been seen as progressive for women’s interests. There has been little chance of invoking the metaphor, unhappy or otherwise, of courtship and marriage that was widely used to foster the hoped-for relationship between marxism and feminism. Where the radical science movement of the 1960s had to free itself from the progressivist claims of science – to show that science was not even neutral but often oppressive and antithetical to human liberation – many women, already outside such progressivist claims as a result of their very exclusion from science, had a hunch that modern science and technology served all too often as means of domination and not liberation.

Overtly relegated to nature by the recrudescence during the seventies of the patriarchal determinism of sociobiology, feminists learnt to uncover and contest the practices of an androcentric science. In claiming a place in culture, feminism has had to think much more deeply about both social relationships and the relationship of women to nature. Indeed feminist biologists, in contesting the boundaries of nature and culture laid down by sociobiology, understood in a direct and practical way that as women we, our bodies and ourselves, are part both of nature and of culture. Political and cultural struggles waged by feminists within and without science have contested a patriarchal science’s right to determine those boundaries. For the most part feminist struggles have resisted biological determinism, which reduced women to nothing but their wombs, hormones, genes, or whatever was the bodily part in biological fashion,² but there is also a record of feminists using nature – even essentialism – as a resource in the defence of women.³

The recurrent mood, as and when the feminist movement preoccupied itself with science, has been one of anger. This anger extended from a sense of injustice at being shut out of an activity that some women, despite the engendered rules of the game, always wanted to take part in to an overwhelming sense of fury that masculinist science and technology are part of a culture of death. The ideology of science, proclaiming objectivity, freedom from values, and dispassionate pursuit of truth, has excluded women and been integral to our cultural domination, has harmed women’s bodies (in our best interests, of course), and has threatened the environment itself. That science claimed its ideological purity, leaving by implication its partner technology to carry the responsibility for the dirty side of the relationship, was part of science’s skill at conveying a culture of no culture.

Second-wave feminism began relatively slowly to analyse and contest science, to see the connections between this entity called ‘science’ and those issues that the movement defined as its own.⁴ There were good reasons why the movement was slow; its central preoccupation was with women’s shared experience, to reclaim what had been denied or trivialized out of existence and return it to social and political existence. The feminist movement has developed and changed in many ways since those early, path-breaking years of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, to consider housework, abortion, sexuality, love, birth control, motherhood and male violence as central social issues was to work against the grain of an arrogant and naturalizing masculinism. Feminism necessarily embraced body politics; the struggle for the repossession of our bodies, including knowledge about them, was to become central to the movement. The very process of examining these everyday aspects of women’s lives, learning to speak about them, forged new concepts, new names.

Naming – conceptualizing – has been rightly seen within feminism as empowerment.⁵ Naming brings into consciousness phenomena and experiences hitherto denied space in both nature and culture. In the fierce opposition to new concepts, it becomes clear that often these are not merely unacknowledged aspects of reality waiting to be discovered, but are actively erased by the values of the dominant culture. Even today feminism’s concept of gender meets strong resistance from androcentric social theorists, or it is used as a euphemism for women, thus denying relationality and so diminishing the political and cultural claims. Naming, above all when the words become part of the language of new historic subjects seeking to take their place in society, simultaneously contests existing hegemony and affirms a changed consciousness of reality.

Feminists both constructed new knowledge, new accounts of the world from the perspective of women’s everyday lives, and also tore down existing hegemonic ideas. Central concepts which had organized thought and culture, not least sacred reason itelf, were interrogated and found to be far from some timeless universal thought form, but instead a gendered, historically and geographically specific construct. The intense abstractionism of masculine thought came into visibility.⁶ To catch the distinctive character of women’s and feminist thought, feminists evoked alternative metaphors of spinning and quilt-making, reconstructions of a responsible rationality, of an ethic of care.⁷ As Adrienne Rich wrote: I am convinced that ‘there are ways of thinking that we don’t yet know about. I take these words to mean that many women are even now thinking in ways which traditional intellection denies, decries or is unable to grasp.’

Although feminism has touched women’s lives the world over and draws increasing numbers of women into its vortex, it is none the less true that the movement has been strongest within the old capitalist societies – and it is here that the discussion of science has been most intense. This is not to say that feminists in what were the societies of ‘actually existing socialism’ and third world or sometimes black feminists within advanced industrial societies have experienced science and technology in a particularly favourable way; rather that, for necessary reasons, their attention has been primarily focused elsewhere. It has been the unremitting struggle to produce enough food without further green revolutions harming people and land alike, the struggle against disease, not least the AIDS which sweeps Africa, and other crises of the environment which have placed science and technology on the agenda of third world women’s struggles to survive.⁸

From the earliest days of the radical science movement of the 1960s, the critique of science and technology has focused attention on the ways in which existing science and technology are locked into the contemporary forms of capitalism and imperialism as systems of domination. This denunciation has served two functions. Negatively, it has facilitated the growth of an antipathy to science that rejects all scientific investigation carried out under any conditions and at any historical time.⁹ Within feminism this took the form of denouncing all of science and technology as monolithically and irretrievably male. More positively, the denunciation has fostered the difficult task of constructing, in a prefigurative way, both the forms and the content of a different, alternative science – one that anticipates the science and technology possible in a new society and, at the same time, contributes through innovatory practice to the realization of that society.¹⁰ But from its inception, with its false starts as well as real achievements, its perilous balancing between atheoretical activism and abstract theoreticism, the project was not without its contradictions and difficulties. Feminism is just beginning to recapture the full force of Virginia Woolf’s compelling aphorism; science, it would seem – to rephrase – is neither raceless, sexless nor classless; she is a white man, bourgeois, and infected too.

The trouble with science and technology from a feminist perspective is that they are integral not only to the systems of domination of late capitalism and its new forms of imperialism, but also to one of patriarchal domination; yet to try to discuss science under these structures of domination or to argue that they constitute one social formation has proved peculiarly difficult. The present chapter serves to open that discussion by looking, first, at the radical critique of science of the 1960s and 1970s, and then at the growing body of feminist scholarship which developed partly in co-operation with, and partly against, the androcentric voice of the radical science movement.¹¹

The radical critique of science

The critique of science was to explode into practice and to struggle into theory during the radical movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The rich and complex issues contained in the class and social struggles of those movements were frequently narrowed and constrained as the theoreticians filtered the wealth of lived experience through the abstract categories of theory. From an early rhetoric which attacked with a certain even-handedness the class society, imperialism, racism and sexism (those who were black, colonized or women might well have had doubts about their equal prioritization in practice as well as in rhetoric), two main lines of analysis were devloped. The first considered the political economy of science, and the second took up the relationship between science and ideology. While the two are linked at many points, work in political economy was more coherently developed; work on the debate over science and ideology was and remains more problematic.¹²

The need to reply immediately to the renewed biological determinism of the 1970s and 1980s was urgent as scientific racism sustained a growing political racism. In Britain the movement did not manage well the double task of opposition and maintaining internal coalitions. As I discuss later, despite the potential alliance between the critics of IQ theory, in which social constructionists and those who argued that it was ‘bad science’ ideologically organized around race and class interests shared a common project of overturning a would-be canonical IQ theory,¹³ the movement split. In a larger country with a larger movement this might have been less significant. As it was the split did tremendous harm, making it very difficult for radical working scientists and radical social constructionists to co-operate. At the time my own feeling was that such radical relativism, such hyper-reflexivity, aided the monolithic rejection of science which was simultaneously being proposed by the counterculture.¹⁴

The new left came into existence opposing the old left analysis which claimed that there was an inevitable contradiction between the productive forces unleashed by science and the capitalist order. Within the old left account science was seen as uninfluenced by class, race, gender, nationality or politics; it was the abstract accumulation of knowledge – of facts, theories and techniques – which could be ‘used’ or ‘abused’ by society.

In the chill early years of the cold war the only space open to left scientists was to criticize science’s use for militaristic purposes, a space epitomized in Britain by the organization of Science for Peace. While this movement failed to criticize the content of science, one of its abiding offshoots has been the continued struggle against the scale and proportion of the British science budget spent on military purposes – a struggle no less urgent in the 1990s. Despite the collapse of the former Soviet Union there has been little in the way of resetting of research objectives, so that half the UK science budget is still directed towards military ends.¹⁵

But the experiences of the sixties and seventies overthrew notions of reharnessing actually existing science. What the sixties’ radicals discovered in their campaigns against a militarized and polluting science was that those in charge of ‘neutral’ science were overwhelmingly white and male occupants of positions of power within advanced industrialized society – whether the project of that society was capitalism or state socialism. The anti-human (and as feminists were increasingly to demonstrate, the specifically anti-women) technologies that science generated were being used for the profit of some and the distress of many. Thus the politics of experience brought the radical movement’s attitudes toward science into a confrontation with the old left analysis of science, in particular in an effort to recover those hopes of a second science, a science for the people, which had been a striking feature of the early days of the Soviet revolution but had subsequently been brutally destroyed. Hope for that lay buried in the cupboard of the Lysenko affair, and disinterring and coming to terms with this denied past was critical for the radical science movement.

The Lysenko affair epitomizes the period from the 1930s to the 1950s in the Soviet Union, during which there was an attempt to develop a specifically proletarian interpretation of all culture, including the natural sciences.¹⁶ This interpretation of the history of science, with its thesis of the ‘Two Sciences’ (bourgeois and proletarian), had been raised by the theorists from the young Soviet Union and introduced to the West at the 1931 International Conference for the History of Science in London. The thesis was strongly attractive to a group of young British marxist scientists, who wanted to revolutionize their science along with their society. Such hopes died in the Lysenko controversy. Against the genetic consensus, but apparently in accord with dialectical principles, the plant breeder Trofim Lysenko advanced the thesis that acquired characteristics are inherited. Initially it was merely a scientific dispute, but Lysenko also set his social origins as a peasant (and thus his experiential knowledge as a proletarian) against the aristocratic origins (and therefore abstract knowledge as a bourgeois) of his leading opponent, Nikolai Vavilov. The debate was resolved by Lysenko’s presentation of falsified statistics on the amounts of grain produced and by the direct intervention of Stalin on the side of this fraudulent, but proletarian-claiming, science. In 1940 Vavilov was arrested and Lysenko became director of the key Agricultural Research Institute.¹⁷ Marxist scholarship at the time, as for example expressed in the debates within the British Communist Party, particularly in the natural science group (the Engels Society), tore itself apart on the issue, which was ultimately presented starkly as a matter of loyalty to the Soviet system at the height of the cold war. Many biologists and geneticists distanced themselves from the Party, leaving non-biologists, above all the distinguished crystallographer J. D. Bernal, a leading figure within the Communist Party, to support Lysenko’s claims in loyalty to the Soviet Union. The Engels Society soon ceased to exist.

Thus, when the radical movement of the 1960s and 1970s turned to marxist analyses of the natural sciences, it found either the terrifying language of ‘mistakes’ and a desire to repress all mention of the past or an insistence, by for example the biologist and historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham, a figure from the old left but who was felt to be more sympathetic to the aspirations of the radical science movement, that there is only one universal modern science.¹⁸ Nor was the movement helped by the special status of science within the history of marxism – from Marx’s and Engels’s claims for a scientific socialism, Engel’s tendency to claim scientists as natural allies of socialism, and Lenin’s enthusiasm for the Taylorist scientific management of industrial production to Althusser’s structuralist project to r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction: Is a Feminist Science Possible?
• 2 Thinking from Caring: Feminism’s Construction of a Responsible Rationality
• 3 Feminism and the Academy: Success and Incorporation
• 4 Listening to Each Other: Feminist Voices in the Theory of Scientific Knowledge
• 5 Gender at Work in the Production System of Science
• 6 Joining the Procession: ‘Man’aging the Entry of Women into the Royal Society
• 7 Nine Decades, Nine Women, Ten Nobel Prizes: Gender Politics at the Apex of Science
• 8 Feminism and the Genetic Turn: Challenging Reproductive Technoscience
• 9 Dreaming the Future: Other Wor(l)ds
• Epilogue: Women’s Work is Never Done
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index