Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death

Essays on Science and Culture

Evelyn Fox Keller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317857204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

The essays included here represent Fox Keller's attempts to integrate the insights of feminist theory with those of her contemporaries in the history and philosophy of science.

PART I

1

Gender and Science: An Update

Introduction

The Meaning of Gender

Schemes for classifying human beings are necessarily multiple and highly variable. Different cultures identify and privilege different criteria in sorting people of their own and other cultures into groups: They may stress size, age, color, occupation, wealth, sanctity, wisdom, or a host of other demarcators. All cultures, however, sort a significant fraction of the human beings that inhabit that culture by sex. What are taken to be the principal indicators of sexual difference as well as the particular importance attributed to this difference undoubtedly vary, but, for fairly obvious reasons, people everywhere engage in the basic act of distinguishing people they call male from those they call female. For the most part, they even agree about who gets called what. Give or take a few marginal cases, these basic acts of categorization do exhibit conspicuous cross-cultural consensus: Different cultures will sort any given collection of adult human beings of reproductive age into the same two groups. For this reason, we can say that there is at least a minimal sense of the term “sex” that denotes categories given to us by nature.¹ One might even say that the universal importance of the reproductive consequences of sexual difference gives rise to as universal a preoccupation with the meaning of this difference.

But for all the cross-cultural consensus we may find around such a minimalist classification, we find equally remarkable cultural variability in what people have made and continue to make of this demarcation; in the significance to which they attribute it; in the properties it connotes; in the role it plays in ordering the human world beyond the immediate spheres of biological reproduction; even in the role it plays in ordering the nonhuman world. It was to underscore this cultural variability that American feminists of the 1970s introduced the distinction between sex and gender, assigning the term “gender” to the meanings of masculinity and femininity that a given culture attaches to the categories of male and female.²

The initial intent behind this distinction was to highlight the importance of nonbiological (that is, social and cultural) factors shaping the development of adult men and women, to emphasize the truth of Simone de Beauvoir's famous dictum, “Women are not born, rather they are made.” Its function was to shift attention away from the time-honored and perhaps even ubiquitous question of the meaning of sexual difference (that is, the meanings of masculine and feminine), to the question of how such meanings are constructed. In Donna Haraway's words, “Gender is a concept developed to contest the naturalization of sexual difference” (1991:131).

Very quickly, however, feminists came to see, and, as quickly, began to exploit, the considerably larger range of analytic functions that the multipotent category of gender is able to serve. From an original focus on gender as a cultural norm guiding the psychosocial development of individual men and women, the attention of feminists soon turned to gender as a cultural structure organizing social (and sexual) relations between men and women,³ and finally, to gender as the basis of a sexual division of cognitive and emotional labor that brackets women, their work, and the values associated with that work from culturally normative delineations of categories intended as “human”–objectivity, morality, citizenship, power, often even, “human nature” itself.⁴ From this perspective, gender and gender norms come to be seen as silent organizers of the mental and discursive maps of the social and natural worlds we simultaneously inhabit and construct–even of those worlds that women never enter.⁵ This I call the symbolic work of gender; it remains silent precisely to the extent that norms associated with masculine culture are taken as universal.

The fact that it took the efforts of contemporary feminism to bring this symbolic work of gender into recognizable view is in itself noteworthy. In these efforts, the dual focus on women as subjects and on gender as a cultural construct was crucial. Analysis of the relevance of gender structures in conventionally male worlds only makes sense once we recognize gender not only as a bimodal term, applying symmetrically to men and women (that is, once we see that men too are gendered, that men too are made rather than born), but also as denoting social rather than natural kinds. Until we can begin to envisage the possibility of alternative arrangements, the symbolic work of gender remains both silent and inaccessible. And as long as gender is thought to pertain only to women, any question about its role can only be understood as a question about the presence or absence of biologically female persons.

This double shift in perception–first, from sex to gender, and second, from the force of gender in shaping the development of men and women to its force in delineating the cultural maps of the social and natural worlds these adults inhabit–constitutes the hallmark of contemporary feminist theory. Beginning in the mid 1970s, feminist historians, literary critics, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, philosophers, and soon, natural scientists as well, sought to supplement earlier feminist analyses of the contribution, treatment, and representation of men and women in these various fields with an enlarged analysis of the ways in which privately held and publicly shared ideas about gender have shaped the underlying assumptions and operant categories in the intellectual history of each of these fields. Put simply, contemporary feminist theory might be described as “a form of attention, a lens that brings into focus a particular question: What does it mean to describe one aspect of human experience as ‘male’ and another as ‘female’? How do such labels affect the ways in which we structure the world around us, assign value to its different domains, and in turn, acculturate and value actual men and women?” (Keller 1985:6).

With such questions as these, feminist scholars launched an intensive investigation of the traces of gender labels evident in many of the fundamental assumptions underlying the traditional academic disciplines. Their earliest efforts were confined to the humanities and social sciences, but by the late 1970s, the lens of feminist inquiry had extended to the natural sciences as well. Under particular scrutiny came those assumptions that posited a dichotomous (and hierarchical) structure tacitly modeled on the prior assumption of a dichotomous (and hierarchical) relation between male and female–for example, public/private; political/personal; reason/feeling; justice/care; objective/subjective; power/love, and so on. The object of this endeavor was not to reverse the conventional ordering of these relations, but to undermine the dichotomies themselves–to expose to radical critique a worldview that deploys categories of gender to rend the fabric of human life and thought along a multiplicity of mutually sanctioning, mutually supportive, and mutually defining binary oppositions.

Feminism and Science

But if the inclusion of the natural sciences under this broad analytic net posed special opportunities, it also posed special difficulties, and special dangers, each of which requires special recognition. On the one hand, the presence of gender markings in the root categories of the natural sciences and their use in the hierarchical ordering of such categories (for example, mind and nature; reason and feeling; objective and subjective) is, if anything, more conspicuous than in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the central claim of the natural sciences is precisely to a methodology that transcends human particularity, that bears no imprint of individual or collective authorship. To signal this dilemma, I began my first inquiry into the relations between gender and science (Keller 1978) with a quote from George Simmel, written more than sixty years ago:

The requirements of… correctness in practical judgments and objectivity in theoretical knowledge … belong as it were in their form and their claims to humanity in general, but in their actual historical configuration they are masculine throughout. Supposing that we describe these things, viewed as absolute ideas, by the single word “objective,” we then find that in the history of our race the equation objective = masculine is a valid one (cited in Keller 1978:409).

Simmel's conclusion, while surely on the mark as a description of a cultural history, alerts us to the special danger that awaits a feminist critique of the natural sciences. Indeed, Simmel himself appears to have fallen into the very trap that we are seeking to expose: In neglecting to specify the space in which he claims “validity” for this equation as a cultural or even ideological space, his wording invites the reading of this space as a biological one. Indeed, by referring to its history as a “history of our race” without specifying “our race” as late-modern, northern European, he tacitly elides the existence of other cultural histories (as well as other “races”) and invites the same conclusion that this cultural history has sought to establish; namely, that “objectivity” is simultaneously a universal value and a privileged possession of the male of the species.

The necessary starting point for a feminist critique of the natural sciences is thus the reframing of this equation as a conundrum: How is it that the scientific mind can be seen at one and the same time as both male and disembodied? How is it that thinking “objectively,” that is, thinking that is defined as self-detached, impersonal, and transcendent, is also understood as “thinking like a man”? From the vantage point of our newly “enlightened” perceptions of gender, we might be tempted to say that the equation “objective = masculine,” harmful though it (like that other equation woman = nature) may have been for aspiring women scientists in the past, was simply a descriptive mistake, reflecting misguided views of women. But what about the views of “objectivity” (or “nature”) that such an equation necessarily also reflected (or inspired)? What difference–for science, now, rather than for women–might such an equation have made? Or, more generally, what sorts of work in the actual production of science has been accomplished by the association of gender with virtually all of the root categories of modern science over the three hundred odd years in which such associations prevailed? How have these associations helped to shape the criteria for “good” science? For distinguishing the values deemed “scientific” from those deemed “unscientific”? In short, what particular cultural norms and values has the language of gender carried into science, and how have these norms and values contributed to its shape and growth?

These, then, are some of the questions that feminist theory brings to the study of science, and that feminist historians and philosophers of science have been trying to answer over the last fifteen years. But, for reasons I have already briefly indicated, they are questions that are strikingly difficult to hold in clear focus (to keep distinct, for example, from questions about the presence or absence of women scientists). For many working scientists, they seem not even to “make sense.”

One might suppose, for example, that once such questions were properly posed (that is, cleansed of any implication about the real abilities of actual women), they would have a special urgency for all practicing scientists who are also women. But experience suggests otherwise; even my own experience suggests otherwise. Despite repeated attempts at clarification, many scientists (especially, women scientists) persist in misreading the force that feminists attribute to gender ideology as a force being attributed to sex, that is, to the claim that women, for biological reasons, would do a different kind of science. The net effect is that, where some of us see a liberating potential (both for women and for science) in exhibiting the historical role of gender in science, these scientists often see only a reactionary potential, fearing its use to support the exclusion of women from science.⁶

The reasons for the divergence in perception between feminist critics and women scientists are deep and complex. Though undoubtedly fueled by political concerns, they rest finally neither on vocabulary, nor on logic, nor even on empirical evidence. Rather, they reflect a fundamental difference in mind-set between feminist critics and working scientists–a difference so radical that a “feminist scientist” appears today as much a contradiction in terms as a “woman scientist” once did.⁷

I need only recall my own trajectory from practicing scientist to feminist critic to appreciate the magnitude of difference between these two mind-sets, as well as the effort required to traverse that difference. In the hope that my experience, with its inevitable idio-syncracies, might prove helpful in furthering our understanding of the more general problem, I offer a reconstruction of that trajectory.

From Working Scientist to Feminist Critic

I begin with three vignettes, all drawn from memory.

1965. In my first few years out of graduate school, I held quite conventional beliefs about science. I believed not only in the possibility of clear and certain knowledge of the world, but also in the uniquely privileged access to this knowledge provided by science in general, and by physics in particular. I believed in the accessibility of an underlying (and unifying) “truth” about the world we live in, and I believed that the laws of physics gave us the closest possible approximation of this truth. In short, I was well trained in both the traditional realist worldviews assumed by virtually all scientists and in the conventional epistemological ordering of the sciences. I had, after all, been trained, first, by theoretical physicists, and later, by molecular biologists. This is not to say that I lived my life according to the teachings of physics (or molecular biology), only that when it came to questions about what “really is,” I knew where, and how, to look. Although I had serious conflicts about my own ability to be part of this venture, I fully accepted science, and scientists, as arbiters of truth. Physics (and physicists) were, of course, the highest arbiters.

Somewhere around this time, I came across the proceedings of the first major conference held in the United States on “Women and the Scientific Professions” (Mattfield and Van Aiken 1965)–a subject of inevitable interest to me. I recall reading in those proceedings an argument for more women in science, made by both Erik Erikson and Bruno Bettelheim, based on the invaluable contributions a “specifically female genius” could make to science. Although earlier in their contributions both Erikson and Bettelheim had each made a number of eminently reasonable observations and recommendations, I flew to these concluding remarks as if waiting for them, indeed forgetting everything else they had said. From the vantage point I then occupied, my reaction was predictable: To put it quite bluntly, I laughed. Laws of nature are universal–how could they possibly depend on the sex of their discoverers? Obviously, I snickered, these psychoanalysts know little enough about science (and by implication, about truth).

1969. I was living in a suburban California house and found myself with time to think seriously about my own mounting conflicts (as well as those of virtually all my female cohorts) about being a scientist. I had taken a leave to accompany my husband on his sabbatical, remaining at home to care for our two s...