ABSTRACT
Feminist science studies emerged in the mid-1980s as a response to the masculinist paradigms of participation and epistemology in the natural sciences. A survey of initial efforts in the area reveals a schism between the women-in-science movement and feminist critiques of science (Hammonds and Subramaniam 2003). The former was predominantly focused on gender equity in science, reflecting the shared awareness that science was dominated by men in terms of membership, status, and access. Participants in women-in-science projects – frequently themselves scientists – worked collaboratively at raising the numbers, improving the conditions, increasing the retention, and strengthening the status of female scientists. Scholarship in the latter area – the feminist critiques of science – tended to be more disciplinarily diverse and driven by the work of individual scholars. There, researchers in a variety of humanities and social science fields took a critical perspective on science itself, arguing that limited definitions of objectivity, sex/ gender, nature, and classification restricted the kinds of questions that scientists could and would ask, and thus the validity and worth of the research results. “Science” is an abstraction, of course; the feminist critique of science focused
initially on physics, and later on biology, as the target scientific discipline, with other disciplines soon taking their turn in the spotlight (Hammonds and Subramaniam 2003: 925). At conferences, academic meetings, and in academic journals, these two realms of feminist research celebrated their shared commitment to feminist intervention into scientific practice, hoping to produce what Sandra Harding called a “successor science” (Harding 1986: 197). Yet they struggled to find common ground in their formulation of the appropriate goals, strategies, and methods for making that intervention. The challenge facing feminist science studies was captured by Donna Haraway’s formulation of “my problem and our problem,”
how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice
for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a real world, one that can be partially shared and friendly to earth-wide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.
