There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

/pdf/situated-knowledges-the-science-question-in-feminism-and-the-50s6kk2g1e.pdf

Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Recent social studies of science and technology, for example, have made available a very strong social constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge claims, most certainly and especially scientific ones. Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become answerable for what we learn how to see. The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology. “Passionate detachment” requires more than acknowledged and self-critical partiality. Positioning is, therefore, the key practice in grounding knowledge organized around the imagery of vision, and much Western scientific and philosophic discourse is organized in this way. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.

/pdf/situated-knowledges-the-science-question-in-feminism-and-the-ttb7c49cb5.pdf

Situated Knowledges : The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all
women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of 
genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in
the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the 
relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations
and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could 
evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution 
that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800

The Complexity of Intersectionality

1980 Preface * 1999 Preface * 1999 Acknowledgements * Introduction * 1 Circular Logic * 2 Phase Singularities (Screwy Results of Circular Logic) * 3 The Rules of the Ring * 4 Ring Populations * 5 Getting Off the Ring * 6 Attracting Cycles and Isochrons * 7 Measuring the Trajectories of a Circadian Clock * 8 Populations of Attractor Cycle Oscillators * 9 Excitable Kinetics and Excitable Media * 10 The Varieties of Phaseless Experience: In Which the Geometrical Orderliness of Rhythmic Organization Breaks Down in Diverse Ways * 11 The Firefly Machine 12 Energy Metabolism in Cells * 13 The Malonic Acid Reagent ('Sodium Geometrate') * 14 Electrical Rhythmicity and Excitability in Cell Membranes * 15 The Aggregation of Slime Mold Amoebae * 16 Numerical Organizing Centers * 17 Electrical Singular Filaments in the Heart Wall * 18 Pattern Formation in the Fungi * 19 Circadian Rhythms in General * 20 The Circadian Clocks of Insect Eclosion * 21 The Flower of Kalanchoe * 22 The Cell Mitotic Cycle * 23 The Female Cycle * References * Index of Names * Index of Subjects

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/596B270197FE27DE5FABB598B6210622/S0025557200150892a.pdf/div-class-title-span-class-italic-the-geometry-of-biological-time-span-by-a-t-winfree-pp-544-dm68-corrected-second-printing-1990-isbn-3-540-52528-9-springer-div.pdf

The geometry of biological time , by A. T. Winfree. Pp 544. DM68. Corrected Second Printing 1990. ISBN 3-540-52528-9 (Springer)

3. The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism Between Telegraphs and Computers

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include the progressive encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning (and measure) of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.

Demarcating public from private values in evolutionary discourse

Synopsis Despite the multiple fractures that have occurred over the last few years in feminist theory, I argue that the center of that venture continues to hold firm. If nowhere else, it holds in the force of the transcultural association between women's bodies and the birth of new living beings. But equally, it holds in the recognition of the cultural variability of the meanings attached to this basic association. Indeed, it is here that I would invoke (and perhaps reinstate) a form of that distinction that was so important to feminists of the seventies, namely the distinction between sex and gender. If “sex” is that which we are given by “nature,” and “gender” that which derives from culture (i.e., the cultural representation of sex), then we need to underscore that what is left to both “sex” and “nature” is now little enough. But it is not yet nothing. Even disavowing all representational plasticity, there remains a core of observational experience that has thus far defied modulation. The premises of feminist theory require us to both acknowledge this observational core, and, at the same time, expose and examine the enormous variability in meanings that are inevitably superposed on it. Only when we have revealed the specificity of the forms and consequences of the interpretive structures built around this core in any given particular cultural context, ultimately in all cultural contexts, will we have done our work.

Evelyn Fox Keller

Papers

3. The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism Between Telegraphs and Computers

Demarcating public from private values in evolutionary discourse

Holding the center of feminist theory

On the need to count past two in our thinking about gender and science

Climate science, truth, and democracy