Hilary Rose

Abstract: ion of scientific practice as it has developed under capitalism and patriarchy, on one hand, is in painful contradiction with her caring labor, on the other. As Ruth Wallsgrove writes, "A woman, especially if she has any ambition or education, receives two kinds of messages: the kind that tells her what it is to be a successful person; and the kind that tells her what it is to be a 'real' woman."26 Small wonder that women, let alone feminists, working in natural science and engineering are rarities. It is difficult enough to suppress half of oneself to pursue knowledge of the natural world as a woman; it is even more difficult to develop a feminist epistemology.27 Part of that feminist epistemology involves creation of a practice of feeling, thinking, and writing that opposes the abstraction of male and bourgeois scientific thought. Reconceptualizing Science Feminist theorizing about science is of a piece with feminist theoretical production. Unlike the alienated abstract knowledge of science, feminist methodology seeks to bring together subjective and objective ways of knowing the world. It begins with and constantly returns 24. Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and D.N.A.: A Vivid View of What It Is Like to Be a Gifted Woman in an Especially Male Profession (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1975). 25. Evelyn Fox Keller, "The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics," in Working It Out: 23 Women, Writers, Scientists and Scholars Talk about Their Lives, ed. Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977); Naomi Weisstein, "Adventures of a Woman in Science," in Working It Out. 26. Wallsgrove (n. 2 above), p. 237. 27. Feminism has been quick to spell out its methodology, but slower when it comes to epistemology; see, e.g., Helen Roberts, ed., Feminist Methodology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981). Signs This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hand, Brain, and Heart to the subjective shared experience of oppression. It is important to stress shared experience, since the purely personal account of oppression, while casting some brilliant insights, may tell us more about the essentially idiosyncratic character of individual experience than about the general experience of all or even most women. Nonetheless, within feminist theoretical production, experience, the living participating "I," is seen as a dimension that must be included in an adequate analysis.28 The very fact that women are, by and large, shut out of the production system of scientific knowledge, with its ideological power to define what is and what is not objective knowledge, paradoxically has offered feminists a fresh page on which to write.29 Largely ignored by the oppressors and their systems of knowledge, feminists have necessarily theorized from practice and returned theory to practice. While it would be false to suggest that all work claiming to be feminist achieves this dialectical synthesis, there is a sense in which theoretical writing looks and must look to the women's movement rather than to the male academy. Working from the experience of the specific oppression of women fuses the personal, the social, and the biological. It is not surprising that, within the natural sciences, it has been in biology and medicine that feminists have sought to defend women's interests and advance feminist interpretations. To take an example: menstruation, which so many women experience as distressing or at best uncomfortable, has generated a tremendous amount of collective discussion, study, and writing. A preeminent characteristic of these investigations lies in their fusing of subjective and objective knowledge in such a way as to make new knowledge. Cartesian dualism, biological determinism, and social constructionism fade when faced with the necessity of integrating and interpreting the personal experience of bleeding, pain, and tension. Many of the slogans as well as titles of books and pamphlets arising from the movement speak to this necessary fusion. "A woman's right to choose" makes immediate sense to women. It is the demand for women to recover the control over their own bodies, a control that maledominated medical professions and the profit motive have appropriated. Self-examination and self-health-care groups not only offer prefigurative social forms of health care, but also prefigurative forms of knowledge about natural science. The rightly best-selling book Our Bodies, Ourselves seeks to reclaim our sense of wholeness-the experiential unity of personal identity. In a similar vein, For Her Owzn Good not only affirms woman's capacities to understand her interests, but also exposes the male 28. See Ruth Hubbar-d's discussion of evolutionary theory as an example; Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried, eds. (n. 3 above), pp. 7-36. 29. Elizabeth Fee's "Is Feminism a Threat to Scientific Objectivity" (paper p-esented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, Toronto, January 4, 1981) pursues parallel themes. 88 Rose This content downloaded from 207.46.13.105 on Wed, 25 May 2016 06:30:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

TL;DR: Hilary and Steven Rose have gathered together the most eminent and outspoken critics of this fashionable ideology and emerge a new perspective on human development which acknowledges the complexity of life by placing at its centre the living organism rather than the gene.

TL;DR: Hilary Rose as mentioned in this paper locates feminist criticism of science at the heart of both the women's movement and the radical science movement and examines at length the latest, massively resourced claimant to the old and oppressive "biology is destiny" dictum the Human Genome program.