Toward a Feeling for the Organism

Abstract

It was Evelyn Fox Keller, in the 1985 work Reflections on Gender and Science, who most specifically introduced us to the concept of a gendered science. Although dismantling science's claims to objectivity was a philosophical move long ago introduced, Keller's unique slant on the scientific endeavor was to critique the discipline's alleged objectivity on feminist grounds. Keller's book constitutes "one strand of the radical feminist critique," which "goes on from the hypothesis of deep-rooted androcentrism in science ... to demand that [this androcentrism] be replaced ... in toto ... by a radically different science" (Reflections 177). Keller's work, among that of other feminist scholars, such as Elizabeth Fee and Carolyn Merchant, has called objectivity itself into questionpositing that science is a peculiarly masculine endeavor rather than a simply objective one. Keller offers not to reject science or objectivity but to reclaim science as a human rather than masculine project, to transcend the biases that claim to remove the emotional from the scientific enterprise; she seeks "the renunciation of the division of emotional and intellectual labor that maintains science as a male preserve" (Reflections 178). Keller is not suggesting that masculine objectivity and feminine subjectivity and feeling need to work together more closely; rather, she envisions "a transformation of the very categories of male and female, and correspondingly, of mind and nature" such that these constricting and oversimplified terms might be loosened when applied to a more holistic science (ibid.). Keller's previous work on the biography of one of the world's foremost scientists, Barbara McClintock, undoubtedly offered her sustenance for her new vision of scientific inquiry. In 1983, just a few months after Keller's book on her was published, Barbara McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize. The award was largely in response to her paradigm-shifting work in the field of developmental biology, work that had for most of her life been ignored and avoided by the scientific community. McClintock's discovery of "transposition" as a means of genetic communication and development reconfigured geneticist's previous "central dogma" conceming the structure and function of genes. It took over thirty years for McClintock's discoveries to be accepted, but once recognized and applied to species other than her own favored maize, McClintock's vision uprooted and replaced many of the previously ruling metaphors.