Biology Feminism

A balanced and accessible introduction to the engagements that feminist scientists and science scholars undertake with a variety of biological sciences.

Standing at the intersection of evolutionary biology and feminist theory is a large audience interested in the questions one field raises for the other. Have evolutionary biologists worked largely or strictly within a masculine paradigm, seeing males as evolving and females as merely reacting passively or carried along with the tide? Would our view of nature `red in tooth in claw' be different if women had played a larger role in the creation of evolutionary theory and through education in its transmission to younger generations? Is there any such thing as a feminist science or feminist methodology? For feminists, does any kind of biological determinism undermine their contention that gender roles purely constructed, not inherent in the human species? Does the study of animals have anything to say to those preoccupied with the evolution and behavior of humans? All these questions and many more are addressed by this book, whose contributing authors include leading scholars in both feminism and evolutionary biology. Bound to be controversial, this book is addressed to evolutionary biologists and to feminists and to the large number of people interested in women's studies.

�Should feminists clone?� �What do neurons think about?� �How can we learn from bacterial writing?� These provocative questions have haunted neuroscientist and molecular biologist Deboleena Roy since her early days of research when she was conducting experiments on an in vitro cell line using molecular biology techniques. An expert natural scientist as well as an intrepid feminist theorist, Roy takes seriously the expressive capabilities of biological �objects��such as bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants�in order to better understand processes of becoming. She also suggests that renewed interest in matter and materiality in feminist theory must be accompanied by new feminist approaches that work with the everyday, nitty-gritty research methods and techniques in the natural sciences. By practicing science as feminism at the lab bench, Roy creates an interdisciplinary conversation between molecular biology, Deleuzian philosophies, science and technology studies, feminist theory, posthumanism, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. In Molecular Feminisms she brings insights from feminist and cultural theory together with lessons learned from the capabilities and techniques of bacteria, subcloning, and synthetic biology to o er tools for how we might approach nature anew. In the process she demonstrates that learning how to see the world around us is also always about learning how to encounter that world.

Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminist theory, but their insides are not. Biological bodies always seem to drop out of debates about the body and its importance in Western culture.

The link between biology and feminism is well established in history. Even as recently as the nineteenth century, preeminent men of science employed skewed biological theorizing to explain the disadvantaged position of women in our society. These male scientists argued that women are mentally inferior to men by design of evolution. They erroneously "proved" that the female of the human species has a relatively smaller brain than the male, attributing this "difference" to the fact that the energy that women use to reproduce is drawn off at the expense of their intellectual development. At odds with nineteenth-century feminist critics, men such as Freud, Darwin, Broca, and Spencer did not assign the supposed inferiority of women to such factors as their decreased access to education, believing instead that tangible biological differences subjugated women to men. In the latter part of the twentieth century we again see a link between biology and feminism that expresses itself through women's health issues, reproductive rights, and ecofeminism. In Biology and Feminism: A Dynamic Interaction, Sue V. Rosser offers an intriguing explanation of the possible bias of biological theories. Rosser maintains that the modern scientific method, accepted as objective and factual, may instead be colored by the values and assumptions of the traditional, male scientist. Her study offers critiques of the traditional scientific research method from the viewpoint of a number of different feminist theories. Rosser also details the contribution of several eminent women of science, past and present, to illustrate the impact of feminism on biological theories, and points out that ironically, biology has had amuch greater impact on feminism than feminism has had on biology. Finding that the standard methods of teaching biology have changed little, Rosser presents models for transforming curricula. Her proposed changes aim to identify and correct unconscious biases and teach student store spect differences. Embracing a wide range of studies, this innovative and thoughtful commentary will be of use to biology, health sciences, women's studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history students alike.

Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole. Bits of Life assumes a posthuman definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards.

In Gut Feminism Elizabeth A. Wilson urges feminists to rethink their resistance to biological and pharmaceutical data. Turning her attention to the gut and depression, she asks what conceptual and methodological innovations become possible when feminist theory isn’t so instinctively antibiological. She examines research on anti-depressants, placebos, transference, phantasy, eating disorders and suicidality with two goals in mind: to show how pharmaceutical data can be useful for feminist theory, and to address the necessary role of aggression in feminist politics. Gut Feminism’s provocative challenge to feminist theory is that it would be more powerful if it could attend to biological data and tolerate its own capacity for harm.