You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Evelyn Fox Keller, a mathematical biophysicist at Northeastern University, has published a collection of nine essays that are complex, ambitious, and problematic. In the introduction she asks 'how much the nature of science is bound up with the idea of masculinity, and what it would mean for science if it were otherwise' (p. 3). She says, 'both gender and science are socially constructed categories' (p. 3). She wishes not only to explore unconscious influences but also to convince her readers that much of our science suffers from an 'androcentric bias' (p. 178). For Fox Keller, this bias manifests itself as a sense of disconnexion between man, the knower, and nature, the known. She wants these essays not only to elucidate that point of view but to be instruments for change. Her desire to examine unconscious determinants in how we do science is the strength of these essays. Her polemical tone and equivocal assumptions are the problems.
Fox Keller's aim 'is the reclamation, from within science, of science as a human instead of a masculine project, and the renunciation of the division of emotional and intellectual labor that maintains science as a male preserve. These essays … are preoccupied with androcentric bias in prevailing definitions of science; their aim throughout is the transcendence of that bias' (p. 178).
Her pursuit of that aim is informed by two schools of thought: the social studies of science and feminist criticism. Historians of science, including Thomas Kuhn (1962), began to question the 'view that science is autonomous and absolutely progressive—approximating ever more closely a full and accurate description of reality "as it is"' (p. 5).
Fox Keller employs a feminist perspective to explore what she describes as 'The deeply rooted popular mythology that casts objectivity, reason, and mind as male, and subjectivity, feeling, and nature as female. In this division of emotional and intellectual labor, women have been the guarantors and protector