Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (review)

Abstract

What does research about female aggression among song sparrows have to do with breast cancer support groups? Reading Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation will answer that question. The editors have brought together scholarship by researchers from heterogeneous backgrounds in science, the humanities, social science, and women's studies as well as from community activists and academic administrators. What connects these studies is a dedication to at last three interrelated questions and issues: how knowledge about the natural and cultural landscape is produced; how this knowledge reflects as well as constitutes power relations, and in particular, gender relations; and what the practical and/or political consequences of this knowledge are. These questions mark out well-known territory and may sound familiar enough to scholars of feminism and epistemology. Indeed, contributors frequently refer to pioneers in these fields, such as Evelyn Fox Keller, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Donna Haraway, and Sandra Harding (some French windows are also opened to Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour). But whatis exciting is that the field now increasingly referred to as "feminist science studies" is attracting a wide variety of new researchers who put epistemological conceptions about the construction of "nature" into practice in their own disciplines and fields of research.