Toward a Feeling for the Organism

Abstract

It was Evelyn Fox Keller, in 1985 work Reflections on Gender and Science, who most specifically introduced us to concept of gendered science. Although dismantling science's claims to objectivity was philosophical move long ago introduced, Keller's unique slant on scientific endeavor was to critique discipline's alleged objectivity on feminist grounds. Keller's book constitutes strand of radical feminist critique, which goes on from hypothesis of deep-rooted androcentrism in ... to demand that [this androcentrism] be replaced ... in toto ... by 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 is peculiarly masculine endeavor rather than simply objective one. Keller offers not to reject or objectivity but to reclaim as human rather than masculine project, to transcend biases that claim to remove emotional from scientific enterprise; she seeks the renunciation of division of emotional and intellectual labor that maintains as 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 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 more holistic (ibid.). Keller's previous work on biography of one of world's foremost scientists, Barbara McClintock, undoubtedly offered her sustenance for her new vision of scientific inquiry. In 1983, just few months after Keller's book on her was published, Barbara McClintock was awarded Nobel Prize. The award was largely in response to her paradigm-shifting work in field of developmental biology, work that had for most of her life been ignored and avoided by scientific community. McClintock's discovery of transposition as means of genetic communication and development reconfigured geneticist's previous central dogma conceming 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 previously ruling metaphors.