The Curious Rise of Feminist Biology: A Half Century of Insurgent Science

• In Event: 2351 - Section on the Sociology of Sex and Gender Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 5. Gendered Language

Abstract

Belief in value-free, objective inquiry is a mainstay of scientific research. While science studies and feminist epistemology have challenged the validity of this “weak objectivity” paradigm, it remains dominant among practicing scientists. And although many social movements seek to influence science, those that are successful generally succeed by rhetorically separating their activism and values from the purportedly objective conduct of science itself. In the late 1960s, some life scientists began to flout this convention by explicitly infusing the conduct of biological research with feminist values. Today, feminist biology is a vibrant subfield, with its own PhD students, publications in top journals like Nature and Science, and even general public readership. This paper explores the unlikely growth and successes of feminist biology as a movement. I argue that accounts of biological research which focus only on the persistence of harmful sex and race essentialism underplay decades of hard-fought progress and mechanisms of change.

Author

• Jeffrey W. Lockhart, University of Michigan