The way different medical practices differently construct their object.

Why is science so credible? Usual answers center on scientists' objective methods or their powerful instruments. In his new book, Thomas Gieryn argues that a better explanation for the cultural authority of science lies downstream, when scientific claims leave laboratories and enter courtrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms. On such occasions, we use "maps" to decide who to believe—cultural maps demarcating "science" from pseudoscience, ideology, faith, or nonsense. Gieryn looks at episodes of boundary-work: Was phrenology good science? How about cold fusion? (...) Is social science really scientific? Is organic farming? After centuries of disputes like these, Gieryn finds no stable criteria that absolutely distinguish science from non-science. Science remains a pliable cultural space, flexibly reshaped to claim credibility for some beliefs while denying it to others. In a timely epilogue, Gieryn finds this same controversy at the heart of the raging "science wars.". (shrink)

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" _Star Trek_-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In _How We Became Posthuman,_ N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost (...) its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel _Limbo_ by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, _How We Became Posthuman_ provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a reiterated (...) social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to advance a new understanding of gender as a routine accomplishment embedded in everyday interaction. To do so entails a critical assessment of existing perspectives on sex and gender and the introduction of important distinctions among sex, sex category, and gender. We argue that recognition of the analytical independence of these concepts is essential for understanding the interactional work involved in being a gendered person in society. The thrust of our remarks is toward theoretical (...) reconceptualization, but we consider fruitful directions for empirical research that are indicated by our formulation. (shrink)

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

In a though provoking study, independent scholar Katharine Young addresses the way the field of medicine separates body and "self", rendering the body an object and the self bodyless. From embodied positions within the realm of medicine and disembodied positions outside it, Young richly conveys the complexity of "presence in the flesh".

Moira Gatens investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory. The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in _Imaginary (...) Bodies_ and traced through the history of philosophy. Using her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment and their legal, political and ethical status. (shrink)

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories (...) of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to concentrate on a monographic style of research. Despite the existence of the series started by Wiley, and now published by Cambridge University Press, it is only in the last ten years or so that more conscious attempts have been made to generate a big-picture literature informed by new scholarship. It is noteworthy that most of this is addressed to students and general readers, although there is no logical reason why it should not tackle major theoretical issues of concern to scholars. My point about maturity still holds, then, since as a designated discipline the history of science is rather new; it is still feeling out its relationship with cognate disciplines. Big-picture histories have an important role to play in these explorations since they make findings and ideas widely available and thereby offer material through which ambitious interpretations can be debated, modified and transformed. (shrink)

Challenging the reflexive identification of images with vice.

This collection of feminist essays from a variety of disciplines explores the idea of the body as a site for the production of political ideologies.

The last decade has seen the transformation of the study of sexuality from a marginalized effort to a fully respected discipline at many major universities. There are numerous publications devoted solely to the topic and queer theory, a force to be reckoned with, has its own celebrities. Nonetheless, queer studies is considered to be the brainchild of the humanities, with the social sciences slowly coming around to apply its principles to empirical research. Long, Slow Burn, a powerful collection of essays (...) by Kath Weston, argues that social science has been talking about sex all along; to deny this one would have to overlook Kinsey's pioneering sex research in the 1950s, or the psychiatrist Evelyn Hooker's pathbreaking study of homosexuality, but also in the "sex talk" that lies at the heart of classic debates on kinship, inequality, cognition, and other foundational topics in the social sciences. What is different now, Weston claims, is the way sexuality has been isolated from other contemporary issues. Long, Slow Burn lays out a radically different approach to the study of sexuality. Not content with its ghettoization as a contained subfield, Weston refuses to draw an artificial line around sexuality. Her essays do not attempt to make sexuality a discrete object of study. Rather, each essay "sexes up" a conventional subject, such as kinship, race or labor, proving that once you start paying attention to sexuality, you can never look at social issues in the same way again. Long, Slow Burn offers an intervention, an attempt to see sexuality as it permeates the multiple fibers of our social fabric. It demonstrates that sexuality has always been a part of the social sciences, but more importantly, is the key to their future. (shrink)

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Anatomy texts are seen as authoritative sources for knowledge about natural sex differences. The concepts of a natural, biological sex and of a natural difference are, however, increasingly difficult to sustain. A growing number of scholars have pointed to the fact that `sex' as much as `gender' is a historical and social construction. This article examines how the multiple-edition anatomy textbook, Gray's Anatomy, has portrayed the sexed body and male/female differences during the course of its publication, 1858 to the present, (...) focusing on specific parts of the anatomy, namely the sex organs or `organs of generation', the pelvis, the skull and the brain. An analysis of textual descriptions and graphic illustrations reveals that the male body has been the stable norm or standard against which the female body has been compared and implicitly judged as underdeveloped, weak or faulty. Only rarely has the male body been compared with the female body. Reflecting long-standing views about sexual complementarity and natural differences between men and women, some comparisons emphasize the reproductive functioning of females or imply that females are intellectually inferior. It would appear that the discipline of anatomy has remained largely immune from broader public debates about sexual inequality and gender representations. (shrink)

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.