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)

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul.

Latour is a world famous and widely published French sociologist who has written with great eloquence and perception about the relationship between people, science, and technology. He is also closely associated with the school of thought known as Actor Network Theory. In this book he sets out for the first time in one place his own ideas about Actor Network Theory and its relevance to management and organization theory.

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

The book then addresses the human/animal opposition implicit in much feminist theorizing, arguing that the opposition helps to maintain the essentialism that feminists have so often criticized. The final chapter brings us back from ideas of what 'the animal' is, to ask how these questions might relate to environmental politics, including ecofeminism and animal rights.

Sex hormones today are seen as central to the production of biological sexual difference. This article examines the development of this scientific `fact', and asks how hormones came to be in this position. The article does not involve original historical research, however. Instead it uses existing histories of hormonal sexual difference to develop a theoretical argument about body histories. How can the history of scientific views of bodies be written and understood? What can these histories tell us about the relation (...) between scientific representations of bodies and the materiality of bodies? Combining and critiquing arguments from feminist histories of science, Bruno Latour's actor network theory, Michel Serres's theory of folded time, and Donna Haraway's notion of situated knowledges, this article argues for the centrality of embodiment and location to useful body histories. (shrink)

The Body Multiple is an extraordinary ethnography of an ordinary disease. Drawing on fieldwork in a Dutch university hospital, Annemarie Mol looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis. A patient information leaflet might describe atherosclerosis as the gradual obstruction of the arteries, but in hospital practice this one medical condition appears to be many other things. From one moment, place, apparatus, specialty, or treatment, to the next, a slightly different “atherosclerosis” is being discussed, measured, observed, or stripped away. (...) This multiplicity does not imply fragmentation; instead, the disease is made to cohere through a range of tactics including transporting forms and files, making images, holding case conferences, and conducting doctor-patient conversations. The Body Multiple juxtaposes two distinct texts. Alongside Mol’s analysis of her ethnographic material—interviews with doctors and patients and observations of medical examinations, consultations, and operations—runs a parallel text in which she reflects on the relevant literature. Mol draws on medical anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, philosophy, and science and technology studies to reframe such issues as the disease-illness distinction, subject-object relations, boundaries, difference, situatedness, and ontology. In dialogue with one another, Mol’s two texts meditate on the multiplicity of reality-in-practice. Presenting philosophical reflections on the body and medical practice through vivid storytelling, The Body Multiple will be important to those in medical anthropology, philosophy, and the social study of science, technology, and medicine. (shrink)

Research over the past 15 years indicates, contrary to earlier results, that women do not synchronize their menstrual cycles. If women do not synchronize their cycles, this implies there is no mechanism for synchronizing cycles. Since a pheromone mechanism of synchronization is the only plausible mechanism that has been proposed, it follows that that there are no pheromones that modulate the length of menstrual cycles. To test this hypothesis, eight studies were reviewed that reported pheromone effects on menstrual cycles, other (...) behavior, or physiological correlates in women. The prediction was that serious problems would be found in each of these studies. As predicted, serious problems were found in all eight studies. Taken together, these results cast doubt on the existence of pheromones that modulate the length of menstrual cycles. (shrink)

In this article I consider the field of HIV treatment and prevention in light of poststructural feminist critiques of the self-evidence of matter. Both HIV and poststructural feminist theory are viewed in relation to the current state of HIV scientific research of which it has been said: ‘much remains left to the imagination’ (McCune, 2001, emphasis added). Importantly, it is in the absence of ‘real’ knowledge of bodily matter and virus, that imagination is presumed by science as a fall back. (...) Paradoxically, recent debate within feminist theory provides an almost perverse counter to this way of characterizing the struggle against HIV. Rather than considering imagination as something outside or external to the ‘real’, there is now substantial argument suggesting that imagination is always already present and inherent to the ‘real’. In the course of this paper, these differing positions of science and feminist theory are used to challenge and extend each other. The empirical matter of HIV medical science is shown as evidence of matter beyond the normative insistence of (human) language. On this basis, a theory of performativity - devised by Judith Butler and extended by Karen Barad - is argued as grounds for a methodologically expanded science. (shrink)

This essay addresses the increasing prominence of ‘performance’ as an analytical frame in recent studies of science. Building on the insights of existing feminist criticism, it identifies two largely unacknowledged features of such performance-oriented studies: first, an implicit recuperation of a pre-discursively real body; and second, a persistent emphasis on the productive character of performances. The essay considers the limitations of these two themes, and concludes by exploring pathways suggested by other theoretical traditions.