Chapter 5
The stories told in this chapter are by no means justifying a comprehensive and fair presentation of feminist research, if that is at all possible. Feminist research is by far too widely spread academic field to be condensed into part of a chapter. I write how I have met and understood feminist research along the paths I have walked so far, how I position myself in feminist research.
Feminist Research
A statement
Feminist research is a separate scientific area of expertise with an international academic tradition of several decades. In the report The Relevance of Gender Research (Trojer 2000) it is noted that gender research nowadays is a collective term for an extensive and rapidly growing field of research. The fact that gender can not be united in one narrow definition does not make gender research less interesting - on the contrary. There are gender researchers within all the established disciplines as well as researchers working across the conventional boundaries between the disciplines. Discipline attachment extends over medicine, engineering, natural science, humanities and social sciences.
The interpretation of what gender research represents thus varies considerably. Both in Sweden and in the Nordic countries we find gender research in the social sciences and humanities to have a strong position65. My understanding comes from a technical scientific context.
One of the two general focuses in gender research / feminist research is the knowledge processes, theories and methodological approaches of science. This identification is of particular interest at a technical faculty and which is one of the main starting points for the feminist technoscience I have been involved in. The other general focus of feminist research is women / men / sex / gender / gender and power relations. However, gender and gender relations are not as self-evident as objects of study within natural science and technology as they are in, say, social science.
In the public debate about feminist research within technology as a science, gender equality issues and feminist research are often confused. The discussion is primarily about charting the reasons for the lack of female researchers (and female students) and the invisibility of their positions, and the consequences thereof. There is a movement away from the idea that feminist research entails development of special scientific skills – in my case, within engineering with a special focus on IT. Equality between men and women and feminist research are not one and the same.
Concept discussion
Cecilia Åsberg (1998) has reviewed the debate on the concept of gender between the year 1980 and 1998 and states that the debate on terms and concepts and the development of feminist theory must be interpreted as an ongoing process, where the meaning of concepts and theories varies according to subject area, discipline, era and discourse. […] There is obvious pluralism in theory and application of concepts. In the second half of the 1990s, gender scientists were scarcely able to agree on a normal science. But isn’t this also a sign that the science is living, where no concepts are taken as lexically granted or exempt from debate?
Thus, Åsberg as well draws attention to the emerging practice of not fixing the concept of gender research in a general sense that can apply regardless of the discipline or field it belongs to.
At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, when gender research communities, primarily in the form of research centres, were starting to be established at Swedish universities, the dominant concept was kvinnoforskning (women’s studies). The term feminist research that had been in use in the Anglo–American research communities had too strong an ideological bias for Swedish tastes. This term now seems to live in a parallel universe alongside more strategically viable terms. The term könsteoretisk forskning (gender theoratical research) has functioned fairly well at the technical colleges that have developed gender research communities.
In terms of research policy, we see that the term gender research started to take hold in the second half of the 1990s (for example, the government bill on research [Proposition 1996/97:5] and earlier research bills). The major Study of Power and Democracy in Sweden from the beginning of the 1990s (Swedish Government Official Report SOU:1990:44), in which Yvonne Hirdman drew attention to gender theory, probably helped the term get a firm foothold66. I believe that the negotiations concerning the choice of terms are probably more the result of strategic choices than assessment of the content of the terms.
Two delimitations need to be defined for feminist research within natural science and technoscience. The first one as indicated above is the importance of distinguishing between work to promote gender equality and feminist research. In order to be able to regard and understand feminist research as a scientific field of research, it must be totally clear that this is not simply work to promote gender equality. If this distinction is not made clear, feminist research risks ending up in an awkward dilemma of relevance. This is particularly the case within technoscience, where gender equality issues have tended to be all about achieving a more equal representation of women and men and equal conditions (pay, promotion opportunities, etc.) in a variety of areas within technoscience.
Early feminist critique of natural science and technology
We live in a world that is structured by scientific rationality and that is dysfunctional for many, many people. It is this world in which feminist thought about scientific knowledge has emerged. (Harding 1990)
The 1980s and 1990s in the Nordic countries
In this context, I am interested in the development and advancement of the feminist critique of science linked to natural science as it appeared in the 1980s and 90s. The critique started with questions regarding female and male researchers’ different working conditions, then moved on to expose biased and warped research based on gender, and ended up at a more fundamental querying of the very knowledge processes used in natural science. I borrow liberally from Sandra Harding’s (1986, 1987) work on the development of a feminist theory of science within natural science and technology.
In the 1980s typical questions were: Does it matter who formulates the laws of nature? Does it make any difference if it is a woman or a man, if they are rich or poor, if they are from Asia or Europe? Aren’t the laws of natural science absolute, objective truths that humankind discovers, sooner or later? Feminist theories of knowledge wanted to show that it does matter who formulates the laws of nature, that gender is a central concept and indispensable for a deeper understanding of science – in this case natural science – as well as that all knowledge production is anchored contextually.
It is a question of a feminist view and critique of the history, ideological foundations and knowledge production of natural science – a feminist epistemology. Internationally, this epistemology within natural science is very young. Feminist analysis and theory within other fields of science, such as psychology, sociology, history, literature, etc. have been developing for much longer. If we define feminism as a conscious reflection on the significance of women in research and society, then it is as old as the hills. For example, there are written documents from the end of the fourteenth century, i.e. before printing was invented, available through Christine de Pizan67.
Focusing on the Nordic countries, feminist critique of science within natural science has been around for roughly the same amount of time as elsewhere, but it has been mostly undertaken outside the traditional institutions. In the Nordic countries, this critique of science has been presented at seminars and conferences, in gender studies journals within the individual Nordic countries, in anthologies and reports (Rose 1992, Ullerstam & Vramming 1992). Feminist critique within natural science was given concrete expression in all the Nordic countries through involvement and work in FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering). FINRRAGE worked as an opinion-forming lobby network in a politically sensitive area at a time when there was no legislation on genetic engineering in most countries and when short-term economic market forces were allowed to contribute to the development of knowledge without the inconvenience of public control.
In the 1980s, Sandra Harding, professor of philosophy at the University of Delaware compiled a feminist epistemology on the basis of biology and sociology. This combination and this approach largely coincide with the development of a feminist critique of natural science in the Nordic countries. I had struggled with her publications. I knew there were important things for me and us just starting with feminist research in our mother disciplines. But it was not until I med Sandra Harding in person in the Finish forest (se introduction), I really understood her. She summarises the development of feminist critique and theory thus (Harding 1986):
- Feminist empiricism
- Feminist standpoint theory
- Feminist postmodernism
It is the first two elements that primarily affected natural science and engineering. However, this did not mean there were not been interesting analysis tools within postmodernism and poststructuralism contributing to yield a deeper understanding with both discourse and material dimensions as well as reality-producing implications.
Women and natural science
Before the first feminist theoretical approaches were formulated, a thorough critique of science had already been done, within natural science as well as elsewhere.
The study of natural science from gender perspectives started with an investigation of women’s contributions to the scientific community. There were three main focuses:
I. Famous female researchers, for example Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Sonja Kovalevsky, Barbara McClintock. In addition to their contributions to scientific knowledge, they have much to teach us about approaches and assessments. However, through this focus on exceptional women, the contributions made by not so famous female researcher remained invisible.
II. Women’s collective contribution, in the form of actions in different movements, such as environmental movements, civil-rights organisations, peace movements and other historically acknowledged movements.
III. Misery research (i.e. research into women as victims) for example issues of power relations, the exclusion of women from academia.
All three focuses have been important in the early developmental phase. They drew attention to the conditions in which female researchers worked and the consequences they had for their contribution to the advancement of knowledge. However, this work had its limitations and did not go far enough. The problem here was and still is that they leave men at the centre of knowledge. It is always a case of women in a men’s world.
Astrid Cleve von Euler illustrates a female researcher’s situation in a male-dominated research world that ended up in exclusion68. She came from Uppsala and lived from 1875 to 1968.
Astrid Cleve was the first woman in Sweden to get a doctorate (1898) in natural science and the third woman to get a doctorate in any field. Astrid Cleve was only 23 years old when she defended her thesis on Swedish mountain vegetation (studies of the growth time and strengthening stage of a selection of Swedish plants). This thesis was unlike any other botanical research at the time, when interest in classification and morphology was dominant. Astrid Cleve’s studies were one of the first to emphasise growth physiology and biochemical aspects. Her academic background was in biology and chemistry. She was the eldest daughter of the famous chemistry professor in Uppsala, P.T. Cleve.
Most of her life she was forced to do her research outside the established research community, focusing on diatoms (siliceous algae). Her best known and most widely recognised contribution to science is a five-volume diatom flora, which was published at the beginning of the 1950s. For a long time, that was the only complete flora containing both current and fossilised forms and is still highly sought after by researchers around the world. Astrid Cleve was honoured with the title of professor in 1955 for her work on diatoms.
Analyses of diatoms are an important tool in quaternary geology. Astrid Cleve was highly respected by researchers in this discipline. She became interested in quaternary geology herself, and the development of the Baltic Sea in particular. The results of her research led to theories, which in many ways broke with theories in quaternary geology, but which became valid areas of research. Her views are being afforded ever more value.
Astrid Cleve’s scientific career is very different from her husband’s and one of her sons’, despite the fact that the scientific starting points were identical. The men in question were awarded a Nobel prize each.
Feminist empiricism
The feminist critique of science continued to evolve and reached the first epistemological approach, as defined by Sandra Harding.
Feminist empiricism grew out of liberal feminism and claims that androcentrism is a social distortion that can be corrected by adhering more closely to existing methodological norms in scientific studies.
There are numerous examples in biology of studies only using male animals (this also applies to humans) and yet still draw conclusions for the whole species. One of the arguments for this practice is the females’ hormone cycles disrupt the findings.
The normal values used in medicine are often based on values from men, for example, young men doing military service. This has led to women being given the wrong treatment, for example in connection with high blood pressure and heart attack. Much of the vast amount of research that has been done on the brain since the beginning of the 1900 has looked for and claimed to have found physiological differences between men and women’s brains (Sayers 1982, Walsh 1979). These studies have provided biological arguments for the inferiority of women. Ruth Bleier, a neurological researcher, has shown how below-par studies and warped interpretations of results has continued to be published (Bleier 1991).
According to Harding, the women’s liberation movement not only created opportunities for broader perspectives on the view of reality, but also prepared the ground for more female researchers. According to feminist empiricism, they are more inclined to recognise androcentric prejudices.
However, feminist empiricism does not query the logic of the research process and the existing methodological norms of science. It is easier to gain sympathy for feminist demands through this way of arguing. It identifies only “bad science” as a problem. It does not criticise normal, general science.
Scientific method is thus not problematized, rather it is assumed that it is capable of eliminating all prejudices and distortions arising from the fact that individual researchers have different origins, different nationalities and different sexes. Feminist empiricism includes the view that women (or rather, feminists, who can be men or women) as a group are more likely to produce prejudice-free, objective results than men (or non-feminists) as a group.
It may appear that feminist empiricism is permeated by a conservative approach as not querying scientific logic and its methods. But by adding women and thus social / cultural gender, it can become radical. In discussions of scientific theory, men and the role they play in science are also studied. Simone de Beauvoir (1949) stated that “Women are made not born”. This probably also applies to men “Men too are made not born”. So, what consequences does this have in male-dominated sciences like the natural sciences and engineering?
Feminist standpoint theory
Investigating the significance of the gender and social identity of researchers entails a pervasive querying of the basic values and consequences of science. To this end, feminist empiricism is inadequate as an analysis model and epistemological approach. This is where feminist standpoint theory takes over.
Sandra Harding introduced this theory and made it generally known. It was then primarily developed by the Canadian sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990). Dorothy Smith presented her standpoint ideas more as a method for thinking than as a finished theory. This analysis model uses a standpoint, which starts in women’s reality – women’s everyday lives. Theories, terms, concepts and knowledge are created from practical and bodily experiences from daily (and nightly) life.
Harding believes that feminist standpoint theory ideologically is rooted in Hegel’s theories of the relations between the master and the slave. The main thesis is that the starting point of oppressed groups (the proletariat) provides a truer picture of reality and they therefore have less to lose by adhering to a less warped description of reality than groups with power. Consequently, women, as an oppressed group, ought to provide a less distorted view of reality with their knowledge and experiences.
Harding holds feminism and women’s movements to develop theories and motivation for research and political reform able to transform women’s perspectives to a standpoint. This standpoint is a basis, which is socially and scientifically preferable for our interpretations and explanations. A science using women’s lives as its starting point poses different questions and ascribes priority to other types of knowledge and understanding.
The problem here is that we cannot find a general female identity to build our theories on. Harding claims feminism to make an important contribution, by showing there is no such thing as a generally applicable human being – only women and men who live in complex patterns of class and with racial and cultural identities.
However, just because the picture gets complicated does not mean it is not interesting to apply feminist standpoint theory. On the contrary, it is particularly interesting in natural science and technology today for several reasons. Here, gender researchers have tried to look beyond the formation of theories and see lines of development created at specific historical times and in special social circumstances – always with a starting point in women’s lives and experiences. Much work has been done to identify the origins of today’s natural science, with the main emphasis on the scientific revolution. By studying the history of science, we see how ethical judgements change and create conditions necessary for a scientific and technical rationality, which today seems far too destructive, from a global perspective. The study also provides explanations for the almost total lack of women in processes of knowledge during the basic development of natural science.
Alternative to the Master-Slave dialectic
As the feminist critique of science emerged and created explanatory models, a need also grew for alternative images to counteract the negative and destructive side of the science coin. Evelyn Fox Keller, a mathematical biophysicist and philosopher of science, has described several existing theories in natural science permeated by a clear master ideology (Keller 1985). She has also provided examples of counter-images to contrast these “master theories”. These ideas are most clearly developed in her biography of the geneticist Barbara McClintock – winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1983 (Keller 1983).
McClintock’s scientific work contains non-hierarchical theories offering an alternative to the master ideology. Instead, priority is given to the absolute necessity of interaction to understand complex genetic functions and, in a longer perspective, evolution, whose judgemental character McClintock criticised harshly.
A driving force in the formation of theories within natural science is reducing as much knowledge as possible to a few simple, generally applicable laws (se chapter 1). This has great status value and is also held up as beautiful and pleasing. The central dogma within genetics is one such simple, overarching law, aiming to show how the function of the genes is decided. This dogma is, according to Keller, a typical example of a master theory, which Barbara McClintock opposed ever since it was first developed in Watson and Crick’s 1953 publication. The central dogma, i.e. the primordial controlling function of the DNA molecule over the RNA molecules to form protein, gives DNA a central role in the organisation of cells. The dogma describes a one-way communication that was regarded as a condition for genetic stability.
McClintock showed that DNA molecules are not always so static in their make-up and organisation. DNA segments can move – the so called jumping genes or transposons – causing significant changes in the DNA molecule. An image of a highly complex genetic organisation began to emerge. McClintock believed there is no such thing as a superior molecule, rather it is more a case of an alternating flow of information in complicated regulatory mechanisms. This interaction between DNA molecules and not only cells, organs, entire organisms, but also the environment outside the organism entails more and different knowledge about organisms’ adaptation to the ecosystem and which is finding its way into present gene related research.
We can regard Barbara McClintock’s research results as a complement to the central dogma – as do many scientists. McClintock herself believed we are in the middle of a revolution that will change our approach. Her feeling for nature and organisms, her way of relating and her research methods prepare the ground for a basis for assessment that needs to replace the foundations on which today’s natural science is built – the natural science encountering challenges of earth survival.
Feminist postmodernism and poststructuralist strategies
In philosophical terms, postmodernism entailed abandoning the major “projects” of modernity. Feminist postmodernism directs general criticism at theories that use universal claims and demands (Barrett 1992). It criticises the feminism of the 1970s, which developed universal demands of this kind. The debate we have seen in postmodernism is part of a broader criticism of today’s thought systems with their universal characteristics.
Postmodernism includes a criticism of rationalism as a doctrine and the impacts it has had for the human subject and different forms of subjectivity. It includes redefinitions of structures and terms – even for the gender structures fundamental to feminism. A critical question for feminist analysis is whether it is possible to give up the culture and discourse in which feminism’s identification and criticism of gender were created and in which feminism has located its major reforms. Another critical question is how and whether the lost terms (within feminist postmodernism) can be filled or recreated.
Harding (1991) holds that both feminist standpoint theory and postmodernism assume an ambivalent attitude towards the basic assumption of Enlightenment. They adhere to the idea that social progress is desirable and possible and that refining theories about ourselves and our surroundings will contribute to this improvement.
Within postmodernism and poststructuralism, the significance of language has assumed a central role. Hierarchical descriptive models using power metaphors show how language and symbols are fundamental even within the formation of theories within natural science. French feminism, which pioneered the development of feminist postmodernism, has been particularly interested in the relevance of language.
The French philosopher Julia Kristeva has contributed to a deeper understanding of the significance of language in connection with the feminist critique of science. She has studied the problem of how meaning is created and how the speaking subject reproduces itself (Moi 1985). Kristeva coined the term intertextuality to show how one or more systems of signs are redistributed among each other. Within these systems, different political and power-relating interests are expressed, which cross one another in characters and symbols. Although we can claim that a dominant power group at a given time dominates the intertextual creation of meanings, this does not mean that the oppressed group has been reduced to total silence. The power struggle is visible in the signs.
Julia Kristeva has also studied the function of poetic language. It is primarily in poetic texts, Kristeva claims, that the speaking being’s troubles and joys are expressed. For example, a dictatorial society cannot exist unless it kills poetic language, which says too much about people’s real needs. Kristeva claims that “the function of poetic language is to destroy and reconstruct social compulsion. This kind of task requires transforming the entire critical apparatus and the traditional terms and concepts, since the methods of classical thought privilege moments of stability and not crisis, whenever meaning is to be determined. Poetic language, by contrast, articulates what is unspoken and suppressed.” (Kristeva 1974 tolkad av Witt Brattström 1984)
The linguistic turn in feminist research was later on balanced in new materialism e.g. by Karen Barad (2007).
I learned a lot from Sandra Harding’s introduction to feminist epistemology and its different stages, which are not only to follow a strict time scale but to experience in parallel. To make partial translations into the context of technology has made sense and constituted a platform to vision epistemological infrastructures beyond Harding’s and relevant for knowledge production and technical development in the challenging academic situations I have moved into.
It might be obvious by now and from chapter 4, that I have found the strongest potentials for my epistemological thinking in feminist poststructuralism as it has been developed by Donna Haraway. How this has evolved is intensely linked to my location as a researcher in technoscience since the beginning of the 90s and will be further discussed in the next chapter.
But I will not forget Julia Kristeva and her contribution to poststructuralism important for social transformations including the knowledge producing bodies of society. AGORA69 highlighted the work of Kristeva again in 2003 in a special volume (nr1/2003). I was reminded of the close link between Kristeva’s intertextuality and poststructuralism (Winderen Owesen 2003) and how the texts (for knowledge production) communicates in a polylogue, a polyphony of non hierarchical voices. We produce knowledge in a net of discourses without a centre I would say using the work of Dorthe Gert Simonsen in her paper about poststructuralist strategies from 1996. Simonsen comments the significance of intertextuality by stating that it is a continuously motion and displacement in every unit of signification because of the never ending reference to something else like the text or the sign quotes or put itself in opposition to, in order to make sense.
When referring to our complex processes of knowledge production in technoscience, Paul Cilliers add potentials in poststructuralism by summing his arguments in a study of complex systems. He writes (1998 p 37) Since it (complexity) is based on a system of relationships, the poststructural inquiry into the nature of language helps us to theorise about the dynamics of the interaction in complex systems. In other words, the dynamics that generates meaning in language can be used to describe the dynamics of complex systems in general.
Simonsen is very clear about poststructuralism to be critical strategies not a fixed –ism, a joint concept for different critical strategies active at numerous levels. Its strong potentials are located in the tryings to avoid to legitimize knowledge by universalizing. Another Danish feminist researcher Dorte Marie Søndergaard (2002) confirms Simonsen’s understanding by claiming that perhaps the most radical claim of poststructuralism is to reject the possibility of arriving at a “truth” about the essence of a phenomenon.