Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern ScienceRutgers University Press, 2004 - 289 pages Winner of the Ludwik Fleck Book Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science, 1995 Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women. Written with humor and meticulous detail, Nature's Body draws on these and other examples to uncover the ways in which assumptions about gender, sex, and race have shaped scientific explanations of nature. Schiebinger offers a rich cultural history of science and a timely and passionate argument that science must be restructured in order to get it right. |
Contents
The Private Lives of Plants | 11 |
The Search for New Methods of Classification | 13 |
Plant Heterosexuality | 18 |
The Use of Metaphor in Science | 23 |
Linnaeus and the Botanic Reveries of Erasmus Darwin | 28 |
The Scientific Revolution in Views of Sexual Difference | 37 |
Why Mammals Are Called Mammals | 40 |
Mammalia The Genealogy of a Term | 42 |
The Anatomy of Difference | 115 |
Fixing Racial and Sexual Types | 117 |
That Majestic Beard | 120 |
The Caucasian Mystery | 126 |
Do Women Shape the Race? | 134 |
Theories of Gender and Race | 143 |
Were Women on the Chain? | 145 |
The Hottentot Venus | 160 |
Males and Monotremes | 47 |
How Significant Are the Mammae? | 51 |
Problematic Icons | 53 |
Gender Politics in Taxonomy | 65 |
The Gendered Ape | 75 |
Distinguishing Humans from Apes | 78 |
Females of the Species | 88 |
Are Apes Human Hybrids? | 94 |
Modesty A Feminine Universal | 99 |
Sir Oran Hautton | 106 |
Other editions - View all
Nature's Body: Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science Londa Schiebinger No preview available - 1994 |
Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science Londa L. Schiebinger No preview available - 1993 |