Feminist critiques of politics/science: discursive controversies at the intersection of gender and science

This paper is a critical assessment of the political intersections of knowledge and power in the feminist critiques of science conducted by Evelyn Fox Keller, Sandra Harding, and Donna Haraway. In it I argue that feminist theory approaches the practicing discourses of science from political purviews that enable us to better understand and critique the political contexts of science and technology, as well as the cognitive content of scientific research. Some of the questions I address are: How is our scientific knowledge of the world structured by particular social, economic, and political imperatives? What get to be defined as scientific problems according to these imperatives? How do the methodologies employed within the sciences produce and reproduce knowledges about the world under such extremely strict and exclusionary conditions? What are the dangers involved with the uses of such methodologies? How is “scientific authority” to know presented to justify research claims, and how does it reify ontological and epistemological assumptions about the validity of scientific knowledge? These questions emphasize the power-knowledge nexus in scientific theories of knowledge and research practices largely ignored by many contemporary critiques of science. In addition, gender, race, and class critiques of the sciences can help us to deconstruct the epistemological and ontological presuppositions woven throughout the fabric of science. Keller, Harding, and Haraway also offer alternative conceptions of science that are more sensitive to the embeddedness of all scientific research and theoretical formulation. In this thesis I shall examine each theorist’s Critique of modern science and assess whether their alter-science project is able to overcome the problems in science that their critique renders problematic.