Gender, Race & Science

Over time, historians have asked how gender politics shaped history, while literary scholars explore how gender politics shaped the novel, or made some literary forms more important than others. In each case, asking such questions changed the structure of the discipline by holding up for analysis what had until then seemed like natural truths.

For the past 30 years, many scholars–including myself– have probed the relationship between science and gender. What is meant by the idea of objective knowledge? Is scientific knowledge gendered? Can science be understood without gender?

I strongly advocate the idea that understanding science is of central importance to feminist students and scholars and that understanding feminist insights into science is essential to science students and researchers.

Going further, as the field of women’s studies began to grapple with its own cultural diversity, some scholars have started to analyze race and science in a manner analogous to studies of gender and science.

There are now dozens of books and thousands of articles on the topics of gender, race and science. I list a few of my favorites below and links to web sites with additional resources as well (see also the book series Race, Gender and Science).

Gender & Science

  • Park, Katherine. (2006) Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. Zone Books.
  • Schiebinger, Londa. (1999) Has Feminism Changed Science? Harvard University Press.
  • Rossiter,Margaret (1998) Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972. Johns Hopkins University Press
  • Haraway, Donna. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncomouseTM Routledge.
  • Martin, Emily. (1994) Flexible Bodies. Beacon Press.
  • Keller, Evelyn Fox. (1992) Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death: Essays on Language Gender and Science. Routledge.
  • Gero, Joan M. and Conkey, Margaret, W. eds. (1991) Engendering Archeology: Women and Prehistory. Blackwell.
  • Harding, Sandra. (1991) Whose Science, Whose Knowledge? Cornell University Press.
  • Russett, Cynthia Eagle. (1989) Sexual Science: the Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Harvard University Press.
  • Martin, Emily. (1987) The Woman in the Body. Beacon Press.
  • Keller, Evelyn. (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science. Yale University Press.
  • Rossiter, Margaret (1984) Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Johns Hopkins University Press

Race & Science

  • Braun, Lundy (2014) Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. University of Minnesota Press
  • Shim, J. K. (2014) Heart-sick: The Politics of Risk, Inequality, and Heart Disease. New York, New York University Press.
  • Kahn, Johnathan (2012) Race in a Bottle: the Story of BiBil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age. Columbia University Press.
  • Bliss, Catherine. (2012) Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford University Press.
  • Fullwiley, Duana (2011) The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa. Princeton University Press.
  • Roberts, Dorothy. (2011) Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business Recreate Race in the 21st Century. New Press.
  • Epstein, Steven (2009) Inclusion: thePolitics of Difference in Medical Research. The University of Chicago Press
  • Coates, Peter. (2007) American Perceptions of Immigrant and Invasive Species: Strangers on the Land. University of California Press.
  • Dupre, John. (2003) Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford University Press.
  • Wailoo, Keith. (2001) Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health. University of North Carolina Press.
  • Harding, Sandra, ed. (1993) The “Racial” Economy of Science. Indiana University Press.
  • Wailoo, Keith. (1999) Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in 20th Century America. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Schiebinger, Londa. (1993) Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Harvard University Press.
  • Longino, Helen. (1990) Science as Social Knowledge. Princeton University Press.
  • Harding, Sandra. (1998) Is Science Multicultural? Indiana University Press.
  • Haraway, Donna. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge.
  • Guthrie, Robert V. (1976) Even the Rat was White. Harper and Row.

Links