Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Feminist scholars systematically began to focus upon the gender values in the biological and medical sciences in the 1970s, drawing upon and developing a radical social constructivism where facts were treated as social products rather than objective value-free entities and knowers were seen to be part of communities rather than lone scholars. This work ran alongside other developments in social studies of science, but was shaped by political commitments to women's rights, in contrast to the intellectual agnosticism of the mainstream, predominantly male scholars of sociology of scientific knowledge. A great deal of the focus of feminist studies of sciences has been on the ways in which gender seeps into scientific theories, and the very “discovery” of natural objects. For example, Oudshoorn (1994) showed how sex hormones were categorized during the 1920s as sexually specific: female hormones were said to make females more female and male hormones to make males more male. Scientists then went on to use these gendered molecules to explain wider biological processes such as development of gender and sexuality in embryos. However, as Oudshoorn and others have argued, sex hormones are very complex. Men and women both have so-called male and female hormones; hormones are not only produced in the ovaries or testes, but also from the adrenal glands; hormones can also be converted. Gendered ... log in or subscribe to read full text