Feminist Technoscience: A Solution to Theoretical Conundrums and the Wane of Feminist Politics?

This paper examines f8th century wax anatomical models alongside the development of feminism and feminist perspectives on and in science from the early 1980s until 2008. Major developments in feminist criticisms of science and technology that helped form technoscience as well as the broader field known as STS, run alongside the case study of the anatomical models. The models are analyzed as complex and engendered agents that, along with some feminist technoscience and STS work, bother boundaries including embodiment, gender and rationality. Introduction What follows are excerpts from six years of my research with anatomical wax models (Burfoot, 2006) among a selection of relevant developments in feminist science studies and technoscience (I assume feminism within technoscience as I argue below). In both pathways (my research and feminist science and technology studies, or STS) there can be found the now familiar pattern describing the development of feminist critiques of science and technology from humanist-complicity through post-modern performativity to post-human singularity and figuration. There are sites of tensions both along each of these pathways as well as between them. What follows is a summary of these tensions from STS to technoscience and an illustration of what can be involved in feminist technoscience with the example of human encasement in anatomical waxes as material semiotic agents. There has been a considerable amount of recent research in the area of feminist science studies and technoscience (1) (Haraway, 1997; Whelan, 2001). For example, readers and special collections include: Feminism in Twentieth-Century, Science, Technology and Medicine (Creager, Lunbeck and Schiebinger, 2001); The Gender and Science Reader (Lederman and Bartsch, 2001); Women, Science and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies (Wyer et al., 2001) and Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation (Mayberry, Subramaniam and Weasel, 2001). Generally, these readers capture the historical formation and current state of feminist STS up to 2002. The special issues of the following journals address more recent developments in feminist STS: Signs: Gender and Science--New Issues (Mayberry, Subramaniam and Weasel, 2003); Feminist Theory: Feminist Theory and/in Science (Squier and Littlefield, 2004); and Hypatia: Special Issue on Feminist Science Studies (Nelson and Wylie, 2004). Also related to feminist STS (even if they do not always admit to it) are the special issue of Science as Culture: Unpacking Intervention in Science and Technology Studies (Zuiderent-Jerak and Jensen, 2007) and articles in the journal Parallax by Beatriz Preciado, Pharmaco-pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology (Preciado, 2008) and Bernard Stiegler, Technoscience and Reproduction (Stiegler, 2007). (2) At the same time as these works emerged I worked on wax anatomical models, chiefly the 18th century ones found in various Italian cities. These models, along with anatomical models in general have been garnering increasing attention in the last decade (Contardi, 2002; Hopwood, 2002; Carlino, 1999; Poggesi, 1999; Sawday, 1995), including those interested in science studies (de Chadarevian, 2004) and especially those coming from a feminist perspective (Jordanova, 1999; Moore and Clarke, 200l; Treichler, Cartwright and Penley, 1998; Petherbridge and Jordanova, 1997; Newman, 1996) Why? Well the models are remarkable. In the Florentine collection alone there are over 200 life-sized models that show the human body in a hyper-real state of dissection. The trappings of their manufacture and original display are intact--even the placement of the display cases is as original. As such, the entire museum serves as a vivid example of the state and stature of human anatomy in the early modern period when scientific rationality was fast overtaking religious dogma for ontological rights. These what--instruments? icons? agents? …

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