Introduction: Hypatia Special Issue on Feminist Science Studies

Feminist analyses of science have grown dramatically in scope, diversity, and impact in the years since Nancy Tuana edited the two-volume issue of Hypatia on "Feminism and Science" (Fall 1987, Spring 1988). What had begun in the 1960s and 1970s as a "trickle of scholarship on feminism and science" had widened by the mid-1980s "into a continuous stream" (Rosser 1987, 5). Fifteen years later, the stream has become something of a torrent. The essays assembled for this special issue of Hypatia represent a vibrant field of scholarship that has matured and diversified in many respects, and that presupposes a number of hard-won insights that were just beginning to emerge in the mid-1980s. To take the measure of these developments, consider briefly where we have come from.

When Tuana assembled "Feminism and Science," the case had already been made for turning the "critical lens" of gender analysis onto the natural sciences (Tuana 1988, 1); this was a response both to skeptical feminists, who were inclined to reject science out of hand as a bastion of masculinist power and interest, and to advocates of science who categorically opposed any suggestion that gender might be relevant to the understanding of science. But the intellectual mandate of this emerging field—its focal questions and the strategies of inquiry appropriate for addressing them—continued to be a matter of active debate. In the first instance feminists had focused on the "surface inequities" of gender-structured participation and recognition in the sciences (Tuana 1988, 1): they were concerned with opening the sciences to women and with documenting overt sexist and androcentric bias in a growing range of fields. They quickly found, however, that these critical, remedial lines of inquiry raised deeper and more challenging questions. As Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka described the state of play in 1983, feminists had "generated an impressive collection of 'facts' about women and their lives, cross-culturally and historically," but these accumulating facts were inadequate to counter the "partial and distorted understanding" that they were intent on calling into question. Harding and Hintikka concluded that "a more fundamental project now confronts us" (1983, ix); they called for the systematic analysis of underlying epistemic and metaphysical assumptions that all too often "mirror and support" conventions of practice structured by androcentric and sexist norms. Tuana echoed this assessment five years later: "feminists have come to realize that the surface inequities are all too often grounded by less visible gender biases in the methods and content selection of the disciplines" (1988, 1). By the mid-1980s questions about the broader philosophical implications of these analyses were being raised with increasing urgency and clarity: how is science to be understood if gender bias proves to be typical of scientific practice rather than an isolable anomaly? And, crucially, how might science be done differently and better; what constructive responses follow from feminist critiques?

In addressing these questions, virtually every contributor to the 1987-1988 special issues of Hypatia notes (albeit in very different ways) that they found themselves implicated in a sharply oppositional debate about the epistemic authority of science. The very possibility of feminist analysis of science depended not only upon a sophisticated reconceptualization of gender as a complex and pliable social construct but also on a growing recognition, evident in many quarters, that the sciences are a fundamentally human, contingent and historical undertaking (Keller 1987, 38-39). But these conditions of possibility were then, and are still, unevenly realized. Time and again feminists have found themselves indicted as relativists by critics who take value-neutrality to be the hallmark of science and who therefore insist that any claim about the gendered nature of science—at least, any claim that extends beyond the critique of manifestly bad science—leaves feminists and scientists alike without grounds for epistemic justification. If it is conceded that science is a social enterprise, such critics argue, then the evaluation of scientific knowledge claims must reduce to an...