テクノ／バイオ・ ポリティクス：科学・ 医療・技術 のいま

テクノ／バイオ・ポリティクス：科学・医療・技術 のいま Kaoru Tachi, ed., Tekuno/baio poritikkusu: kagaku iryo gijyutsu no ima [Techno/Bio Politics: Contemporary Science, Medicine and Technology] Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2008. 294 pp. ¥2,625. Maiko Watanabe Received: 30 November 2008 /Accepted: 30 November 2008 /Published online: 18 September 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 The collection, Techno/Bio Politics: Contemporary science, medicine and technology (2008), provides valuable case studies on issues of science and technology from a gender perspective. The collection is the fruitful result of the research project, “Biomedicine and Gender in the Post Genomic Era,” conducted between 2003 and 2008 by a team of 16 Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese female researchers in the fields of history and sociology. As Azumi Tsuge, the primary investigator, states in Chap. 13, the project has two aims. One is to inform those who presume that science is a value-free activity that is neutral to political, economic, and cultural conditions that science actually has sociopolitical and cultural challenges. The other is to broaden the scope of the research field, “science, technology, medicine and gender,” which she and other researchers have been working on. The results exhibited in this collection not only fulfill the two original aims of the project but also contribute to science studies, as the frontier of a feminist critique of science in Asia. The studies presented in the collection are grounded in a strand of thought called “feminist standpoint theory” that constitutes a theoretical and practical framework for a feminist critique of science. According to Harding (2004), feminist standpoint theory emerged in the 1970s and 1980s “as a feminist critical theory about relations between the production of knowledge and practices of power” (p.1). It shares an interest with the philosophy of science and science studies that have been questioning the neutrality of truth claimed by science by indicating the intervention of power structures in the production of scientific knowledge. Borrowing the term of James Robert Brown (2001), feminist standpoint theory is part of widespread East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2009) 3:385–388 DOI 10.1007/s12280-009-9093-6 M. Watanabe (*) Department of Public Policy Human Genome Centre, Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan e-mail: wtnb@ims.u-tokyo.ac.jp discussions on “Who Rules in Science?” Among the scholarship involved in this discussion, that of feminist standpoint theory is the most critical. As Patricia Hill Collins (2004) states, “feminist standpoint theory” is “an interpretive framework dedicated to explicating how knowledge remains central to maintaining and changing unjust systems of power” (p. 247). It values “the collective experience of women” as “folk thought” or “folk knowledge,” critically demonstrating the ignorance of science towards the knowledge of the minority. Techno/Bio Politics explores the collected experiences of women that have often been ignored in the name of science. The intention of a feminist critique of science is made especially clear in the first chapter by Londa Schiebinger. She explores, from a historical perspective, folk knowledge of an abortion pill in the West Indies and its “discovery” by European females in the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuries. According to Naoko Yuga, who comments on Schiebinger in her own chapter in the book, Schiebinger’s aim in observing “folk knowledge” in the colonial period is to develop agnotology, which is the study of knowledge that is eliminated in a certain cultural context (p.43). Schiebinger discusses the function of gender in the development, obtainment, and mediation of folk knowledge, based on her three basic research interests: (1) how women participate in the practice of science, (2) how the cultural and institutional aspects of science limit the participation of women in science, and (3) how scientific knowledge is constructed within a gender framework (p.15). These research interests indicate that, although termed differently, the intention of agnotology, as pursued by Schiebinger, overlaps with that of feminist standpoint theory in valuing the knowledge of oppressed groups, questioning, “Could women (in various diverse collectivities) become subjects of knowledge?” (Harding 2004: 4). And this question is underlined in the discussions in the following papers. In Chap. 2, Miwa Yokoyama demonstrates the objectification of the female body by European males in the era...