'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means exactly what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Master - a person with the ability or power to use, control, or dispose of something; male head of a household; a victor or conqueror; a man eminently skilled in something; one holding this title.
Random House Dictionary of the English Language
Do feminists have anything distinctive to say about the natural sciences? Should feminists concentrate on criticizing sexist science and the conditions of its production? Or should feminists be laying the foundation for an epistemological revolution illuminating all facets of scientific knowledge? Is there a specifically feminist theory of knowledge growing today which is analogous in its implications to theories which are the heritage of Greek science and of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century? Would a feminist epistemology informing scientific enquiry be a family member to existing theories of representation and philosophical realism? Or should feminists adopt a radical form of epistemology that denies the possibility of access to a real world and an objective standpoint? Would feminist standards of knowledge genuinely end the dilemma of the cleavage between subject and object or between non-invasive knowing and prediction and control? Does feminism offer insight into the connections between science and humanism? Do feminists have anything new to say about the vexed relations of knowledge and power? Would feminist authority and the power to name give the world a new identity, a new story? Can feminists master science?
These large questions may be usefully broached in a meditation on four recent books addressed to one little corner of contemporary natural science - the debate about biological determinism and human nature. One thing is undeniable about biology since its early formulations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: biology tells tales about origins, about genesis, and about nature. Further, modern feminists have inherited our story in a patriarchal voice. Biology is the science of life, conceived and authored by a word from the father. Feminists have inherited knowledge through the paternal line. The word was Aristotle's, Galileo's, Bacon's, Newton's, Linnaeus's, Darwin's; the flesh was woman's,1 And the word was made flesh, naturally. We have been engendered. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), in their study of nineteenth-century women writers, discuss women's travail to construct a voice, to have authority, to author a text, to tell a story, to give birth to the word. To author is to have the power to originate, to name. Women who seek to produce natural knowledge, like our sisters who learned to write and speak, also must decipher a text, the book of nature, authored legitimately by men.
Gilbert and Gubar, analysing the extraordinary influence of Milton's justification of the ways of God on nineteenth-century female writers seeking to tell stories, suggest that all of us begin in some sense as Milton's daughters, forced to read a book in a language that signifies our lack, our difference. The Madwoman in the Attic asserts that Milton's literary daughters adopted two main strategies for gaining authority: they either reinterpreted the origin story to get it right the second time, or they rebelliously proclaimed a totally new story. In deep similarity, feminists taking responsibility for modern origin stories - that is, for biology - may try to get the story right, to clean up shoddy science about evolution and brains and hormones, to show how biology really comes out right with no conflict between reason and authority. Or feminists may more boldly announce a completely new birth. In both cases, feminists are contesting for a voice. And so rhetorical strategies, the contest to set the terms of speech, are at the centre of feminist struggles in natural science. The four books discussed in this chapter may be read primarily as entries in the contest of rhetorical strategies for setting the terms that define good science. How should we know whom to believe? After examining these four books, the stories they tell, and the modes of telling they adopt in their attempt to prove authority, we may return to the questions of the opening paragraph with a new ear.
Let us begin at the beginning. David Barash (1977), zoologist-sociobiologist at the University of Washington, did probing research on rape in mallards and wrote the authoritative textbook Sociobiology and Behavior. In The Whisperings Within, Barash (1979) intends to reveal to the popular audience the inner voice of biology, the cake of nature under the icing of culture, the biogrammar of genes structuring the message of the organism all so that modern people might come to know themselves and fulfil their potential. Barash maintains that biology is the most powerful tool in the humanist project to know and achieve the self.2 Barash makes unbridled use of the literary devices and thematic structure of Genesis and its commentators. Harper & Row actually marketed Whisperings in a dust jacket picturing a blond, blue-eyed, young white male and a brown-haired, blue-eyed, young white woman standing, genitals hidden, in a garden of vegetables dominated by sword plants that could have come only from Lewis/Luis's nursery in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Barash invited his packaging: his first quote is from Pius XII on natural law and reproductive sex in marriage; the first sentence of Chapter 2 is, 'In the beginning was the gene' (p. 16). Milton might not have liked these new children's stories or recognized his Adam and Eve in Barash's original partnerships in which male and female are 'co-shareholders in any offspring' engaged in the 'eternal evolutionary struggle to get ahead'; but the lineage is intact (Barash, 1979, pp. 123, 126).3 Milton's fierce determinism has been translated into Barash's doctrine of people as 'temporary, skin-encapsulated egos, serving as complex tools by means of which their potentially immortal genes replicate themselves' (p.2).
Indeed, Barash's concern for lineages is his central rhetorical strategy. He calls on the authority of the father and names it scientific knowledge. Most important, Barash wishes to establish that Darwin begat sociobiology through his sons, especially men like himself, Robert Trivers, and W. D. Hamilton. Introducing experts to validate sociobiological reasoning, Barash rarely lets a name or argument stand alone. His authorities are Harvard biologist X, the great physicist Y, the leading evolutionary biologist Z, and so on (pp. 29, 34, 91, 133, 135, 166, 221, 240). In Chapter I - a pious homily before Chapter 2's genesis story of the gene and its great drama of endless replication, sexual reproduction, and the titanic market struggles among its thralls - Barash calls sociobiology the child of Copernicus and the Scientific Revolution. The promise of science - to know man - win at last be fulfilled. 'Sociobiology, in the same tradition, may help us discover our own nature and allow us to eavesdrop on the whispers of biology within us all' (p. 9). The true scientist in the legitimate lineage must face the scorn of scoffers, of those who prefer untruth because it is comfortable.4 Like Darwin, the brilliant and courageous truth-teller will gain honour in the end. And sociobiology promises more than knowledge of the self; it also promises, like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness of nature beneath the merely verbal icing of culture. The lonely hero, the true child, will take us back to the garden of ourselves. 5
So, attention to patrilineages is Barash's first fictive strategy for producing facts. His second is the legitimation of sociobiology's authority and power to achieve the promises of humanism. Sociobiology is fundamentally a scientific humanism which makes self-fulfilment possible by revealing the common coin, the medium of exchange, the equivalent that defines reality, the generator of meaning. At first glance, Barash's skin-encapsulated egos who serve the replicative ends of the prolix code-gene-coin-word within seem part of a strategy of reduction and objectification deeply opposed to humanism and human subjectivity, self-definition, and freedom. On the surface, Barash offers a doctrine of necessary biological determinism of all the chief forms of domination which are especially driven by the motors of ruthless competition and male dominance. In the beginning was the gene. And the gene was hungry; to live was to multiply. But the 'ultimate message' of sociobiology is quite different: it is the identification of the proper expert who has authority to exercise effective power over nature through knowledge of the word, control of the coin, cracking the code of nature's secret voice. Barash's message is the technology of power. He disavows the 'naturalistic fallacy'; 'is' is not 'ought' for him.6 Knowing how to read the word, how to assess the value of the coin, gives the power of determination to those who use those tools. Of course, freedom and necessity come together as they must for humanists - in the end freedom is doing what we really want to do, and that is revealed by listening to the voice within, interpreted in the patriline of sociobiology. But we can change what we want; humanist power is radical. Power and authorship fabricate reality. The patriarchal voice of sociobiology is less the effusive sexism that ripples over the whole plane of the text than it is the logic of domination embedded in fashioning the tool of the word. Science and humanism have always been bedfellows. Their arguments are the wrangling of the two made into one flesh. Subject and object need each other. Their union gives birth to the patriarchal authorial voice.
A nagging question persists when one reads sociobiological texts: does anyone listen to these stories? An affirmative answer emerges from reading the seventeen essays in Gregory et al.'s collection, Sociobiology and Human Nature (1978). Ironically, the editors based this book on a symposium held under the very official auspices of the Science-Humanities Convergence Program (NEXA) funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore 'humanistic implications of sociobiological inquiry . . . NEXA provided a setting in which biologists, sociobiologists, anthropologists, psychologists, physicists, economists, and humanists could combine their efforts to understand the import of the questions currently being raised in sociobiological research' (p. x). The experts, then, were assembled to mediate and interpet the marital squabble between science and humanism and to show their higher unity. And they spoke - individually, authoritatively, joined in debate by the power of editors and panel moderators - in the rhetoric to which we have become accustomed. Each speaker seemed especially anxious to have his version of the history of science adopted, so that the legitimate lineage could be established. (The one woman who was invited - a senior scholar, Marjorie Greene - was assigned the task of discussing sociobiological implications for a philosophy of mind! The patriarchal voice is sometimes flatly funny.) This collection does contain some well-reasoned and very interesting essays, but this discussion will do them the injustice of limited analysis in order to keep to the theme of rhetorical strategies important for feminist mastery of scientific discourse.
E. O. Wilson, the arch-scientist of the moment, introduces the volume with the rhetoric of the innocent seeker for truth, the eternally young scientist surprised by all the furor (Gregory et al., 1978, p. 1). He reiterates that sociobiology aims only to provide perspective for formulating the highest social goals, for bridging the two cultures, science and humanities. David Barash, his authority to speak acknowledged by his invitation to this expensive, taxpayer-supported forum, provides a manifesto for a scientific revolution and exclaims over the 'epiphantic insights' of the cost-benefit theorists in the history of sociobiology (p. 11). Sociobiologist Pierre L. van den Berghe preaches to the derelict social sciences and argues that only a return to the pastures of biology will reroot the human sciences in the soil of truth; history of science shows it. Sherwood Washburn scathingly chastises sociobiology for ruining social science by biologizing; his history of science shows the necessity of social explanation for social facts.7 Physicist and historian of the physical sciences Gerald Holton, whose authority to speak must derive from his association with the most real of sciences (he notes in the first paragraph that he checked his pronouncements about biology with the relevant experts), praises sociobiology because it 'takes risks' and 'throws down the challenge' (pp. 75, 79). In short, sociobiology has proper male attributes. Holton proceeds to talk about the lineage of Ernst Haeckel, Jacques Loeb, Lucretius, and, of course, Newton. The point is to assess whether sociobiology measures up to the standards of a new synthesis. Animal psychologist Frank Beach argues persuasively that real science has more to say about proximate mechanisms and detailed empirical investigation and eschews easy ultimate claims and premature risky theory. Comparing the history of evolutionary biology and phrenology, historian-philosopher David Hull disclaims any pronouncements on the truth of scientific theories and points out that judgements of history have to do with success - who marshals resources to stay in the game and so by definition practises good science. In short, he adapts sociobiological standards to a cynical, agnostic history of science which has the virtue of showing that historically science is produced through struggles over power. Garrett Hardin, famed in the United States for the ethics of sinking lifeboats and desecrated commons, adopts a rhetoric of simple red-baiting. Those who oppose the truth of a selfish world are self-deceiving Marxists. Joseph Alper speaks for Science for the People, summing up the critique of ideologies of objectivity and demonstrating the false political neutrality of sociobiology.
The last article in this expert collection is actually a pronouncement by a Nobel Prize winner on the human condition! George Wald, a good friend of science radicals, insists immodestly that 'A scientist should not just study nature but should take care of humanity, life, and our planet' (p. 282). The text has moved from innocent to innocent, Wilson to Wald. After this pious ending, the editors' voices re-enter to sum it all up: Wilson speaking for the sociobiologists has turned our attention (as if it had wavered!) to the quest for 'our humanity'. 'We have no recourse but to accept his challenge. And paradoxically, he deserves our thanks for having cast it in so extreme a form' (p. 294). Deo gratias.
Let us now turn to Milton's scientific daughters who are taking stock of this rhetorical inheritance. We have not set the original terms of discourse; that fact determines our texts. What are the degrees of freedom for feminist reshaping of the production of science? Again, let us approach our question by exploring rhetorical strategies presented in the texts at hand. Genes and Gender (Hubbard and Lowe, 1979) unabashedly puns on the central problematic of genesis in biology; the title of Women Look at Biology Looking at Women (Hubbard et al., 1979) could hardly be more explicit about the mirror theme in the fictive scientific production of reality. Between the covers of these works, explicit commentary on the productive and reproductive power of the word continues. Language is a principal preoccupation of nearly every author in both books of collected essays. Susan Leigh Star makes the pervasive theme explicit in Genes and Gender. power to determine the language of discourse is the power to make flesh, to
somatize our oppression . . . We have no language at present that does not reflect a Cartesian nature/nurture dichotomy for discussing sex differences. It is difficult to resist the urge to ask, 'But what, underneath it all, really are the differences between men and women.' What we must begin to give voice to as scientists and feminists is that there is no such thing, or place, as underneath it all. Literally, empirically, physiologically, anatomically, neurologically . . . the only accurate locus for research about us who speak to each other is the changing, moving, complex web of our interactions, in light of the language, power structures, natural environments (internal and external), and beliefs that weave it in time. (Hubbard and Lowe, 1979, p. 116)
Star writes this in a book that sets as its task the re-establishment of standards of research on all aspects of sex differences. Genes and Gender concludes that such research is now impossible - it simply cannot measure up to standards of scientific knowledge. This group of feminists has set out to name the rules of enquiry. And Star speaks in this group not as a Nobel Prize winner or as a tenured sociobiologist at a major university claiming Darwin's mantle, if not Newton's. She speaks as an editor of poetry for Sinister Wisdom and as a graduate student in geriatrics who studied research on brain asymmetry in an undergraduate seminar at Radcliffe, an institution that has led many women to authority. The authors in Genes and Gender try to persuade researchers to accept new standards, indeed, to abandon their field, in a way analogous to a physicist's telling biologists that anything they cannot quantify does not qualify as the matter of science. It remains a question whether natural selection and evolutionary biology itself would not have to abandon the field in the face of enforcement of that standard. What leads the authors in Genes and Gender to reach their nihilistic conclusion?
First, they cite the ubiquity of 'bad science' in the field of sex differences8. This strategy emerges from the historical necessity for feminists to begin with the heritage of names in a patriarchal voice. We are obliged to comment on the received texts. After all, one does not start from scratch when John Money has the gender clinic, E. O. Wilson the professorship at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and so on. Milton's feminist daughters are as concerned about lineages as Barash, Holton, or Hardin. The strategy of reinterpretation of received stories is widely used by the authors in this book. In the 'begats' as presented by these authors, Darwin and Galileo become anti-heroes who either scientized Victorian social prejudice or alienated the subject from the object in a doctrine of the primacy of quantifiable qualities (pp. 15-17). The critique of bad science leads directly to an analysis of the material conditions of the production of knowledge and to a personal identification of the objective voice behind the 'pure, unadulterated facts'. Reality has an author. The author always has a proper name, but it has a way of disappearing into declarative sentences or even graphs embedded in published papers issuing from well-funded laboratories.9
Through these kinds of analyses, the authors in Genes and Gender want to persuade us that the bad science did not emerge accidentally, but systematically - and further, must continue to emerge, no matter how much individual scientists try to do good science on sex and gender. Facts are theory-laden; theories are value-laden; values are history-laden. And the history in this case makes it impossible for any researcher to step far enough away from daily, lived dominations of gender to study gender with any authority. Indeed, the very constitution of gender and sex as objects of study is part of the reproduction of the problem - the problem of genesis and origin. The historical project of humanism and its associated life and human sciences is the search for and fulfilment of the self. The constitution of sex and gender as privileged objects of knowledge is a tool in the search for the self. This construction regenerates the infinite regress of the search for the illusive subject that paradoxically ends regularly in the discovery of the totalitarian object - nature, the gene, the word.
These are strong words, and their difficulty is revealed when the feminists of Genes and Gender want to emerge from agnosticism and say what is the case with sex and gender. Feminists want also to adopt the second strategy of Milton's literary daughters and tell truly new stories with authority. But the critique of bad science that glides into a radical doctrine that all scientific statements are historical fictions made facts through the exercise of power produces trouble when feminists want to talk about producing feminist science which is more true, not just better at predicting and controlling the body of the world. David Hull's success story in the NEXA volume (that science becomes official through opportunistic survival) will not do for feminists because they do not wish to adopt the mask of having no position, mere spectators on the sidelines of the history of science. Corrosive scepticism cannot be midwife to new stories. Naomi Weisstein puts the matter well in Woman Look at Biology when she says, '[E]vidence became a hero of mine' (Hubbard et al., 1979, p. 187).10
The process of exposing bad science, showing the Active character of all science, and then proposing the real facts results in repeated unexamined contradictions in the feminist essays in both books.11 These contradictions are important; they also bring us back to the opening questions of this chapter. Ruth Hubbard, a kind of scientific mother in the production of both Genes and Gender and Women Look at Biology, provides a sophisticated analysis of the issues and also shows clearly some of the contradictions in extant feminist analysis of biology.
In 'Have only men evolved', Hubbard begins with a thorough critique of theories of representation and ideologies of objectivity in science in general.
For humans, language plays a major role in generating reality . . . However, all acts of naming happen against a backdrop of what is socially accepted as real. The question is who has social sanction to define the larger reality into which one's everyday experiences must fit in order that one be reckoned sane and responsible . . . At present science is the most respectable legitimator of new realities. (Hubbard et al., 1979, pp. 8-9)12
Language generates reality in the inescapable context of power; it does not stand for or point to a knowable world hiding somewhere outside the ever-receding boundaries of particular social-historical enquiries. Yet somehow the task of the scientist as Sisyphus is to try to produce a picture of the world that is 'more than a reflection of various aspects of ourselves and of our social arrangements' (p. 11). Next Hubbard provides a nuanced reading of male-'engendered' origin stories of human evolution. But then, in the midst of discussing the difficulty of reconstructing the past, she puts in a little sentence that categorically asserts a fact: 'Since the time when we and the apes diverged some fifteen million years ago, the main features of human evolution that one can read from the palaeontological finds are the upright stance, reduction in the size of the teeth, and increase in brain size' (p. 29) Maybe, but what are the rules of interpretation that make this story unequivocally readable, and how do they differ from the rules for reading social and behavioural evolution? The main difference seems to be that there is now a non-gender-linked agreement about upright stance, so the reading is uncontested. But does the end of controversy mean that a story has achieved the status of fact, has escaped social determination, and has become objective? So suggests an innocent declarative sentence in the midst of scathing deconstruction. Yet upright stance and times of divergence between ape and hominid lines have been arenas of mortal combat in evolutionary theory more than once.
These problems become acute in the conclusion of the article when Hubbard suggests tasks for feminists as they take responsibility for the production of science. In particular, the hidden link between theories of representation and the humanist projects of self-discovery causes trouble. Hubbard cautions that women should not produce mirror-image 'estrocentric' stories, except perhaps as joke and parody. We should sift through current work to find raw data. But how, when we have also been told all facts are laden with theory and thus with value and history? We should demythologize masculinist science; and, able to 'think beyond it, [we] must do the necessary work in the field, in the laboratories, and in the libraries and come up with ways of seeing the facts and of interpreting them' (p. 32). 'False facts' and 'androcentric science' have endured too long, and a feminist science is necessary for finding ourselves, for getting our true inheritance. 'To see our alternatives is essential if we are to acquire the space in which to explore who we are, where we have come from, and where we want to go' (p. 32). In short, feminism is a true humanism based on true knowledge or at least on true interpretation. But all of the epistemological and political problems of humanism and realism are latent - or patent - here.
Feminists want some theory of representation to avoid the problem of epistemological anarchism. An epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying to build a shared politics.13 But feminists also know that the power of naming a thing is the power of objectifying, of totalizing. The other is simultaneously produced and located outside the more real in the twin discourses of life and human sciences, of natural science and humanism. This is the creation of difference that plagues 'Western' knowledge; it is the patriarchal voice in the production of discourse that can name only by subordinating within legitimate lineages.
Nancy Hartsock and Sandra Harding try to overcome this dilemma by arguing in slightly different ways that, because of our historical position, women can have a theory of objectivity, of the radical material-social production of knowledge, and of the possible end of dominating by naming. We have nothing to hide, so the self will not play its usual tricks and recede while substituting a fetish.14 Subject and object can cohabit without the master-slave domination. Harding and Hartsock work from the Marxist premise that those suffering oppression have no interest in appearances passing for reality and so can really show how things work. Life and human sciences have merely been obscured by the position of the knowers - on top. I find this approach promising but not fully convincing. That argument must wait. What becomes very clear, however, is that feminists have now entered the debates on the nature and power of scientific knowledge with authority: we do have something to say. The only remaining problem is what, and here we are speaking in many voices. One voice for beginning again is offered by the epilogue of Women Look at Biology:
The man-nature antithesis was invented by men. Our job is to reinvent a relationship that will realize (in the literal sense of making real) the unity of humankind with nature and will try to understand its workings from the inside . . . Science is a human construct that came about under a particular set of historical conditions when men's domination of nature seemed a positive and worthy goal. The conditions have changed and we know now that the path we are travelling is more likely to destroy nature than to explain or improve it. Women have recognized more often than men that we are part of nature and that its fate is in human hands that have not cared for it well. We must now act on that knowledge. (Hubbard et al., 1979, p. 209)
That is a feminist voice; is it also a humanist whisper?