A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies

1994 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Jeanne Haraway

The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory provides an overview of the analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts feminist theorists have developed to challenge established knowledge. Leading feminist theorists, from around the globe, provide in-depth explorations of a diverse array of subject areas, capturing a plurality of approaches. The Handbook raises new questions, brings new evidence, and poses significant challenges across the spectrum of academic disciplines, demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of feminist theory. The chapters offer innovative analyses of the central topics in social and political science (e.g. civilization, development, divisions of labor, economies, institutions, markets, migration, militarization, prisons, policy, politics, representation, the state/nation, the transnational, violence); cultural studies and the humanities (e.g. affect, agency, experience, identity, intersectionality, jurisprudence, narrative, performativity, popular culture, posthumanism, religion, representation, standpoint, temporality, visual culture); and discourses in medicine and science (e.g. cyborgs, health, intersexuality, nature, pregnancy, reproduction, science studies, sex/gender, sexuality, transsexuality) and contemporary critical theory that have been transformed through feminist theorization (e.g. biopolitics, coloniality, diaspora, the microphysics of power, norms/normalization, postcoloniality, race/racialization, subjectivity/subjectivation). The Handbook identifies the limitations of key epistemic assumptions that inform traditional scholarship and shows how theorizing from women’s and men’s lives has profound effects on the conceptualization of central categories, whether the field of analysis is aesthetics, biology, cultural studies, development, economics, film studies, health, history, literature, politics, religion, science studies, sexualities, violence, or war.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Rosenfeld

Farmed animal sanctuaries rescue, rehabilitate, and care for animals bred for use in agriculture. Because of the structure of veterinary training, regulations on species considered agricultural, and for other reasons, rescued animals such as chickens fall out of spaces of veterinary care and medical knowledge production. Given these knowledge and research gaps, this paper investigates how sanctuaries develop medical knowledge about chickens, focusing on hens bred for egg production. I develop the concept of “witnessing” as it has been used in science studies, feminist theory, and animal activism, arguing that sanctuary science and medicine can be understood as queer witnessing. Then, I discuss how sanctuaries put queer witnessing into practice, through aspirational archiving, transposition, and reorienting health. Though queer witnessing has its limits and problems, it offers a way of doing activist science, at sanctuaries and beyond.


Philosophy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandra Tanesini

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science is the study of the significance of gender for the acquisition and justification of knowledge. At its inception, feminist epistemology was in large part concerned with science and showed more affinity with the history and philosophy of science and with social and cultural studies of science than with mainstream epistemology. Since the early 2000s, however, significant new trends have led to the production of extremely innovative work, such as a turn toward a conception of matter as being in some ways like an agent in science studies, as well as a focus on topics at the interface between ethics and epistemology in feminist epistemology.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (6) ◽  
pp. 833-839
Author(s):  
Marcus Johnson ◽  
Ralina L Joseph

This article argues that Black cultural studies must be understood as an intersectional intervention of praxis. Grounding our field in the past, speaking from the present, and projecting to the future, we examine the transformational influence that Black feminist theory has had on cultural studies, from Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s defense of 2 Live Crew, to the #SayHerName and Protect Black Women rally and marches.


Author(s):  
Stacy Alaimo

The term “nature,” because of its associations with gender and racial essentialisms, its position in foundational Western dualisms, its place in the colonialist imagination, and its promotion of heteronormativity is a volatile term for feminist theory. While much feminist theory has distanced itself from the conceptual terrain of nature, environmental feminisms, material feminisms, feminist science studies, queer ecologies, and feminist posthumanisms approach “nature” differently, productively engaging with human corporeality, environments, material agency and nonhuman life. In this anthropocene era, marked by the human alteration of the biological, geological, and chemical composition of the planet, feminist theory needs to contend with “nature” in ways that are attuned not only to social justice but to the survival of a multitude of species, ecosystems, and life forms. Feminist theory is thus a vital resource for all theorists who wish to rethink the concept of nature and its theoretical, ethical, and political entanglements.


Author(s):  
Deboleena Roy

This chapter provides an overview of the emergence and development of feminist science studies and traces its engagement with key concepts in feminist theory. First, it considers the operationalization of liberal/equal rights feminist frameworks within science and the efforts to create scientific knowledge through sex/gender analyses. Next, it examines the new materialist conversations that have changed feminist theory’s relation to matter and binaries such as sex/gender, contrasting feminist poststructuralist and feminist science studies approaches to the “material turn” in feminist theory. Finally, it considers what the insights feminist science and science and technology scholarship have gleaned from social-justice epistemologies and ethical practices contribute to feminist theory—notably, contextualized analyses that are cognizant of the formative influence of colonialism, capitalism, and neoliberal biopolitics. These diverse approaches to feminist science studies share a cosmopolitical effort to move beyond critiques of science to develop new ways of working with science.


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