ABSTRACT
For several years now we have seen the heightening of old battles between ‘Science’ and ‘Culture’, with Darwin reinstated as the figurehead of Science. Today, it is no longer physics, with its military utility, but molecular biology, with its commercial stakes, which has become the new King of Science. Not atomic energy, but recombinant DNA, is the object of the latest form of veneration-now the final arbiter of human circumstance and potential. The loss of belief in the legacies of both Marx and Keynes as guides for social change, and the intensified attacks on Freud as a diviner of self-knowledge, have something to do with the current return to Darwin. So too does another feature of our times: the continuing shifts and disruptions in gender relations, gender practices and identities, alongside persistent feminist questionings, have encouraged an enthusiastic ‘backlash’ reception for new theories endorsing genetic origins for normative investments in sexual difference.
