ABSTRACT
Many scientists were curious about feminist critiques and worried that they might unintentionally be driving women and students of color away from their fields. But they also feared being labeled “politically incorrect” or being ridiculed for their lack of sophistication in nonscientific forms of analysis. Team members expected to act as facilitators of conversations about the feminist critique of science. The scientists often found the language used by feminist theorists impenetrable, and their arguments opaque. Feminists, one scientist commented, “are very verbose, quite clever, and manipulative in their language, and often repetitive.” Feminists, of course, take for granted that one of their primary contributions to any analytical framework is to add the lens of gender to the theorist’s toolkit. For the nonfeminist participants, however, this category was not easily assimilated as a useful or even viable tool for analysis. Feminist critiques go beyond creating “female-friendly” classrooms, and raise questions about how scientific knowledge is constructed, and by whom.
