ABSTRACT
The film version of The Race to the Double Helix shows Rosalind Franklin gazing down, admiring the evidence of her latest experiment, and murmuring beatifically, ‘I just want to look, I don’t want to touch’. This is a twist on the association of vision with distance and aggression, and touching with erotic engagement that is so familiar to feminist scholars. Franklin reverses these. Yet, by appealing to a different association, most familiar to scientists, she is saved the feminine-subject position. In scientific discourse, looking is associated with innocence, with the desire to understand, while touching implies intervention, manipulation, and control.
