ABSTRACT
While it is true that scholars of all stripes who teach technoscience studies have come under considerable criticism recently, when Paul Gross and Norman Levitt took on the project of “debunking” the academic critique of the ideological work of the natural sciences, they singled out several prominent feminist scholars as unduly influential in provoking the “Left’s” hostility to science (Gross and Levitt 1994). Donna Haraway’s (1990) famous line notwithstanding (“I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess”), feminists were lumped together as issuing an “ecofeminist harangue from the Goddess-worshipping camp” (Gross and Levitt 1994: 10). From the other side of the political divide, feminists who teach technoscience studies have been accused by other feminists of sabotaging feminist aims by contributing to women’s disillusionment with science, and of discouraging female students from pursuing careers in scientific and technological fields (Koertge 1994: A80). Commentators from both sides of the political divide transcode the intellectual aim of feminist technoscience criticism – to critically examine the implications of scientific and technological practice for the lives of women and the construction of gender – into a broad-stroked condemnation of science. Where one side criticizes feminist technoscience scholars of fostering an aggressive, debilitating hostility toward science in young students, the other side accuses feminists of a wide-sweeping ecological utopianism that promotes the transcendental value of a feminized “nature.” Needless to say, feminists who teach technoscience studies find themselves navigating a difficult intellectual landscape.
