ABSTRACT
In the American scene, according to Sandra Harding (1986), the nature of feminist critiques of science has evolved since the mid-1970s from a reformist to a revolutionary position. This critical history began with the “woman question” in science, which problematizes the exclusion of women from science and the “unscientific” androcentrism that resulted from this underrepresentation. It subsequently moved on to the “science question” in feminism, to interrogate the androcentrism structuring the very standards of scientific investigation, notably the equation of “objectivity” with the Western attributes of masculinity (see also Fox Keller 1987, 1992). For Harding, this evolution from the critique of bad science to that of science as usual emerged out of the paradoxical grounds from which feminist scholars articulated their claims about androcentrism in science:
Clearly, more scientifically rigorous and objective inquiry has produced the evidence supporting specific charges of androcentrism-but that same inquiry suggests that this kind of rigor and objectivity is androcentric! It is this paradox that raises the Science Question in feminism. (1986, 110)
This paper tries to take the science question in feminism one step further, from the critique of the androcentric methodological discourse of rigor and objectivity to the critique of a substantive construct, indeed, to the questioning of substance as construct itself. More specifically, it addresses a new paradox emerging out of the stillpervasive assumption that one part of sex-what I call “naked sex”—is prior to gender construction, wherein naked sex’s resistance to constructivist analysis would derive from the “thingness” or the “stuff” composing sex, namely, from the matter of sexual difference (see, e.g., Hausman 1995). As you are no doubt aware, this issue has already been addressed, in a provocative manner, by Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter (1993). As an extension of this critical endeavor, I suggest here that conceiving of matter as the substance of sexual difference can be considered a naturalized effect produced by the very gesture of denaturalizing boundaries that are usually posited as themselves natural divides-for example, between nature and culture, sex and gender, women and men, or even female and male.
