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Nature’s Body. Londa Schiebinger. The Introduction. Why investigate natural history? Why choose gender?. Chapter One. Why did plant sexuality become a priority in the 18 th century? Why did sexuality become the key to classification?
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Nature’s Body Londa Schiebinger
The Introduction • Why investigate natural history? • Why choose gender?
Chapter One • Why did plant sexuality become a priority in the 18th century? • Why did sexuality become the key to classification? • What are Schiebinger’s two uses of gender in her analysis? What does she mean by implicit or explicit gender? • Why the sex and marriage metaphors? What were the cultural reasons? • What is Schiebinger’s point about metaphors in science? • Why no sexualization of plants in France? • What role did “radical politics” in the use and perception of these metaphors? • What curbed the use of these sexual metaphors?
Chapter Two • Why was the term mammalia used to classify animals? • What was the common term before mammalia? • What is the origin of the term mammalia? • What were the common historical connotations of the “breast” and breast-feeding” in western culture (pre-18th century)? • How did breasts imply about female nature? • What cultural shifts occurred in the 1750s that altered the way one perceived of breast-feeding, breasts, and womanhood? • How might this has influenced Linnaeus? What evidence do we have?
Chapter Three • Why was Enlightenment natural history so interested in primates? • What were the four major questions that dominated the “are primates human” debate? • What primate traits or abilities encouraged the “apes-are-human-hybrids” idea? • What was the focus of study when it came to investigating female primates? • What human male characteristics were superimposed onto the male ape? • What human female characteristics were superimposed onto the female ape? • What were some of the racialized/miscegenation myths of primate origin? • Considering what you know about 18th century culture and the debates around women’s rights and the abolition of slavery, what is significant about the many satirical texts that played on the “apes-are-human-hybrids” myth?
18th Century Text on Liberal Values Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), The Crisis (1776-77), The Rights of Man (1791-92); Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
Chapter Four • Why was the beard used as a racial marker? What was it believed to signify? • Where does the classification Caucasian come from? What were the reasons for this term? • What supposed role did women play in the shaping of races? • What was the environmentalist argument about race? How did it question the “great chain of being”? • What was the biological deterministic argument? Where did they look to find their evidence?
Chapter Five • What was the theory of gender complementarity? How might we view it as simultaneously oppressive and liberating? • When studying the racial and gendered classifications and differences, which “specimens” were used? • How was Blumenbach’s work different? • Why does Schiebinger’s chapter take an “excursion into political history”?
Conceptual Keys Male = the set Female = the subset (need to study subset’s difference from the set) Black male = (often on the same or similar power level) = White female (dominant gender of the inferior race) = (inferior gender of the dominant race) What human (usually white) male traits were “found” in male animals and/or used to classify human males? What female (usually white) female traits were “found” in female animals and/or used to classify human females? How is power involved in the creation of classification systems?
Chapter 6 & “Nature’s Body Wronged” • What two questions about race, gender, and science dominated debates about who should and should not be involved in the scientific enterprise? • What were the major hypotheses about the race of Egyptian (and North African) people? • What, according to Schiebinger, is problematic about Bernal’s Black Athena? • What were some of the similarities, differences, and inconsistencies in the 18th century education of Black males and white females? • What questions does Schiebinger raise (in the last section) about the formation/development of natural history had women (all women) been more involved in this scientific work?
Schiebinger’s Book and the “So What” Questions: • Keeping in mind the nature of this course, what does Schiebinger’s book offer us? • What does she ultimately say about science, gender, race, and culture?
