The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology THE BIOLOGY AND GENDER STUDY GROUP

This essay is reprinted courtesy of the Indiana University Press and the authors. The explanatory footnotes have been placed into the text Sections of this paper concerning metaphors in other sciences have been replaced by a section that seeks to update the 1988 paper. Biology is seen not merely as a privileged oppressor of women but as a co-victim of masculinist social assumptions. We see feminist critique as one of the normative controls that any scientist must perform whenever analyzing data, and we seek to demonstrate what has happened when this control has not been utilized. Narratives of fertilization and sex determination traditionally have been modeled on the cultural patterns of male/female interaction, leading to gender associations being placed on cells and their components. We also find that when gender biases are controlled, new perceptions of these intracellular and extracellular relationships emerge. Nancy Tuana (this volume) has traced the seed-and-soil analogy from cosmological myths through Aristotle into the biology of the 1700s. Modeling his embryology after his social ideal, Aristotle promulgated the notions of male activity versus female passivity, the female as incomplete male, and the male as the real parent of the offspring. The female merely provided passive matter to be molded by the male sperm. While there were competing views of embryology during Aristotle's time, Aristotle's principles got the support of St. Thomas an