Background
Fox-Keller, Evelyn was born in 1936 in New York, United States.
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Evelyn Fox-Keller
Edit ProfileEducation
Physics and Molecular Biology. Harvard University. Inns: T. S. Kuhn, Barbara McLintock and feminist psychoanalysis.
Views
Western science hitherto has had an unacknowledged gender bias which has not only tended until quite recently to exclude women from scientific work but has influenced the basic concepts and paradigms with which scientists work. For example, the traditional association of intellect and objectivity with the male and of subjectivity and feeling with the female has tended to exclude women from scientific discourse. Again, the preference among male scientists for models in which nature •s regarded as rigidly determined and lawgoverned, and the biological sphere as one of competition and conflict for scarce resources, she regards as an unconscious reflection of what she asserts to be standard male conditioning: to grow UP a male must stifle his emotional relationship with his mother and deny subjective emotional needs, and this Fox-Keller sees as the root cause of the typical male mental set. She argues further that this mental set prevents a proper understanding of nature. It is more productive to approach nature as a system incorporating spontaneity and cooperation. Again, the relationship of scientist and object of study should be rcgarded as a dynamic rapport, rather than that of a master attempting to subjugate a recalcitrant nature conceived of as female.
