Love, Power and Knowledge

This work develops new terms for thinking about science and feminism. The author locates the feminist criticism of science as both integral to the feminist movement and also to the radical science movement. She returns to her work from 1983 on the feminist reconstruction of rationality, drawing on UK, US and Scandinavian research. She attends to the political economy of the production of knowledge and to what does and does not count as knowledge. She also explores how women and minorities are affected by these processes. Arguing that the "biology is destiny" theory is both an old and oppressive claim made by science, Rose examines at length the latest, and massively resourced, claimant - the Human Genome programme - the so-called "Holy Grail" of the new, industrialized genetics. Rose contrasts Genome's ability to turn leading male molecular biologists into a status approaching that of millionaires, with the resistance of feminism and the commitment of many working biologists, particularly - but not only - women, who work for and with families confronted by serious genetic disorders.
Rose's commitment to feminist resistance against the science and technology of oppression leads her to explore feminist science-fiction as an ally of the feminist science critics, with its imaginative capacity to explore different futures with different sciences and technologies.