The Nature of Feminist Science Studies (Introduction) (Editorial‪)‬

In this special issue of RFR/DRF, entitled 'The Nature of Feminist Studies,' we are pleased to include papers by authors writing in the emerging area of feminist social studies of science and technology (STS). Two interrelated themes guide the issue: first, a critical exploration of the status of nature and/or the physical world within particular scientific contexts and second, reflections on recent feminist theorizing about STS. The use of the double-entendre introducing this issue is meant to provoke discussion about the nature of differences that are said to define specifically feminist approaches within the interdisciplinary field of STS. Of particular interest to us were papers that explored the social relations in which science and technology are embedded, as well as the possible worlds that science and technology bring forth. The issue was conceived from our reflections on Emma Whelan's (2001) overview of the field in which she concluded that there is a lack of "cross-fertilization" between feminist and mainstream science studies. Although there is no single origin story that unites mainstream STS, the impact of critical science studies over the past three decades is evident in the unsettling of boundaries between, for example: inside/outside (of science), science/social, natural/cultural, and objective/subjective to name just a few. Earlier boundary work between the natural and social sciences created distinctions between those who studied non-human objects and those who focused on interpretive subjects, what Bruno Latour (1991) called the "soft social periphery rather than the hard, natural center." But as he noted, nature is not waiting like a good parent to see who figures it out, "[N]ature waits to be fleshed out and decided upon by the struggling collective" (Latour, 1991, p. 9). Latour has argued that the science of texts and natural science both deal with traces; the historian deals with archives and clues while the scientist in the lab interprets instruments, fossils, faint parchments and polls (1991, p. 10). Moreover, Ian Hacking (1983) has shown that the uniqueness of the lab sciences is their interference with nature a perspective shared by Karin Knorr-Cetina (1995) who proposes that we expand the reach of "the lab" to use it more as a theoretical notion, which involves both the configuration of subjects and objects. Her reconfiguration model extends the notion of the lab, calling it a process of "upgrading the social order." However, one of the "nagging" questions more closely associated with feminist STS is: what makes some translations (of nature, culture, society) more durable, stable and oppressive than others? (Haraway, 1996) Indeed Donna Haraway has shown that many science studies scholars treat gender and race as preformed, preconstituted categories; despite heated debates in all fields about how all entities are constituted in the "action of knowledge production, not before the action starts" (1996, p. 433). She then asks: how do we document the unequal social consequences of "material-semiotic" translations while seeking to change them?