Boel Berner och Isabelle Dussauge (eds.), Kön, kropp, materialitet: perspektiv från fransk genusforskning, Arkiv, 2014
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17337
application/pdf
2038-3460
17337
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Silvia Bruzzone
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Boel Berner and Isabelle Dussauge (eds.), Sex, body and materiality. French perspectives on gender studies, Arkiv, 2014
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
7
Book Reviews
2017-01-24
2023-06-21
2017-01-24
2023-08-21
178-181
TS
Silvia Bruzzone
2016
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17337
178
Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées
2038-3460
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en
181
Boel Berner and Isabelle Dussauge (eds.), Sex, body and materiality. French perspectives on gender studies, Arkiv, 2014
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7
178                                                               Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

discourse. It is a chapter, moreover, which provides an ironic and inter-
esting “Malaise Bingo” of STS researchers, which consists in recognizing
themselves in questions and statements such as: “Is the aim of STS to
make science better?”; “The academic world is the place of social
change?”; “I work with a natural science researcher who, whenever he
revises an article of mine, systematically comments “I don’t understand”
on the epistemological passages in which I question the linear progress of
his field of research”.
     Consistently with the attention to (and curiosity in) the construction
of future scenarios in the technoscientific field, the book closes with a re-
flection by Arie Rip on: “The future of the regime of the promises” (Sec-
tion 4, Chapter 5). Here the discussion returns to promises as integral el-
ements of a knowledge regime (and therefore something that concerns
the present more than the future) and the double linkage that ties scien-
tific promises to research funding. In particular, Rip identifies in three
current trends the most significant features of what will be the future sce-
narios: a) a focus on indicators, instead of the “reality of things”, which
gives rise to an industry of “derived products” (such as, for example, the
Shanghai ranking of the best universities in the world); b) the attempt to
link emerging scientific technologies and knowledge to product innova-
tion and the absorption of these products on a social level; 3) a certain
deprofessionalisation of science.
     These may not be the right trends for a happy ending, but the book
deserves to be read anyway.

References
Fortin, J.M., and Currie, D.J. (2013) Big Science vs. Little Science: How Scientific
        Impact Scales with Funding, in “PLoS ONE”, 8 (6), pp. e65263.
Traweek, S. (1992), Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and
      among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan, in A. Pickering (ed.),
      Science as Practice and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.



                                       ***


   Boel Berner and Isabelle Dussauge (eds.)
Kön, kropp, materialitet: perspektiv från fransk genusforskning [Sex, body
and materiality. French perspectives on gender studies], Lund, Arkiv,
2014, pp. 249

Silvia Bruzzone Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and Henny
Stridsberg Université Paris 8
Book Review                                                               179


    The focus of this collective work is the development of gender studies
as viewed through the prism of technology and natural science. The edi-
tors’ intention is to show in a collection of articles how French feminist
research and gender studies have contributed to our understanding of
science, technology and materiality, and more broadly to the construction
of knowledge, with a special focus on a so called French perspective.
    The texts that make up the book are taken from a variety of discipli-
nary backgrounds – philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history, and bi-
ology – and were published in French-edited academic reviews or books
between 1997 and 2010. In the introduction, the editors retrace the histo-
ry of gender studies in France. Even though France was in the forefront
in the 1970s in this field – starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s crucial
work – they recount the ideological and institutional resistance to the de-
velopment of gender studies in France.
    From an ideological point of view, the main characteristics of the se-
cond wave of feminism were its opposition to any form of intellectualiza-
tion of the movement and its disconnection with the academia. The frag-
mentation of feminist groups and disengagement from the first wave of
the 1950s were also features of the French women’s movement in the
1970s. These factors prevented the development of academic research in
women studies during this period.
    From an institutional point of view, the clear separation among aca-
demic subject areas in France hindered the progress of the new discipline,
with sociology and history proving to be more open to feminist issues. It
was not until 1983, therefore, that the first Department of Gender Studies
was created at CNRS, with a specialization in the sociology of work.
    Gender studies have flourished in France in the last twenty years
thanks to the involvement of well-known scholars such as Pierre Bour-
dieu and Francoise Heritier. The establishment of the Institute for Gen-
der Studies in 2012 then brought greater acceptance for the subject. De-
spite this, the editors claim that gender studies in France still do not enjoy
much official support, and that the educational offer and the number of
professors in the sector are both still limited. More recently, moreover,
objections have been raised by Catholic associations in the context of the
debate on same sex marriage, adoption, and procreation practices.
    The editors place the texts in this book within a third wave of feminist
thinking, which since the 1990s has been characterized by an understand-
ing of gender as social construction. As the editors explain, what these
texts have in common is that they have all raised gender issues in French
technology and natural science studies. As its title suggests, the book is
divided into three sections: materiality, body and sex.
    The main topic of the first section is how technology has contributed
to the reproduction of gender power relations.
    The first piece, by Delphine Gardey, focuses on the development of
the typewriter as a feminine object at the beginning of the 20th century,
                                                                          179
180                                                         Tecnoscienza – 7 (2)

and shows how this process accompanied the subordination of women in
office work.
    Danielle Chabaud-Rychter’s piece deals with the progressive “detech-
nicization” of technical objects and the progressive exclusion of users
from their technical mechanisms. In the case of home appliances, the
growing distance between design innovators and users takes the form of a
greater distance between man-innovators and women-users, at the same
time as design progressively embodies female practices.
    Ilana Löwy shows how natural processes have been redefined by new
medical techniques for assisted procreation in accordance with nation-
specific values and socio-economic conditions. In France, severe State
control over those techniques and the restricted access offered to hetero-
sexual couples reinforce the “norm” that procreation is confined to
young heterosexual couples. The U.S. context is very permissive in terms
of permitted techniques and access for non-heterosexual individuals, but
this medical sector turns out to be highly lucrative and completely regu-
lated by the market, and so in practice, the right to assisted procreation is
restricted to people with high incomes. In Israel, a specific combination
of orthodox Jewish values (in particular relating to procreation) and na-
tional interests – namely the perpetuation of the Israeli State – make Isra-
el the most liberal system in terms of low-cost access to assisted procrea-
tion.
    The second part of the book deals with nature, science and medicine.
It shows in particular how medical knowledge might lead to a separate
new understanding of the body apart from the subject, affect access to
work activity and even represent a source for moral judgment on the
body.
    Madeleine Akrich and Berenice Pasveer analyse the role played by
medical practice in childbirth. Their main theory is that the dichotomy
introduced by obstetric knowledge between a woman’s body and her
perception of it does not inexorably translate into a sensation of aliena-
tion from her body. Their suggestion is that we should go beyond the du-
alism between medical practice and the holistic approach. Some tech-
niques used on women (such as epidurals) may allow a woman to main-
tain a certain link between her body and herself. This is very body- and
context-specific, and from this perspective, the role of medical personnel
as mediators becomes crucial, and diversification in medical practice is
necessary in order to adapt to the plurality of patients.
    Rossella Ghigi retraces the “invention” of cellulite as a pathology in
medical discourse at the beginning of the 19th century and its appearance
in women’s magazines in the 1930s. The author shows how the crusade
against cellulite and obesity at the time created moral condemnation of
women’s bodies, as it was associated with the concept of women’s un-
healthy bodies and the degenerate habits that are typical of modern cities.
    In her analysis of the connections between female health and risks in
the workplace, Anne Fellinger focuses on the nuclear research sector. The
Book Review                                                               181
historical evolution of this field of research - from the experiences of Ma-
rie Curie and Marguerite Perey until today - show how increasing protec-
tion of women in this area actually led to their being gradually excluded
from this area of research, in which men are now over-represented.
    In the last section of the book, the authors approach the discussion of
biological sex differences from a variety of angles.
    Nicolas Divert provides an analysis of the social mechanisms that link
sexuality and education choices, showing how boys at French fashion
schools are characterized as deviant in a dual sense: both sexually, be-
cause it is presumed they must be homosexual, and also with regard to
their choice of profession.
    Differences in height between men and women appear to be taken for
granted, but what are the causes of sexual dimorphism, and why does it
persist? While the evolutionist theories that are mobilized to explain, di-
morphism are not appropriate to explain the phenomenon, Priscille Tou-
raille claims that there is a certain level of resistance when it comes to in-
vestigating the social and political causes that lie at the origin of differ-
ences that are perceived as being biological. According to the author, the
fact that women have historically been less well-fed than men still con-
tributes to the persistence of a hierarchical relationship between men and
women.
    Finally, the philosopher Cynthia Kraus presents a complex critique of
the social-constructivist approach of recent feminist theory, which has
questioned the dual model that only recognizes two sexes. She suggests
that social-constructivist knowledge practices deserve to be examined and
problematized further.
    Readers of Tecnoscienza will find an interesting analysis in each text
of the various entanglements among gender, techniques and knowledge
production. In addition, the variety of disciplinary perspectives and origi-
nal fieldwork sometimes gives rise to extremely passionate research goals.
The aim of the book is less convincing, however; in the end, the reader is
none the wiser about what the contribution of gender studies to tech-
niques and natural science studies from the so-called “French perspec-
tive” has been. The lack of a concluding chapter and transversal analysis
compromises the editors’ intent and ultimately leaves it up to the readers
themselves to finding any concluding remarks. What has been proposed
as a “French perspective” is not sufficiently problematized, and nor is the
interest in the interaction between gender and studies on materiality. This
means that the choice of articles is not clear, and in the end, the purpose
of the book seems to be to suggest examples of interactions between gen-
der and STS studies under the principal headings of “materiality”,
“body” and “sex” to non-Francophone readers without ever developing a
discussion on disciplinary boundaries and epistemological perspectives.

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