Silvia Cervia, Genere e scienza come costruzione sociale. Il ruolo delle istituzioni nello sviluppo della ricerca, FrancoAngeli, 2018
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17550
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2038-3460
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Ilenia Picardi
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Silvia Cervia, Gender and Science as a Social Construction. The role of institutions in research development, FrancoAngeli, 2018
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Book Reviews
2022-03-26
2023-06-30
2022-03-26
2023-10-23
217-220
TS
Ilenia Picardi
2021
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17550
217
University of Naples Federico II
2038-3460
2
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Silvia Cervia, Gender and Science as a Social Construction. The role of institutions in research development, FrancoAngeli, 2018
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Book Review                                                               217
MacCormack, P. (2020) The Ahuman Manifesto. Activism for the End of the An-
     thropocene, New York, Bloomsbury.

                                    ***
    Silvia Cervia
Genere e scienza come costruzione sociale. Il ruolo delle istituzioni nello
sviluppo della ricerca [Gender and Science as a Social Construction. The
role of institutions in research development], Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2018,
pp. 216

Ilenia Picardi University of Naples Federico II

    The gender issue, a topic widely addressed in feminist science studies
in previous decades, has also recently emerged in the public sphere and as
a target for institutional policies in academic and research environments.
One reason for this emerging attention involves the European Union’s
(EU’s) incentives for universities to address the underrepresentation of
women in research and innovation and to adopt specific gender equality
plans and strategies. The book Genere e Scienza come costruzione sociale by
Silvia Cervia retraces the process of the progressive definition of the issue
as a social construct, specifying the role that feminist reflection and activ-
ism played in this process while revealing its hidden pitfalls. The theme is
highly relevant because, as the author points out, gender and science con-
stitute a paradigmatic arena for exploring the process of building scientific
knowledge and its meanings.
    The volume explores the vast research literature about female partici-
pation in science in the arduous attempt to reconstruct a taxonomy of con-
cepts that, as highlighted in the analysis carried out in the initial chapters
of the book, coexists in a multiplicity of interpretative perspectives. This
work reconsiders different theoretical views in the sociology of science,
such as Merton’s normative system of science, the sociology of scientific
knowledge, the empirical programme of relativism (Collins 1985; Collins
and Pinch 1993), laboratory studies (Latour 1997; Knorr Cetina 1995), and
the post-academic science (Ziman 2000), looking for traces of the gender
issue and any points of similarity (or disagreement) with the feminist re-
flection on the relationship between gender and science. In this excursus,
the author focuses in particular on the distinction between elements that
are external and internal to science that contribute to gender segregation.
External elements refer to forms of (self or hetero) exclusion of women
deriving from the organizational functioning of science and its practices,
while internal elements correspond to material (objects of investigation)
218                                                           Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
and conceptual (concepts, theories, knowledge) domains characterizing sci-
ence as a cultural and gendered product (pp. 17-18). The analysis adopts
the feminist epistemological perspective, shifting attention from female ex-
clusion from science, to science as a gendered social and cultural activity,
as well as the operative arm of ideologies and power.
    The book focuses on the black box of the mainstream version of gender
and science as an issue and tries to open it through the interpretative keys
provided by the constructionist perspective.
    Cervia identifies the ideological rationality that informs the dominant
rhetoric of public policies and the inherent process of universalizing and
normalizing the different positions developed over the years by feminist
activism. This analysis approaches public research funding policies as an
“ideological apparatus, aimed at constructing the truth through a process
of objectification and universalization that operates through the distribu-
tion of awards (positions and grants) and punishments (lack of recognition
and funding)” (p. 95, my translation). The author examines the institu-
tional documents of the EU and governmental agencies (reports, work pro-
grammes, and vade mecums) of the last twenty years, assuming the indis-
solubility of the format-content link as a constitutive element. The study
analyses the discursive mechanisms and practices implemented by Euro-
pean government institutions, highlighting the justification regime adopted
to legitimize the introduction and development of policies and interven-
tions and to attribute the value of truth (fact-making) to the meanings pro-
duced (sense-making) by these same institutions.
    The analysis explores the framing of the binomial construct gender and
science and its declination in institutional and discursive practices aimed at
building an incremental political-institutional legitimation of it. In this pro-
cess, the narrative underlying the mainstream scientific literature is sche-
matized as a sequence of “political seasons” (p. 98) – fixing the women, fix-
ing the institutions, fixing the knowledge (aimed respectively at increasing
the participation of women in science, transforming the institutions of sci-
ence, and transforming scientific knowledge content) – described as the
result of a natural process of osmosis between the progress of scientific
knowledge about the issue and the design of dedicated policies. The thesis
supported by Cervia is that this reconstruction shows a “substantial dis-
continuity with the feminist tradition, betraying its structural/institutional
criticism” (p. 176, my translation). The analysis, proposed as part of the
feminist institutionalist research program (Mergaert and Lombardo 2014),
highlights the translation process of the political promotion of gender
equality in standardization procedures implemented by selecting topics,
objects, and perspectives recognized and legitimized as pertinent. In de-
nouncing the normalizing effect of the narrative of European public poli-
cies, Cervia identifies a new alliance between knowledge and power, enrol-
ling specific feminist positions in a project aimed at strengthening the
claims of science to objectivity and universality. According to the author,
Book Review                                                                219
the evidence-based approach adopted by governmental documents led to
the focusing of elements external to science (interpreted as micro and
macro) to the detriment of internal ones, and the discursive practices
adopted by both mainstream literature and European institutions have
brought about the universalization of standpoint feminism. The perspec-
tive of standpoint feminism is therefore recruited by EU institutions in a
“project capable of re-founding science as stronger and more objective
overcoming the myopia of gender-blindness, and at the same time obscur-
ing other voices, much more radical, which, shunning all universalizing dis-
courses, highlight the knowledge/power character of the discourse of sci-
ence (post-modernism) and the plural value of domination, while high-
lighting the artifactual character of scientific knowledge” (pp. 175-176, my
translation).
    The book does not adopt an STS approach properly in scrutinizing the
social construction of gender and science, but the STS theoretical perspec-
tive offers a fascinating framework to read Cervia’s work.
    In the last decades, in line with post-structuralist feminism that defines
gender in terms of practices continuously reproduced in social interaction,
STS studies have unveiled practices that obscured subjectivity as a consti-
tutive part of scientific knowledge and theorized gender and technoscience
as reciprocal modelling, investigating gender in technoscience and the gen-
der of technoscience as well as gender as a product of technoscience. In
Haraway’s analysis (1996), the experimental technologies that in the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century anchored the definition of the scientific
method, produced the boundaries and standards to define and control
what could be considered scientific knowledge and what could not. Hara-
way revealed the situated and sociohistorically constituted nature of this
process, which claimed the establishment of the experimental method as
productive of universal knowledge. Judy Wajcman’s (2010) techno-femi-
nist approach, in which technological artefacts are both the conditioning
elements and the products of gender relations, enables to consider gender
relations as materialized in technoscientific practices, while gender, in turn,
acquires meaning and character through its inscription and incorporation
into technological devices and infrastructures.
    Therefore, within the STS approach, the distinction between external
and internal elements collapses, and these elements are relocated within a
co-evolutionary socio-material network, being mutually co-constructed
and modelled in a process of continuous redefinition. Public research
funding institutions can be investigated as actors that (re)direct the techno-
governance of science and community policies, and the Foucauldian con-
ception of apparatus used by Cervia can be extended in agential realism of
Karen Barad by identifying the apparatuses not as “mere observing instru-
ments but [as] boundary-drawing practices – specific material (re)config-
uring of the word – which come to matter” (Barad 2007, p. 140). In this
sense, they act as apparatuses operating in the construction of gender and
220                                                             Tecnoscienza – 12 (2)
science as an issue in scientific institutions. From this view, change in
techno-scientific governance systems is an internally heterogeneous pro-
cess in which regulatory systems, technology, and society mutually consti-
tute each other, giving rise to socio-material systems and structures.
    This perspective opens up challenging lines of research in the STS field
aimed at understanding the socio-material practices of construction of gen-
dered technoscience inscribed in the implementation of European policies
and at understanding innovation, science, and gender in their making.

References
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       ment of matter and meaning, Durham and London, Duke University Press.
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Collins, H.M. and Pinch, T. (1993) The Golem: what everyone needs to know about
        science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Haraway, D. (1996) Modest witness. Feminist diffractions in science studies, in P.
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