Over the past decade Western science and technology have been sharply interrogated by a multi-stranded feminism. While this interrogation has extended to every area of cultural production, this book primarily addresses the issue of the nature and form of knowledge of the natural world.
Rose's passionately engaged book develops new terms for thinking about science and feminism. Rose locates the feminist criticism of science as both integral to the feminist movement and also to the radical science movement. She returns to her own ground breaking work from 1983 on the feminist reconstruction of rationality, drawing on UK, US and Scandinavian research. Rose attends to the political economy of the production of knowledge; and to what does and does not count as knowledge; how women and minorities are affected by these processes is also explored.
Because "biology is destiny" 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. She 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.