Nature

1
Natures Body

• Londa Schiebinger

2
The Introduction

• Why investigate natural history?
• Why choose gender?

3
Chapter One

1. Why did plant sexuality become a priority in the
   18th century?
2. Why did sexuality become the key to
   classification?
3. What are Schiebingers two uses of gender in her
   analysis? What does she mean by implicit or
   explicit gender?
4. Why the sex and marriage metaphors? What were the
   cultural reasons?
5. What is Schiebingers point about metaphors in
   science?
6. Why no sexualization of plants in France?
7. What role did radical politics in the use and
   perception of these metaphors?
8. What curbed the use of these sexual metaphors?

4
Chapter Two

• Why was the term mammalia used to classify
  animals?
• What was the common term before mammalia?
• What is the origin of the term mammalia?
• What were the common historical connotations of
  the breast and breast-feeding in western
  culture (pre-18th century)?
• How did breasts imply about female nature?
• What cultural shifts occurred in the 1750s that
  altered the way one perceived of breast-feeding,
  breasts, and womanhood?
• How might this has influenced Linnaeus? What
  evidence do we have?

5
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People,
1830
6
Chapter Three

1. Why was Enlightenment natural history so
   interested in primates?
2. What were the four major questions that dominated
   the are primates human debate?
3. What primate traits or abilities encouraged the
   apes-are-human-hybrids idea?
4. What was the focus of study when it came to
   investigating female primates?
5. What human male characteristics were superimposed
   onto the male ape?
6. What human female characteristics were
   superimposed onto the female ape?
7. What were some of the racialized/miscegenation
   myths of primate origin?
8. Considering what you know about 18th century
   culture and the debates around womens rights and
   the abolition of slavery, what is significant
   about the many satirical texts that played on the
   apes-are-human-hybrids myth?

7
18th Century Text on Liberal Values

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), The Crisis
  (1776-77), The Rights of Man (1791-92)
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of
  Daughters (1787), A Vindication of the Rights of
  Men (1790)

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Chapter Four

• Why was the beard used as a racial marker? What
  was it believed to signify?
• Where does the classification Caucasian come
  from? What were the reasons for this term?
• What supposed role did women play in the shaping
  of races?
• What was the environmentalist argument about
  race? How did it question the great chain of
  being?
• What was the biological deterministic argument?
  Where did they look to find their evidence?

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Chapter Five

1. What was the theory of gender complementarity?
   How might we view it as simultaneously oppressive
   and liberating?
2. When studying the racial and gendered
   classifications and differences, which
   specimens were used?
3. How was Blumenbachs work different?
4. Why does Schiebingers chapter take an excursion
   into political history?

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Conceptual Keys

• Male the set
• Female the subset (need to study subsets
  difference from the set)
• Black male (often on the same or similar power
  level) White female
• (dominant gender of the inferior race)
  (inferior gender of the dominant race)
• What human (usually white) male traits were
  found in male animals and/or used to classify
  human males?
• What female (usually white) female traits were
  found in female animals and/or used to classify
  human females?
• How is power involved in the creation of
  classification systems?

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Chapter 6 Natures Body Wronged

• What two questions about race, gender, and
  science dominated debates about who should and
  should not be involved in the scientific
  enterprise?
• What were the major hypotheses about the race of
  Egyptian (and North African) people?
• What, according to Schiebinger, is problematic
  about Bernals Black Athena?
• What were some of the similarities, differences,
  and inconsistencies in the 18th century education
  of Black males and white females?
• What questions does Schiebinger raise (in the
  last section) about the formation/development of
  natural history had women (all women) been more
  involved in this scientific work?

12
Schiebingers Book and the So What Questions

1. Keeping in mind the nature of this course, what
   does Schiebingers book offer us?
2. What does she ultimately say about science,
   gender, race, and culture?