2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

The body has been at the center of feminist science studies since the field’s inception over thirty years ago. Scholars have explored not just how gendered ideologies influence the production of scientific knowledge about the body, but also how biomedical knowledge about the body is central to our definitions and experiences of gender. This lightning session draws together a multidisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners addressing topics including: gendered experiences of doctoral and postdoctoral training in the life sciences; how endocrinological expertise intersected with popular and sociological notions of sex and gender; the role that the metaphor “biological clock” has played in constructing the reproductive body; the reclaiming of the female body through menstrual extraction activism; and how queer analytics reshapes understandings of federal regulations for assisted human reproduction.

Beyond addressing new approaches to knowledge-making practices, our conversation will acknowledge the difficult intersections, silences, and divergences between humanist critiques of science and the challenges of everyday biomedical practices. What is the relationship between academic studies of women, gender, and sexuality and the body and the production of biomedical knowledge about its functions? How do ideas about gender, knowledge, and embodiment circulate between the library, the laboratory, the clinic, and everyday life? This lightning session is the second of two sessions designed to critically engage with feminist histories of the body and its relationship to biomedical knowledge. We look forward to generative cross-session discussions about the role of the body in our scholarship, teaching, and feminist praxis.