Introduction

It was predestined that the history of gender and the history of science and medicine would converge, for they share a central preoccupation with the understanding and uses of nature. They also share a framework for analyzing conceptions of nature and their applications, that of naturalization. Reduced to its essentials, “naturalization” refers to ways of fortifying various social, cultural, political, or economic conventions by presenting them as part of the natural order. Naturalization is a leitmotif of gender studies, many of which show how forgers and enforcers of gender identities have appealed ceaselessly to the authority of nature, and how the interpreters of nature – natural philosophers, natural scientists, and physicians – have often aided and abetted that transfer of authority. In the context-dominated science studies of the last decade, naturalization has been the bridge carrying the heaviest traffic between science and its social context: Galileo, for example, “naturalizes” the shaky political legitimacy of the Medicis by christening the newly discovered moons of Jupiter in their honor; Darwin “naturalizes” the contested theories and practices of British political economy in the theory of natural selection. In both gender and science studies, naturalization is ideology at full strength, hardening the flimsy conventions of culture into the immutable, inevitable, and indifferent dictates of nature.

In this essay, I would like to use the history of early modern conceptions of the female intellect to challenge the notion of naturalization as it is currently deployed in both gender and science studies.