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This chapter takes up the feminists’ normative questions regarding science introduced in chapter 1 together with the various feminist science studies approaches they have engendered—the methodological approach rationalized by the ideal of value-free science, the social approach rationalized by the social value management ideal of science, and the naturalist approaches rationalized by the empiricist ideal of science. In the end, however, a new approach is found necessary—a political approach rationalized by the ideal of socially responsible science. According to this approach sound social values as well as sound epistemic values must control every aspect of the scientific research process from the choice of research questions to the communication and application of results, this to be enforced by such political means as funding requirements on research.

This chapter examines the history of coral reef science by drawing on the work of the feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway. This history moves from early British preoccupations with coral structure, which had reefs as a sort of architecture, to anthropological visions of coral as a metaphor for culture, to reproductive ecological fascinations with the spawning sexways of corals, to contemporary readings of coral genomes for signs of reef health in the age of warming and acidifying seas. The chapter uses Haraway's notion of the “figure” to highlight change and continuity in coral science. It argues that coral reefs can attune their human visitors and inquisitors to empirical and epistemological questions of scale and context— where context, drawing upon a once-upon-a-time literal, but now more figurative, meaning, refers to a “weaving together.”

This chapter situates the sex chromosomes within the history of twentieth century theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. The author shows how the X and Y chromosomes, thought of as “sex itself,” came to anchor a conception of sex as a biologically fixed and unalterable binary. The chapter frames the book’s major questions, locating them within scholarship in feminist science studies and social, historical, and philosophical research on the social dimensions of science. The book’s theoretical and methodological innovations, including the concepts of “modeling gender in science,” “gender analysis,” “gender criticality,” and “gender valence,” are introduced and defined.

Issues of territory and territorialization are germane to this essay. Its driving question is whether affect theory or theology can ever deterritorialize themselves fully from Western-citationality. Acutely attuned to the impossibility and importance of this challenge, the essay enjoins “sticking with the trouble” (a là Donna Haraway) represented by animisms and their indigenous territories: geographical, intellectual, and spiritual. Weaving together indigenous modes of knowing with feminist science studies, the essay resists the sovereignties of both affect theory and theology. Countering modes of thinking affect and theology that might stake out ground, it instead tracks what each does when they are invoked. It thereby seeks alternate routes for making a world and finds them most fruitfully in indigenous futurism. The essay adumbrates a hope for an animist-affect-theology that would create a storied world necessarily rooted in the colonial past/present but also open to indigenous futures and inclusive of other-than-human meanings.

This chapter explores the tremendous possibilities of coalitions and collaboration between women's studies and women in science and engineering (WISE) initiatives. At this time, with few exceptions, WISE programs tend not to be centrally located in feminist science studies or women's studies programs and departments. Women and gender studies programs, in turn, have too few allies in science and engineering fields. Thus, while all three fields—WISE programs, feminist science studies, and women/gender/sexuality studies—can arguably be said to be thriving, there is little interaction between them. The chapter suggests that WISE programs can yield impressive results if they engaged more fully with feminist work in the social sciences and the humanities.

Epigenetics, a field that some are calling a “new” paradigm in biology, offers a window of opportunity for feminist science studies to forge new, intersectional understandings of how the social and material are intertwined in the manifestation of becoming. Research in epigenetics suggests that socially constructed lived experiences of race, class and gender intersect in and with the material body, in effect blurring the boundaries between inside and outside, social and material. For a generation of feminist scientists steeped in critique of a reductionist DNA-centric model, epigenetics seems to provide promising resources for reimagining a natureculture of embodied being. Yet, this potential will not emerge out of science alone. Intersectional feminist perspectives and approaches are needed to reimagine an epigenetic future that does not repeat and reify the essentialist, oppressive accounts of mother-blaming in its multiple intersectional manifestations that the sciences of genetics have produced in the past. Feminist participation in further conceptualizing and interrogating the socio-material intra-actions and agency that shape health outcomes along intersectional axes is not just intellectually compelling; it may also provide important avenues for feminist social change, through the reshaping of the cuts and contours that define science within and beyond its borders.

The Conclusion accounts for the fate of the women whose ideas are examined in this book, and takes stock of the legacies of their sexological work. It further lays out the benefits of pursuing a larger twentieth century history of women’s sexological work, one that is international in its scope and grapples with the rupture in female sexual knowledge production affected by the Second World War and its geopolitical realignments, the reshuffling of the ideological landscapes after 1945, and the rise of new social movements in the 1960s. Finally, the Conclusion argues that the history of women’s sexological work is especially significant at this particular moment in time, as twenty-first century feminist theorists positively embrace science and nature as intellectual and rhetorical resources once again.

The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.

The fifth chapter considers the anxious fantasy of life’s withdrawal in contemporary sterility apocalypses. These fantasmatic representations—principally Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and the science fiction franchise Battlestar Galactica—hinge on the miraculously restored fertility of a woman of color. Ultimately, these works serve to highlight the history of racialized labor and enforced reproduction.

The first chapter considers the predictively foreclosed temporality through which popular environmentalism gains its sense. It reads the child as a crucial affective and conceptual technology allowing environmentalism to disavow its central insight that matter is mobile. It also looks into and compares the disavowal to feminist new materialist accounts of the queerness of matter.