Patriarchy includes a dualistic world view based on the male/female dichotomy. This dualistic ordering of reality is also hierarchical: the principle of male over female, mind over body, culture over nature, and so on. Male, mind and culture are exercising hierarchical control over female, body, nature. Reality is perceived as a machine rather than a living organism. In Western thought the principles of hierarchy, domination and control are deeply inscribed in patterns of thinking and therefore appear "normal", "natural" and "neutral". These patterns of thinking are often shared by men and women alike.
Mainstream science is a product of patriarchy. Mainstream science is customarily portrayed as universal, value-free and neutral in its pursuit of truth that is deemed valuable for all. For feminists, however, the production of knowledge is a social activity embedded in a certain culture and world view. Science aims to explain reality, but the experience of this reality, of one's perception and interpretation of it are a product of human thought determined by culture. Feminist critics of science have pointed out that Western science as it has developed since the Enlightenment period is determined by political, economic and social conditions based on a patriarchal order. Women were not only excluded from the actual activity of doing science, but they were defined as being closer to nature, feelings and emotions and therefore unfit for reason.
Dualism, in the masculinist hegemonic thinking that marks the production of Western science, is a system of exclusion of "others". For example, the values and wisdom of indigenous peoples are considered as primitive, a barrier to progress. Feminists have criticized scientific discourses as an account of the world that systematically devalues every category that is other than the male, Western, bourgeois self: women, children, other races, foreign cultures, handicapped people and nature.
Some have pointed out that science is not used to explain reality but to produce, control and normalize it. The connection between power, knowledge and truth thus becomes clearer. Scientific discourse is the outcome of a network of power relations, structures and procedures that determines which statement is to be assigned the status of a scientific truth and which is not.
Based on: "Women, the Environment and Sustainable Development. Towards a Theoretical Synthesis", Braidotti, R. et al. ZED Books/INSRTAW London 1994
Contact: Rosi Braidotti
E-mail: rosi.braidotti@let.uu.nl
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