Disclaimer: I realize that this may soon be moved to GD for a short time before it ends up in the Pit, but for now I’m just trying to verify if this is true.
Datclaimer: I am not against feminism. In fact, I consider myself a feminist. But bad iseas is bad ideas.
Deudderclaimer: If this has been discussed before, I’d be happy with a link.
So to my question: Are there really some uber-feminists who claim that Einstein’s general theory, and Euclidian mathematics in general, are sexist institutions designed to keep women in social bondage? Who are these people, and why do they believe this? Do they have a website for me to mock?
That’s a new one on me if such feminism does indeed exist. How a physical theory describing how the universe behaves could ever be construed as sexist is beyond me.
The working of the female mind are far too obscure to be contained in something as simple as General and Special Relativity ;).
It’s not really new, though. I’ve heard this several times, the first of which was probably 10 years ago. It’s possible that there is a large contingent of feminists who believe this, but there may be 2 more possibilities;
Every “movement” has its share of whackos. There may be only one or two people that believe this, but they tend to get all the press.
This may be a gross distortion of a more reasonable statement by those that wish to make fun of “those silly feminazis.”
I’ve done a brief web search for this, but so far came up empty-handed.
It’s not an argument of femiinism. It’s a post-modernist philosophical conjecture by one Luce Irigaray, who has argued that
This quote is from a hostile (and in itself somewhat brainless) review of Sokal and Bricmont’s “Intellectual Impostures,” in which Irigaray and several other French post-modernists are raked over the coals for misusing scientific terminology and concepts that they don’t understand.
Years ago, when I was in college, I heard about Sandra Harding’s reference to Newton’s Laws of Physics as “Newton’s Rape Manual”. I did a quick search and found the quote here.
Actually, by the way, the science of fluid dynamics is underdeveloed because it’s hellishly difficult. Whether that is a feminine trait or not, I will not say.
[QUOTE]
if the science of fluid mechanics is under-developed, then that is because it is a quintessentially feminine topic.
[QUOTE]
I am always bugged by this sort of thing. The first quote about fluid mechanics being a quintessentially feminine topic. Is it a quintessentially feminine topic? It is not obvious to me that it is. Am I missing something? I have read a smattering of de constructionist stuff and things like this get said quite a lot. I am never sure if this is because the authors are babbling or if there is some vast amount of agreed upon stuff that I being a dilettante am not familiar with.
I had a teacher once who at least brought up in class the feminist ideas of science. Being a hard scientist myself, I didn’t see how this could be so, and I asked her. Her explanation with, “Okay, suppose a scientist sets out to prove that all women are irrational…” She was a great teacher, but suffice to say she did not convince me that Physics is sexist.