Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science
Boston: Beacon Press (1995), 160 - 171.
Description:
A strikingly original analysis of how 18th-century natural historians created the basic vocabulary that permeates scientific discourse today. Carl Linnaeus's choice of mammary glands as the distinguishing characteristic of Mammalia, for instance, was informed as much by the sexual politics of the day as by the animals he intended to describe. "Indispensable for all anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and practitioners of science"
--Emily Martin, author of
The Woman in the Body.
Selected Contents:
Chapter 5: Theories of Gender and Race
Were Women on the Chain?
The Hottentot Venus
Illustrations (captions):
Hottentot woman suckling a child on her back. Peter Kolb reported that the Hottentot woman's breasts are "so long that she can toss the nipple to the child over her shoulder." According to Kolb, mothers usually smoked dacha (marijuana) while nursing. From Peter Kolb, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, trans. Guido Medley (London 1731), vol. 1., p. 163, plate 4.
A Hottentot woman with an "apron." Eighteenth-century illustrators favored frontal views of Hottentot women to focus attention ot their "aprons"; nineteenth-century illustrators portrayed these women in profile to highlight their buttocks. From François Le Vaillant, Voyage de François Le Vaillant dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique, (Paris 1798), vol. 2, facing p. 349. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Sate University Libraries.
The New Body Politic
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