A Quarter Century of Encounters with Evelyn Fox Keller

Volume 11, Issue 3

It was not until I was asked by Keller's former student at MIT Wen-Hua Kuo to write this article that I realized Evelyn Fox Keller, in the form of her intellectual fruits, has been with me for a quarter of a century. Her 1985 book Reflections on Gender and Science (hereafter Reflections) was on my MA qualification examination list in 1991 at National Tsing Hua University, along with Sandra Harding's 1987 The Science Ouestion in Feminism. I entered the Graduate Institute of History at Tsing Hua University in 1989, two years after Taiwan had lifted martial law. At that time, social movements were vibrant; student dissenters of various political persuasions, including environmentalists, Taiwan study groups, Marxists, and feminists, were flourishing on campus. In retrospect, it seems to me the timing was perfect for reading Keller's books—women's movements were going strong, and I was at one of the major turning points of my life. As a microbiology major turned history graduate student who was skeptical of science and hungry for feminism, I read both Reflections and her 1983 work A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (hereafter A Feeling) with intense interest. Indeed, looking back, it's not exaggerating to say that my intellectual self grew up with Keller's work. Inspired by A Feeling, I wrote an essay comparing the scientific careers of Barbara McClintock (1902-92) and Max Delbrück (1906-82) when I was a graduate student in the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sometime in the late 1990s. Since 2003 I have been assigning parts of her books and her articles to students in my graduate seminars, undergraduate courses, and lectures for high-school students. In 2007, I also coauthored with Professors Li-Ling Tsai and Chia-Ling Wu a textbook chapter, "Gender and Science, * 111 which we incorporated parts from A Feeling and Reflections (Tsai, Wang, and Wu 2012 [2007]). More recently, in August 2016, my colleagues and I organized a reading group in which we read her recent article "Thinking about Biology and Culture" (Keller 2016).

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