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On Black‐boxing Gender: Some Social Questions for Bruno Latour

Kristina Rolin (2002), in her article in Social Epistemology, asks the question, “Is ‘the social’ a feminist insight?” Rolin then goes on to examine this observation further in the context of feminist epistemology, but I think her initial question points towards the theme of this issue. “After Social Construction” implies that social construction as a theory has come to an impasse; indeed, some feel that the term has been overused to the point of meaninglessness (see Hacking 1999). It may also mean that the “after” referred to is the “social”, which should be discarded as a category of analysis in technoscience, leaving constructivism theoretically intact. And for those who have bid the “social” farewell, asking whether or not feminism is a social insight may appear beside the point. In this short position paper, I take up Bruno Latour’s inattention both to the social and to feminist concerns with gender; I argue that by ignoring how gender is constructed in the space of technoscience, Latour reserves the “neutral” male subjectivity born of Enlightenment science, and re-inscribes the “absent presence” of female subjectivity. Although the length of this paper does not permit me to discuss how a feminist ethical epistemology of technoscience might re-examine both gender and technoscience as socially constructed (Sturman 2003), I will show how feminist theorists have confronted Latour’s rejection of “the social” and his disinterest in the formation of gender within technoscience. The novelty of Latour’s method of microsocial analysis in the initiation of laboratory studies stands as an important accomplishment in STS, in particular his elaboration of Actor Network Theory (ANT).1 His critique poses not only a theoretical challenge to