Monday - March 31, 2008

This I Just Had to Post About.

Over at her blog Zoe Brain writes about Feminism getting piled higher and deeper. The post is about women in science, and how certain parties get the reason why women are disproportionately represented in certain field so wrong. Zoe is commenting on Math is Hard by Jonathan Kulick. As part of the article Mr. Kulick presents the following quotation.

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. Although men, too, flow on occasion—when semen is emitted, for example—this aspect of their sexuality is not emphasized. It is the rigidity of the male organ that counts, not its complicity in fluid flow. These idealizations are reinscribed in mathematics, which conceives of fluids as laminated planes and other modified solid forms. In the same way that women are erased within masculinist theories and language, existing only as not-men, so fluids have been erased from science, existing only as not-solids. From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
(Hayles, N. K. (1992) “Gender encoding in fluid mechanics: masculine channels and feminine flows,” Differences: A Journal Of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4(2):16–44.)

As so many have so aptly observed, the stupid, it burns.

Posted by mythusmage     on 03/31/2008 at 03:44 AM   
Filed Under: • Odd-Strange • Politically-Incorrect • Science-Technology •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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