Biology

This essay provides a critical overview of the intersections between biology, gender, and matter, covering the origins of modern biology, feminist critiques of science, gendered language and metaphor within the discipline, sociobiology and neurosexism, intersubjectivity and transcorporeality, the place of the body within disability studies, as well as both intersex and transgender bodies and lives as challenges to binary biological models of sex. This overview illustrates many of the ways in which biology has been used as a tool to restrict or oppress but also the ways in which biology offers opportunities for empowerment, from including more women and other minorities in the discipline to changing the ways that discourses of biology influence people’s lives and even to modifying one’s own body through the use of biological sciences.