On Hands, Feelings, and a Nose: Bodies Beyond Gender as Transdisciplinary Tools in Science

A variety of quantitative studies I will discuss below confirm that the integrated or transdisciplinary approaches long called-for by practitioners in science and technology studies are increasingly being adopted. From nanotechnology to neuroscience, from artificial intelligence to climate, cancer and “one health” studies, a growing number of research groups are moving beyond speaking only their own specialist dialect. Efforts are being made to understand, if not actually to speak, the languages of neighboring fields, in order to draw from these fields both inspiration and data useful for rounding out their own understanding. There is an increasingly shared awareness that complex problems require multiple tools to be tackled: indeed, this notion has become so often repeated that some argue it is becoming a risky cliché. Exchanges between different fields, some even quite distant, provide confirmation of an insight science studies began to develop long ago: that interactions between different contents and contexts play a crucial role in the process of building innovative (natural) knowledge. From climate change to the spread of viral epidemics, from the increase in average life expectancy to the rise in cognitive abilities, every phenomenon involving humanity is at the intersections of natural, technological, and social spheres. In order to be understood, these phenomena must often be studied using both the natural sciences and the social sciences: the kind of integrated approach typical of studies on gender and science. Keeping in mind these broad themes, and in the context of a book on the material and visual, modern and early modern history of science in relation to touch – whether gendered or not – in this chapter I suggest a long-durée – and scandalously shallow – journey through some well-known cases in which touch played a signi��cant role. It is a journey that starts in today’s laboratories, in order to address the question: are there or are there not sex/gender di�fer- ences in touch? The journey continues with a leap back into an early mod- ern anatomy lab, then back to the Twentieth century. The aim is to highlight the results that I believe the recent dialogue around gender issues that has sprung up between the natural and social sciences has produced in science, technology and medicine. Ironically, while professional women scientists are still struggling with discrimination ratione sexus7 in more or less every country in the world, the concept of gender has successfully made its way into many cutting-edge labs, breaking new ground in otherwise well -established, tradi- tional research areas