Modern political science and gender : a debate between the deaf and the mute

Abstract

Starting from the notion of an exceptional lack of mediation between political science and feminist studies, the study focuses on Finnish political science of the postwar period as a "pure" case of a gendered scientific discourse. Applying textual analysis with resources drawn from feminist studies, rhetorical studies of science and reading science as literature, the work attempts to create a "method" for gendered reading. The texts studied - from the period between 1945 and 1965 - were any texts authorised as "political science" by the disciplinary institution. Any genre or part of a text qualified as data. A key to gendered meaning was expected to be found by starting from the words "man" or "woman" as clues to gendered meaning. The texts were grouped into two main categories: metatexts telling what political science is and research texts telling about the world. In studying a continuum of metatexts - textual constructions of the political science community - it was found that establishing political science as a scientific discipline was processed by gradually demarcating the community from various others that were described in terms of a feminine semantic matrix. The boundaries of the discipline were marked by images of Woman. The fields of objects constructed for political science to study were contrarily expanded to include even women and areas marked as feminine, while at the same time an objectifying and mechanizing vocabulary of science was adopted. In constructing an equation where "what political science is" became the opposite of "what women are", political science established itself as a language game of professional expertise.