Dartmouth College, a high-class American school, has on its library page a long section that it calls “a short definition for feminist geography“. It appears to be an entrée to the field as well as a list of resources for people who want to investigate the discipline. If you read it, you’ll find the usual obscurantist and postmodern descriptions, heavy on jargon and short on comprehensible statements. But the description makes it clear that the purpose of the field is not just to bring feminist perspectives to the study of geography, but to overthrow masculine ones, which apparently include the objectivity of science (my emphases in all statements):

Part of this commitment is to transform the practices and structures of geography itself. To that end feminist geographers have made critical interventions into the conduct of research in geography, introducing feminist epistemologies and methodologies that challenge the masculinist formulation of science as objective, neutral, and value-free, instead arguing that research always has a positionality that produces situated knowledge. They have thus highlighted the masculinist nature of fieldwork and made the case for more interpretative approaches to research that utilize qualitative methods.

Well, you can argue that there’s no such thing as academic study that doesn’t have some kind of ideological motivation behind it, but I would deny that for most of science. What ideology motivates me to figure out how genetic change produces new species, or whether there’s a way to test the many-worlds theory of physics? More important, the formulation of science should indeed be “objective, neutral, and value-free”, except for the “value” of finding truth and not giving in to your biases. Is that “masculinist”? I don’t think so, for the women I know who do science, including those who are known for doing really good science, do it exactly as men do. There is no “feminist scientific method” that I can see—just a set of conventions that are used by everyone, regardless of ethnicity or gender, that have been time-tested to give results. There is no Catholic science, no Hindu science, no Hungarian science, and no Hispanic science. There’s just science, and it forms a glorious community united by a single method and a single goal: to satisfy one’s curiosity about the universe. As I always say, when I travel and meet other scientists, as I recently did in India, I can immediately begin conversing with them about their work, with a mutual set of understandings and methods that requires no preliminaries. If there’s any community that is universal, it’s the community of scientists. (I’m not saying, of course, that scientists don’t have prejudices and bias.)

But if there is indeed a “feminist formulation of science” and if such a method emphasizes nonobjectivity, non-neutrality, and the insertion of personal values, well, that’s not only bad, but it’s not science. Such a science would in fact be an insult to women.

This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, “lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they’re free to say whatever they want, or “discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient. I’ll remind you that this is not some inconsequential school in the middle of nowhere—this is Dartmouth.

As for objectivity, the library admits that feminist scholarship is not only non-objective, but designed to change society in certain ways:

Unlike many theoretical approaches that seek to be objective and impartial in the production of knowledge, feminism is explicitly ideological in that it seeks to transform that which it studies (see feminist standpoint theory).

But is there a given way to transform society: a given goal that everyone agrees we must attain? Granted, most of us want equal treatment and opportunities for women, but this goes beyond that, for it rejects objectivity in the service of ideology. And when they clash, as they might if, for instance, women and men are found to differ genetically in their preferences, you know which one will win.

I always flog myself when writing stuff like this, for I don’t want to come off as someone who is anti-feminist. But what I can say is that any form of feminism that privileges ideology over truth, and jettisons the latter when it clashes with the former, is not my brand of feminism.

I urge you to look at that library page and judge for yourself.