UC Davis

The Reproductive Logic of Authorship and the Birth of the New Science combines literary and STS methods to examine how metaphors of the reproductive body influence the constitution of modern science and the construction of authoritative knowledge during the social and political transformation often referred to as “the scientific revolution.” It demonstrates how, in the seventeenth century, anxieties about the conditions of producing authoritative knowledge—especially who does and does not get to make that knowledge, and whose authority makes it authoritative—get written into early modern science’s narratives and institutional frameworks. It argues that one important way this happens is through a specific category of figurative language that is already long established by the seventeenth century: reproductive metaphors of authorship. These figures reveal a conceptual link not only between the products (human bodies and texts) but also the processes—material, social, and especially embodied—by which they are produced. Such metaphors draw upon naturalized assumptions about the body, and as such they import vigorous defenses of hegemony into rationales for the new science’s claims of objectivity.