Paper short abstract:

Students of Biochemistry approach life on a molecular level. They often overlook how particular approaches of generation, reproduction or brain research are embedded in discourses of dominance and subordination. The presented course guides them through these entanglements from history to present.

Paper long abstract:

I present a mandatory Gender Studies course of biochemistry and technical chemistry. Students can earn 3 ECTS. I introduce the course by discussing main concepts of Gender and STS and then present eleven topics based on a scholarly paper everyone prepared.

The first topic relates Enlightenment philosophical agitation against wet nursing, promoting normative breastfeeding by mothers resulting in so many cases of infant death that, when in the later 19th century artificial baby food was developed by chemists, it led to a huge market success. Here, the students get introduced to changing gender norms in the past and their relation to scientific innovation, whereby chemistry plays a salvatory role. This counteracts eventual fears that this would be an anti-science course.

The next topic is about the ‘discovery’ of an exotic abortifacient by an exceptional women scientist around 1700, who travelled from Amsterdam to Surinam and learned from indigenous and enslaved African women how they contributed to the struggle against slavery. Here, as well as in the former and throughout the following topics, I discuss with the students, who – and what – is an actor and how are the actors related to each other. On this way they learn how knowledge production in the laboratory is entangled with local and global politics. Who is entitled to decide on questions of life and death? Who is heard? Who is acknowledged?

In the paper I will present a short overview on the topics and then discuss the methodological and didactical approach.