Atoms, Individuals, and Myths

Abstract Feminism's engagement with science has been played out on a number of stages. Historians and sociologists have studied the lives of women scientists and have traced the processes by which the institutions in which science is practised have either excluded women or narrowly restricted the roles they are permitted to play. Another focus has been the role of gender in what might be called the culture of science. The practice of science is often mediated in images that are tendentiously gendered, for example, the image of science as ‘conquest’, a trope that has often taken on connotations of fierce sexual aggression directed at a personified Nature gendered as female. This chapter introduces Lucretius and ancient theories of atomism to explore the role of reductionism within feminist accounts of science. It examines the spectre of ancient myth in science's gendered formulations of the natural world.