Erika Lorraine Milam - Böcker

This volume of Osiris integrates gender analysis with the global history of science and medicine from the late Middle Ages to the present by focusing on masculinity. The premise is that social constructions of masculinity function simultaneously as foils for femininity and as methods of differentiating between "kinds" of men. In exploring scientific masculinities, the book asks: how has masculinity been defined, and what are the mechanisms by which it operates in science? The essays are divided into sections that emphasize the importance of gender to the practices of professionalization, the spaces in which scientific, technological, and medical labor is performed, and the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation are measured and serve as metaphors in society and culture.

How Cold War America came to attribute human evolutionary success to our species' unique capacity for murderAfter World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. Creatures of Cain charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man’s evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder.Drawing on a wealth of archival materials and in-depth interviews, Erika Lorraine Milam reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity’s problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, Milam shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee-human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations.A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, Creatures of Cain argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.