I tried to wait a couple days before posting to let my blood pressure drop.
I wonder how many list members have read about the Sokal affair? Alan
Sokal, a physicist at NYU, decided to test his hunch that a leading academic
journal of cultural studies would print complete nonsense, "if
(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological
preconceptions." --Sokal in Lingua Franca May/June 96
So he wrote an article full of scientific howlers, postmodernist
critical jargon, and progressive politics, with many quotes and much
name-dropping (Derrida, Lacan, Irigiray), and concluding that modern science
denies the idea of there being an "objective reality."
The journal _Social Text_ then printed his article, and was shocked when
Sokal then announced that the article had been a hoax. This created a furor,
of course, with many notables trying to defend _Social Text_ and the field of
cultural studies from the accusations of indifference to scientific merit,
intellectual laziness, and obscurantism.
One of the criticisms leveled against Sokal was that he should not have
satirized the belief that there is no such thing as objective reality,
"because no one in the field actually believes that." Well, it seems some
people some people *do* believe that.
(Slate, the webzine, has a good summary and links list about Sokal.)
I would also point out that by surrendering objective reality to the
patriarchy, you also give the "bad guys" sole rights to:
R Truth
Knowledge
Science
Technology
Science Fiction.
The territory you claim for feminism seems to consist of:
Ignorance
Superstition
Religion
Fantasy
I leave it at that.
As for hard science fiction:
I think you have to try to write in the hard sf mode; novels do not
become hard sf by accident any more than they become Gothic. For example,
Nicola Griffith certainly seems to know enough about waste treatment to write
a hard sf treatment of the subject, but IMHO she was going after something
different in _Slow River_ -- maybe something bigger. She said something
similar to this in the SFWA bulletin, about how when she added characters to
her knowledge of biology, everything changed.. I don't see it as a criticism
of _Slow River_ to say that it does not fit within the hard sf canon.
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