A Game of Cat's Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies

"Nature" is a topos, or commonplace. Nature is a topic I .cannot avoid. It is the imploded, densely packed location for the simulta­ neously ethnospecific, cultural, political, and scientific conversa­ tions about what the allowable structures of action and the possible plots in the sacred secular dramas of technoscience-as well as in the analysis of technoscience-might be. This nature, this common place and topical commons, has possessed me sin.ce I was a child. To inhabit this nature has not been a choice, but a complex inheri­ tance. I was riveted by natural law and fixed in the time zones of the Christian liturgical year, and then set loose in the culture medi­ um of the molecular biological laboratory. For people nurtured in the worlds in which I grew up, whatever else it also is, nature is good to think with.