Margaret Cavendish : science and women's power through the blazing world

Science fiction was used by Margaret Cavendish to highlight the negative—both present and potential—aspects of her time. In particular, she uses fiction to call into question the relation between power and scientific knowledge and to show that science could be allied to female power only if radically rethought. I will analyse The Blazing World in relation to Cavendish’s scientific theories and explore the theme of sexual difference. Furthermore, The Blazing World shows that, rather than scientific knowledge being objective truth, it has a definite political agenda, and it is the expression of a particular point of view. In this sense, The Blazing World binds to Cavendish’s philosophical reflections, highlighting how her criticism of the mechanistic approach and the experimental scientific method has important political and epistemological consequences, even for the contemporary feminist debate on science and knowledge.