Emily Martin (anthropologist)

Emily Martin (born 1944) is a sinologist, anthropologist, and feminist. Currently, she is a professor of socio-cultural anthropology at New York University. She received her PhD degree from Cornell University in 1971. Before 1984, she published works under the name of Emily Martin Ahern.

Martin’s work on sinology focused on topics both in Mainland China and Taiwan. These topics included Chinese religion and rituals, architecture, politics, traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese women’s culture, Chinese rural culture, Chinese lineages and genealogies, etc.

Martin focuses the anthropology of science and analyzes science from a feminist perspective. Her work includes detailed analysis on human reproduction and related things. From her feminist perspective, Martin argues that current scientific literature is gender-biased, and that such bias has become entrenched in our language. According to Martin, scientific explanations such as “the sperm forcefully penetrates the egg” are presented in a sexist way, to the disadvantage of women.

Martin began researching the analogies used in science education starting in 1982. Pregnant with her second child, Martin noticed a pattern in her expecting parents' class how the woman's body and its parts were described and referred to "as if these things weren't a part of us." Martin began with interviews with women regarding their perspective on female reproductive issues and compiled her research of interviews into a book called The Woman in the Body (1987). Martin began to expand on her research by interviewing scientists and including the topic of male reproductive processes. All of these topics were encompassed under fertilization and elaborated on in Martin's article The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles (1991).

For example, Martin notes that our perception on menstruation is usually negative and misogynistic. We tend to think menstruation as a failure, because the egg is not fertilized and the woman’s uterine tissues begin to “break down” or “slough off". Martin ascribes this perception to linguistic and cultural gender bias - words used to describe menstruation imply failure, dirtiness, structural breakdown and destruction, and wound. (By contrast, we do not perceive the shedding of the stomach lining as a structural failure.) This wound perception is reinforced by the fact that, during menstruation, the woman bleeds and may suffer from pain and discomfort. Martin contends that menstruation is a normal physiological function and process (not a dirty thing or a “secret illness”), which should be viewed as a success - i.e., the success of the female body in avoiding pregnancy, the success of the female body in ridding itself of potentially harmful material from the uterus. Yet, our language and culture prevent this. Such gender bias is also responsible for our tendency to “praise” males for their “amazing” ability to produce a huge amount of sperm, despite of the fact that the sperm is a lot cheaper, biologically, to produce compared to the egg, and the sperm suffer an extremely high mortality in the female reproductive tract. (Robbins and Larkin, 2007: 255)

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