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Book part
Publication date: 21 August 2015

Landon Schnabel and Lindsey Breitwieser

The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge.

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this chapter is to bring three recent and innovative feminist science and technology studies paradigms into dialogue on the topics of subjectivity and knowledge.

Findings

Each of the three frameworks – feminist postcolonial science and technology studies, queer ecologies, and new feminist materialisms – reconceptualizes and expands our understanding of subjectivity and knowledge. As projects invested in identifying and challenging the strategic conferral of subjectivity, they move from subjectivity located in all human life, to subjectivity as indivisible from nature, to a broader notion of subjectivity as both material and discursive. Despite some methodological differences, the three frameworks all broaden feminist conceptions of knowledge production and validation, advocating for increased consideration of scientific practices and material conditions in feminist scholarship.

Originality

This chapter examines three feminist science and technology studies paradigms by comparing and contrasting how each addresses notions of subjectivity and knowledge in ways that push us to rethink key epistemological issues.

Research Implications

This chapter identifies similarities and differences in the three frameworks’ discussions of subjectivity and knowledge production. By putting these frameworks into conversation, we identify methodological crossover, capture the coevolution of subjectivity and knowledge production in feminist theory, and emphasize the importance of matter in sociocultural explorations.

Book part
Publication date: 6 July 2005

Iain Morland

My discussion of intersexuality's changing exemplificatory position within feminist studies of science explains how its medical management has emerged as an exemplary injustice of…

Abstract

My discussion of intersexuality's changing exemplificatory position within feminist studies of science explains how its medical management has emerged as an exemplary injustice of recognition. Specifically, the surgical protocol that aims to make unusual genitalia invisible, and the medical obfuscation of intersexuality's ramifications for the cultural construction of gender, have been written as a wrong by Anne Fausto-Sterling and Suzanne Kessler. By mapping intersex treatment as a discursively produced injustice, I argue that it is accordingly within discourse that the wrongs of intersex treatment may be redressed – not by undoing past surgeries, or by punishing clinicians as personally “guilty.”

Details

Toward a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-189-7

Book part
Publication date: 27 July 2018

Elizabeth Anderson

The underdetermination argument establishes that scientists may use political values to guide inquiry, without providing criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate…

Abstract

The underdetermination argument establishes that scientists may use political values to guide inquiry, without providing criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate guidance. This chapter supplies such criteria. Analysis of the confused arguments against value-laden science reveals the fundamental criterion of illegitimate guidance: when value judgments operate to drive inquiry to a predetermined conclusion. A case study of feminist research on divorce reveals numerous legitimate ways that values can guide science without violating this standard.

Details

Critical Realism, History, and Philosophy in the Social Sciences
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78756-604-0

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 17 December 2016

Justine Egner

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

Methodology/approach

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

Findings

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Originality/value

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

Details

Sociology Looking at Disability: What Did We Know and When Did We Know it
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78635-478-5

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 27 October 2017

Madeleine Pape

Purpose: In this chapter, I analyze proceedings from 2015 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was asked to determine whether Dutee Chand, an Indian sprinter, could…

Abstract

Purpose: In this chapter, I analyze proceedings from 2015 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) was asked to determine whether Dutee Chand, an Indian sprinter, could compete as a female athlete. Excluded on the basis that her naturally high testosterone levels conferred an unfair athletic advantage, Chand argued that existing policies in international sport were scientifically flawed. The purpose of the analysis is to examine whether the case led to a shift in the gender politics of sport, law, and science.

Methodology/Approach: I present a textual analysis of the arbitral award document, drawing on feminist methodology to identify where and how the adjudicating panel’s assessment of the case was gendered.

Findings: The CAS decision defined the right to compete as primarily a matter for science to decide, in the process obscuring the gendered and tilted playing field upon which scientific knowledge production takes place. Furthermore, the right to unconditional recognition as a woman was reduced to science alone.

Social Implications: My analysis reveals that Chand’s victory is a precarious one, with binary and biologized models of sex and gender prevailing when the institutions of sport, law, and science determine the policy boundaries of “fair play” for female athletes.

Originality/Value of Study: This chapter shows how the institutions of sport, law, and science work together to determine gender. As a consequence, even feminist versions of the biology of sex difference risk reifying the authority of science as the dominant knowledge form within the institutional spaces of sport and law.

Details

Gender Panic, Gender Policy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-203-1

Keywords

Content available
Book part
Publication date: 5 July 2017

Abstract

Details

Insights and Research on the Study of Gender and Intersectionality in International Airline Cultures
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-546-7

Book part
Publication date: 21 August 2015

Marcia Texler Segal and Vasilikie Demos

This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

Abstract

Purpose

This introduction provides an overview of the themes and chapters of this volume.

Research limitations/implications

The chapters illustrate current approaches to theories, research methods, pedagogy, and praxis in gender studies showing both continuity and change.

Practical/social implications

Newer approaches, gender-centered, intersectional, and global offer a critique of older ways of gathering and understanding data, ways that respond to and are impacted by social change.

Originality/value

The chapter and the volume are intended to encourage further advances in gender research.

Details

At the Center: Feminism, Social Science and Knowledge
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78560-078-4

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 6 May 2014

Jennifer Germon

The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that consists of dual narratives that bolster an oppositional complementary model of sex-gender. By these accounts male sexual development results from complex and multi-faceted processes generated by the Y chromosome while female sexual development is straightforward, articulated through a discourse of “default sex” (Jost, 1953). Such apparent truths fit seamlessly with the timeworn notion of maleness and masculinity as always already active, and femaleness and femininity always and inevitably passive. In other words, he does and she is.

Design/methodology/approach

Despite embryogenetic findings thoroughly debunking these ideas, contemporary medical and biological textbooks remain haunted by outdated androcentric models of sex development. This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.

Findings

This paper demonstrates how new ways of thinking can lead to a new understanding with regards to sex, gender, bodies, and experiences.

Originality/value

This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.

Details

Qualitative Research Journal, vol. 14 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1443-9883

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 November 2008

Karen L. Henwood, Karen Anne Parkhill and Nick F. Pidgeon

A longstanding quantitative finding from surveys of public perceptions of hazardous technologies is that women and men respondents tend to express different levels of concern when…

1987

Abstract

Purpose

A longstanding quantitative finding from surveys of public perceptions of hazardous technologies is that women and men respondents tend to express different levels of concern when asked about environmental and technological hazards. Traditional psychometric risk perception research has provided extensive empirical descriptions of this “gender effect”, but is criticised for having less success in developing substantive theory linking observations to socio‐cultural explanations to explicate this effect. The purpose of this paper is to build a theoretical platform to account for the existing empirical findings on gender and perceptions of risk.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper presents a critical synthesis, drawing upon theory in contemporary risk research, gender theory, social studies of science and feminist studies of epistemology.

Findings

A theoretical platform is developed concerning the operation of gender as a regulatory process involving norms and discourse. The role is identified of moral discourses, hegemonic masculinities/gender authenticity, and epistemic subjectivities as plausible ways of understanding the gender–risk effect in risk perception.

Research limitations/implications

A novel theoretical exploration is provided of the relationship between gender and risk perceptions. Conceptual development in the gender and risk arena could be further refined by applying the theoretical platform developed here to empirical analyses and, to investigate its relevance to understanding how people discuss, deliberate and reason about risk issues.

Originality/value

Much of the existing literature fails to offer adequately grounded theoretical explanations for the observed empirical finding on gender and risk. This paper is the first to utilise a non‐essentialist reading of the gender‐risk effect by developing the “effects made by gender” approach.

Details

Equal Opportunities International, vol. 27 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0261-0159

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 25 July 2008

Joseph Schneider

In 1985, I was moving along a more or less definable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts…

Abstract

In 1985, I was moving along a more or less definable disciplinary path, writing qualitative sociology guided by my understanding of leading symbolic interactionist texts, productively disturbed by affection for Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology. Although there were prior lines of influence, my writing then was focused especially on various “social constructionist” projects, first with Peter Conrad (Conrad & Schneider, 1992 [1980]; Schneider & Conrad, 1983) and then with Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse (Kitsuse & Schneider, 1984, 1989). I also read closely and had many conversations with Anselm Strauss about how to do what he and Barney Glaser called “grounded theory” and with Howard Becker about “doing sociology.” Not only did I feel that I was getting better at doing ethnography or field work and “writing it up,” as we put it in Sociology, I felt I was engaged in an epistemologically superior practice relative to the more quantitative and structurally oriented work that was then and still is defined as “mainstream” (a land from which I had emigrated, gradually, after the Ph.D.).

Details

Studies in Symbolic Interaction
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84663-931-9

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