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Exploring Expertise pp 55–79Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Gender, Expertise and Feminism

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Abstract

Connie, the poor Latino heroine of Woman on the Edge of Time who has been diagnosed as insane and repeatedly institutionalized, is represented here pitted against a phalanx of experts. The image epitomizes the ‘cognitive politics’ (Keller, 1990, p. 180) around gender and expertise which emerged with the women’s liberation movement in parts of Europe, North America, and Australasia in the 1970s. Since then the terms ‘expertise’ and ‘gender’ have had notable currency in the English speaking world. The term gender refers to the social construction of the categories feminine and masculine, whereas sex refers to the biological categories female and male.1 Feminists adopted the terminology of gender, because it enabled them to contest the ‘naturalness’ of inequality between men and women, and so open the possibility of change.

All those experts lined up against her in a jury dressed in medical white and judicial black — social workers, caseworkers, child guidance counselors, psychiatrists, doctors, nurses, clinical psychologists, probation officers — all those cool knowing faces had caught her and bound her in their nets of jargon hung all with tiny barbed hooks that stuck in her flesh and leaked a slow weakening poison.

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976, 1991, p. 60)

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Authors
  1. Maureen McNeil
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Robin Williams Wendy Faulkner James Fleck

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© 1998 Maureen McNeil

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McNeil, M. (1998). Gender, Expertise and Feminism. In: Williams, R., Faulkner, W., Fleck, J. (eds) Exploring Expertise. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13693-3_3

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