Gender, Expertise and Feminism

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.