Research Program
How is gender embedded in the formation of modern disciplines? And how do gendered ideas shape our everyday knowledge? How do they become invisible, objectified, and scientific facts? Our Berlin-based graduate research school focused on the question of the significance of gender for the production of scientific knowledge, its role in the formation of scientific concepts and categories, and the ways in which it inscribes itself in orders of knowledge. Since discipline-based categorizations of gender are being included, it is of crucial importance to not refer too quickly to the heuristic separation of ›sex‹ and ›gender‹. Rather, the central goal is to consider the distinction between a cultural conceptualization of gender on the one hand, and a biological-natural gender duality on the other, as the departing point from which to highlight the numerous cross-connections between physiological, cultural, historical, and socially-developed notions of gender. Without considering the representations and codifications of gender which are inherent in the history of knowledge, neither a history of science nor a modern history of gender can ever be written.
The Research Training Group was comprised of disciplines that already have an established tradition of gender research and/or those that could provide research skills related to the history of science and the sociology of knowledge. These disciplines are literary and cultural studies (including German, English and American studies, Scandinavian studies and Romance studies), general linguistics, history, European ethnology, medicine, history of medicine (including history of science), social sciences, pedagogy, theology/ religious studies, law, and economics.
In supporting such a graduate research group, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin builds on a 100-year tradition of Berlin as a vanguard for research in gender studies that can be traced all the way back to the pioneers of sexology, the research projects of Georg Simmel, and the establishment of the first psychoanalytical institute. Alone in the rich scientific landscape of Berlin, the group brought together critical approaches that address the question of the relationship between knowledge, science, and gender.