Research Focuses
Research focuses
The Research Training Group focused on two research areas: first, the inscription of gendered categories into the production, terminology, and structuring of knowledge in the respective dis- ciplines; and second the sexual coding of knowledge objects and social bodies.
1. The interrelation of gender and knowledge order
Not only Georges Canguilhem has drawn our attention to the hidden history of scientific con-cepts. The dynamics of and changes in scientific concepts have for quite some time been viewed as both manifestations and generators of knowledge development in the recent history of science (Thomas S. Kuhn 1973). Hence scientific terms are not perceived as neutral vessels for logical or empirical facts, but as conceptualizations that draw upon historically contingent assumptions, decisions, or paradigms, which nevertheless are generally concealed (e.g. as a discursive empty space). In the Western history of science, gender functions as one of the silenced epistemological foundations of knowledge.
After bringing the cultural construction of gender in scientific disciplines into perspective, the second phase of the graduate program focused on the various dimensions of ›knowledge‹ itself.
The intense methodological work (especially in the area of interdependency theories) that takes place in gender research, opened new insights into the different dimensions of the history of knowledge and structured the contemporary re- search field. Thus the implicit, individual, and collective knowledge systems of everyday life and gender upon which science builds were thoroughly examined. In addition to epistemological structures, cognitive and meaning-constitutive dimensions of knowledge (tacit knowledge, knowledge spaces, etc.) were compiled as elements of an expanded concept of knowledge. Furthermore, such an analytical sharpening and broadening of the concept of knowledge made room for a theoretical clarification of how categories of difference (gender, ›race‹, disability, etc.) are enmeshed in the formation of knowledge. Consequently it was not only the histories and theorems of the individual disciplines, their categorical reference systems, nor the development of their respective canons that were at the center of interest, but also the power relations that make this knowledge possible, as well as the effects of gender-coded knowledge systems on the subject.
Such an expanded concept of knowledge poses the question of transfer processes afresh: what happens if knowledge of gender or difference is transferred from one context (local, national, disciplinary, discursive) into another? Research into the interrelations of gender and the order of
knowledge made it possible to describe interdiscursive and interdependent translation processes in more detail. The comparative and transdisciplinary approach of the graduate school enabled us to analyze the unconsciousness of rational categories, their forgotten, undisclosed, yet effective elements, and uncover the transfer processes be- tween collective and individual knowledge.
2. Gendered coding of objects of knowledge and social bodies
The body is a central topos of gender research: on the one hand, the differences in the material nature and condition of the human body provide the starting point for our notions of gender; on the other hand, this very materiality and physicality is the vanishing point of all empirical and theoretical attempts to present and represent gendered differences as objects of knowledge.
In the life sciences, as well as in other areas, the physical body of the individual is subjected to normative regulations in very different historical discourses and practices. In the initial funding phase we placed the material constitution of body constructions and their embodiment (the psychiatric patient, the gender of the disabled, the woman in the family tree of the breast cancer genes, etc.) at the center of our line of questioning. In the second funding phase we focussed on the relationship between the individual and the social body to show how the two are related. Whether in the form of »Leviathan« or »the king’s two bod- ies,« the social body is always the shadow of the physical – or the physical body is a figuration of the social. The focus was, in other words, on the practices of construction, media technologies of representation, and the discourses of mediation, all of which assign gender to the objects of knowledge in the sciences as well as in the areas of cultural and everyday knowledge.