The Entanglement of Gender and Physics

Human Actors, Work Place Cultures, and Knowledge Production

Abstract

Research in an area that might be called gender and physics lies neither in the focus of science studies nor in the centre of gender studies. However, there is a rich tradition of interdisciplinary research that studies the entanglement of gender and physics from different perspectives. In this review article, I give a survey on this inadequately discussed research area by presenting selected examples of often-cited as well as internationally less known literature. Furthermore, I propose a systematisation of three different dimensions, comprising research on human actors, work place cultures, and knowledge production in physics. In so doing, I uncover some achievements and gaps of this interdisciplinary research. Following E. F. Keller (1995), I finally plea for a trading zone for scholars working on the entanglement of gender and physics.