An Introduction to Scientific Masculinities

Abstract

This volume seeks to integrate gender analysis into the global history of science and medicine from the late Middle Ages to the present by focusing on masculinity, the part of the gender equation that has received the least attention from scholars. The premise of the volume is that social constructions of masculinity function simultaneously as foils for femininity and as methods of differentiating between “kinds” of men. In exploring scientific masculinities without taking the dominance of men and masculinity in the sciences for granted, we ask, What is masculinity and how does it operate in science? Our answers remind us that gender is at once an analytical category and a historical object. The essays are divided into three sections that in turn emphasize the importance of gender to the professionalization of scientific, technological, and medical practices, the spaces in which such labor is performed, and the ways that sex, gender, and sexual orientation are measured and serve as metaphors in society and culture.