This presentation examines the way in which gender, power and knowledge are intimately intertwined. Its purpose is to illustrate how gender (‘doing gender’) can be considered a politics of knowledge and to conduct symbolic analysis on how Western thought has developed from a binary conception of gender. By deconstructing a classical narrative (taken from Plato) of how knowledge is gendered, it seeks to show (or better perform) an alternative narrative in which ‘another’ form of knowing the world is possible, thereby showing how gender performativity is inscribed in a politics of knowledge.
Short biography:
Silvia Gherardi is full professor of sociology of work at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Trento, Italy, where she has been Director of the Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning, and Aesthetics (www.unitn.it/rucola) since 1993.
