Seeking Eccentricity

Abstract

This Sociology and Technoscience monograph extends conversations and uses of eccentricity as a methodological tool for doing research within the field of feminist and gender studies. The search for eccentricity responds to the editors’ interest in reflecting on and engaging with different methodological approaches which help deviate from canonical established patterns of research onto unusual and provocative ways of doing research differently. In this collection we have gathered contributions dealing with the analysis of technologies of gender, sexuality and bodies to propose new ways to defocus, dislocate or blur the split between subjects and objects of study. In sum, with this monograph we intend to contribute to gender approaches to science by exploring "eccentrically" the ways feminist and gender scholars think and research otherwise.

Feminist modes of knowledge and doing research have traditionally been excluded from academic discourses or denied the merits of their own specificity due to the constitution of the notion of “women” as a sexual differentiated subject. “Women”, as epistemological subject, has been trapped between the unrepresented or unrepresentable due to the articulation of what Michel Foucault calls “technologies of sex” - that is, mechanisms, apparatuses and discourses (legal, pedagogical, medical, demographic, religious or economic) that regulate sexuality. Following the Foucaultian concept, Teresa De Lauretis (1987) coins the concept of “technologies of gender” to move away from the idea of gender as sexual difference towards its comprehension as a political tool instead. Technologies are hence understood as inseparable from their sociocultural milieus and the semiotic apparatuses which produce women and men, assigning an identity and a position to each individual within the social group.