ABSTRACT
In the present climate in which sexism and gender inequities in the technosciences continue to beckon for historical interventions, this chapter affirms the value of adopting governance as an analytical focus in women’s and gender histories of the technosciences. Returning to early feminist science studies concepts, with the dynamics of governance in focus, this chapter emphasizes the utility of approaching gender in technoscience in terms of performance, argued to be critical for interpreting gendered practices that transverse thresholds demarcating private from public contexts. Historians adopting such an approach may account for a fuller scope of knowledge production-as-performance, revealing a greater complexity of roles beyond earlier (often polarized) emphases on exceptionalism, victimhood, sex-based divisions of labor, the logics of nature/nurture, and hierarchies separating amateurs from professionals. Such a historiographical orientation can be leveraged in STEM gender-equity efforts, both in exposing and combating hostilities against gender diversity in the technosciences that persist globally today.
