Round table discussion - Gender, Expertise, and the State

Victoria Piehowski, University at Buffalo

In this roundtable panel, panelists will discuss new directions in theorizing how states produce expertise about gender and sexuality. Panelists will explore the social processes by which actors within and outside the state are recognized as experts on gender and sexuality by the state; how state/market relationships shape policy expertise on gendered forms of labor, violence, and social inequality; and how state institutions create gender and sexual categories of citizenship through the implementation of new types of expertise. To inform the discussion, panelists will leverage findings from their own research on welfare state jobs during the pandemic and the construction of the essential worker category; reproductive governance, industrial relations, and the technosciences of 'motivation' in postcolonial India, 1960-1977; the role of non-state expert actors in the legal governance of sexualized subjects; how state actors explain gendered patterns of disability, chronic pain, and opioid use in the U.S. and France; and how veteran’s courts in the United States understand the relationship between masculinity and violence.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 2. Round table discussion - Gender, Expertise, and the State