Toward a critical, feminist sociology of expertise

This paper draws on oral history interviews with members of a feminized profession, dietetics, and feminist actor-network theory (ANT) to advance an emerging theoretical framework, the sociology of expertise. The feminist sociology of expertise developed in this paper will likely be of interest to scholars of the professions and professionalization who are familiar with the frameworks developed in the sociology of professions literature. The sociology of professions has served as the main body of literature in which the stratification of work and elite knowledge, or expertise, has been theorized. However, the sociology of professions largely oversimplifies the implications of expert claims-making because of its narrow focus on the actions of professional groups. The sociology of expertise draws on the tools of ANT to illuminate the wider workings and consequences of expert claims-making as a performed and participatory phenomenon. Nevertheless, like much of mainstream ANT, the sociology of expertise has not considered how performances of expertise are also performances of other socio-material identities, namely gender, race, and class inequities. Moreover, the conceptual tools developed by theorists of the sociology of expertise do not sufficiently account for the agency and impact of feminized networks of expertise. In this paper, I draw on feminist ANT scholarship to develop a feminist sociology of expertise, that I contend, is better suited to theorize expertise as a network and performance that inherently implicates the performances of multiple socio-material identities including gender, race, and class.