Queering Engineering: A Critical Analysis of the Gendered Technical/Social Dualism in Engineering and Engineering Education Research

Wendy Faulkner first introduced the technical/social dualism in her 2000 article to detail engineering as a gendered space where technical skills are valued over social competence and thus deemed a masculinized trait. This paper draws on our review of research of peer-reviewed journal articles, handbook chapters, and refereed conference proceedings that cite Faulkner’s article to critically examine the variation of using the technical/social dualism to explore engineering as a gendered field of study. Faulkner’s three-tiered analytical framework (division of labor, symbols, and identities) was adopted in our review to document the extent to which the gendered mappings of the technical/social dualism onto heterosexual masculinity/femininity have been challenged in order to further broaden participation among women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, queer/questioning, and other (LGBTQ+) individuals. A subset of findings from the review presented in this paper highlight the need for future ethnographic analyses that advance Faulkner’s destabilizing of the technical/social dualism. This allows for the detailing of in-the-moment gendered engineering experiences among women and LGBTQ+ individuals at multiple intersections of their gender, sexuality, and other social identities.