ABSTRACT
Drawing on feminist post-structural perspectives, this article shows how the dominant discourses of underrepresentation and gender difference that characterize gender inequality in computer science (CS) create subject positions, which simultaneously mark women as highly invisible and visible. Narrative accounts from qualitative interviews and focus groups with women students of color enrolled in CS at a university located in the southwestern region of the US illustrate the situated ways in which participants materialized these discourses in their personal accounts of ‘not seeing and seeing women in CS.’ Participants accounts reveal how isolation, exclusion, and connection in CS are contextual, contingent, and intersectional experiences that cannot be collapsed into a single, monolithic meta-narrative. Participant accounts also demonstrate the complex ways that women students of color in CS pushed back on dominant discourses of underrepresentation and gender difference.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the participants in this study for their time, their trust, and their insights. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their thoughtful and very helpful feedback and suggestions on this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Christina Convertino is an Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Foundations and an Educational Anthropologist at the University of Texas-El Paso.
Notes
1 Herein, western episteme refers to Enlightenment humanism, which involves the Cartesian logic of duality and a postivistic model of rationality (St. Pierre Citation2000). Within this view, gender includes the preformed, essentialized, and dualistic identity categories of man and woman, which each presume a particular set of qualities that are different.
2 The names of all persons and places used in this paper are pseudonyms.
3 A non-binary, gender-neutral term to refer to persons from Latin American origin or descent.