Science Ladies on Stage

The volume includes also a contribution by Andrea Grignolio, who looks at theatre as a site where science and humanities have fruitfully crossed paths in the last twenty years. He considers in particular three one-woman plays inspired by the difficult lives and careers of twentieth-century woman scientists, a genre that was virtually non-existent before the 1980s. Grignolio explains the writing and staging of such plays in terms of the new conditions that were brought about by theunderstanding of science as a situated and socially shaped activity. The cross-disciplinary interaction between science studies and gender studies has shed light precisely on the ways in which gender and power relations come to bear on the dynamics of scientific communities and the making of scientific knowledge.