Technology Feminism and the Body Week 4 Feminism

Technology, Feminism and the Body (Week 4)

Feminism and Technology • Technology is closely associated with science • Science and technology are markers of progress • Associated with masculinity / knowledge / competence

Feminist approaches: 1. Access and regulation • Recovering lost histories (e. g. Rosalind Franklin; Barbara Mc. Clintock; Alice White) • Getting more women into science (education / employment) • Identifying uses and abuses of science and technology • Technology as neutral artifact • Regulatory intervention

Feminist Approaches 2. Radical critiques • Use and abuses (e. g. military / environment) • Capitalism; patriarchy • Competing strategies 1. embracing technology (e. g. Shulamith Firestone – The Dialectic of Sex 1971) 2. Repudiating technology (e. g. Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) – see Spallone and Steinberg (1987))

Is a science / technology of women’s values possible? • Risks essentialising certain values as feminine (nurturing / creative / intuitive etc. ) • Overlooks the embeddedness of science and technology in masculine culture (e. g. history of excluding women – as inventors / users; the language of technology)

Rethinking technology • Re-defining technology (and its development) • Rethinking what counts as competence • The role of the “user” in technological (re)production

What is technology? • Wacjman 1991: – Form of knowledge – Human activities and practices – hardware

Changing technologies • Technological development is unpredictable – novel uses for existing ideas

Path Dependency?

Competence • Women are generally seen as technologically incompetent • Technologies associated with women are not seen as technological (e. g. domestic technologies)

Users • Involved in every stage of the development of a technology • Women (and men) are not simply victims / passive recipients of technologies (e. g. reproductive technologies; cosmetic surgery) (See Saetnan et al (2000) Bodies of Technology)

So how does this relate to this module?

Seminar task • Before the seminar, find a technology that has followed an unusual, or unpredictable path – you will be asked to introduce it during the seminar.