Lecture 6 - Haraway, Wajcman Flashcards
1
Q
Technofeminism / feminist technoscience:
A
- Technofeminism explores role of gender in technology
o Relationship between historical and societal norms, and technology design and implementation
o Often deploying an intersectional approach - Technofeminism explores coded social and historical implications of science and technology on the development of society, including how identity constructs and is constructed by these theories
- Wajcman: technology is product of mutual alliances, collectively created (performativity)
- Emerged as critique of overt techno-determinism
- Key achievement 2000’s: feminist critiques of scientific knowledge and the design and use of technologies as heavily infused with a gender bias
2
Q
Judy Wajcman – feminist theory of technology:
A
- Feminism and feminist thought as a diverse field that developed through different forms of struggle not one way to talk about women’s oppression/suppression
- Aim: interrogate the gender power relations of the material world
- Material in this case also means embodied, not just conceptual
- Essentializing the female struggle also means generalizing
- Part of the approach: mutual shaping of gender and technology
3
Q
Wajcman - technology as culture
A
- Technology is often thought of as industrial and military, ignoring other technologies that affect most aspects of everyday life technology cast in male terms
- Feminist scholars show that binary oppositions favor masculinity over femininity, so the association of men and machines is a result of the historical/cultural construct of gender
- Shift of perspective: revaluing cooking, childcare etc disrupts stereotype that women are technically incompetent or invisible in technical spheres
- Response of overcoding women: mechanical and civil engineering became dominant, diminishing significance of knowledge associated with women
4
Q
Shared ground of STS and feminist STS:
A
- Identifying the ways in which socio-technical relations are manifest not only in physical objects and institutions but also in symbols, language and identities
- Scientific facts and technological artifacts are treated as semiotic and material. Broad notion makes it possible to understand how relationship to technology is integral to subjectivity for both sexes.
- No way to understand technology without acknowledging what it does for people
- [Binaries do persist here, think about how]
5
Q
Why feminist theories of technology:
A
- Effects of different childhood exposure, prevalence of different role models, forms of schooling, gender segregation, job market
- Result of women being largely excluded from process of technical design
6
Q
Wajcman – technology as gendered:
A
- Women’s question in science science question in feminism
- From seeing science as problem in which men dominate (liberal feminist), to how to use technology for emancipation of women
- Radical feminist: gender power relations are embedded more deeply in technoscience [in the entire idea of technology]
- Feminism feminisms, meaning also acknowledging the differences between women
7
Q
Difference radical and social feminist:
A
- Radical feminist focuses on womens bodies and sexuality
- Social feminist: exploring relation between women’s work and technology, how to use technology in favor of feminism
8
Q
Wajcman – contemporary approaches:
A
- Haraway++
- On the internet: ‘However, the possibility and the fluidity of gender discourse in the virtual world is constrained by the visceral, lived gender relations of the material world’
9
Q
Wajcman – feminism and STS:
A
- Mutual shaping of gender and technology
- Technological innovation is shaped by social circumstances
- Technology – social acts as a network, mutually constituted
10
Q
Haraway - an ironic dream
A
- Aim: to build ironic myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism the image of a cyborg
- Irony for haraway is about contradictions
11
Q
Defining the cyborg:
A
- “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a worldchanging fiction”
o Change in perspective – from women’s experience
o Fiction not as an imaginary but a change in perspective (boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion) - Cyborg as fiction mapping of social and bodily reality cyborg is zowel fictie als realiteit
- Cyborg is our ontology
- Relation organism-machine is a border war, the stakes are production, reproduction and imagination
12
Q
Defining cyborg itself
A
- Skips the steps of original unity, of identification with nature in Western sense
- No origin story
- Defines technological polis, based on revolution social relations of oikos (household, takes it into account, doesn’t have masculinist view of home and work)
- Trouble: they are offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism (masculinist technology), but the cyborg is not beholden to its parents
13
Q
Three boundary breakdowns
A
- Human-animal: nothing convincingly settles the separation of human and animal
- Organism-machine: “Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” ie the effects of cybernetics
- Physical – non-physical: microelectronic devices, information, wifi
14
Q
A shift in how to think (by breaking down 3 boundaries) – resistance:
A
- A networked form of struggle beyond classic revolutions of the masses: traditional revolution is also a masculinized view
- Haraway is not talking about creating a final abstraction eg a closed system
- Haraway is not afraid of crossing boundary with animal, machine and physical permanently partial identities
15
Q
Transformations (mediations)
A
- Communication and semiotization: entire universe of objects becomes a problem of communications engineering, against: theories of the text
- Decision procedures: interested in configuration of objects (network) and not objects itself, control should be based on control of the network or the whole (statistics etc)
