Lecture 6 - Haraway, Wajcman

Question 1

Technofeminism / feminist technoscience:

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

Judy Wajcman – feminist theory of technology:

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

Wajcman - technology as culture

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

Shared ground of STS and feminist STS:

Answer 4

• 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]

Question 5

Why feminist theories of technology:

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Wajcman – technology as gendered:

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

Difference radical and social feminist:

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

Wajcman – contemporary approaches:

Answer 8

• 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’

Question 9

Wajcman – feminism and STS:

Answer 9

• Mutual shaping of gender and technology
• Technological innovation is shaped by social circumstances
• Technology – social acts as a network, mutually constituted

Question 10

Haraway - an ironic dream

Answer 10

• Aim: to build ironic myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism  the image of a cyborg
• Irony for haraway is about contradictions

Question 11

Defining the cyborg:

Answer 11

• “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

Question 12

Defining cyborg itself

Answer 12

• 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

Question 13

Three boundary breakdowns

Answer 13

1. Human-animal: nothing convincingly settles the separation of human and animal
2. 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
3. Physical – non-physical: microelectronic devices, information, wifi

Question 14

A shift in how to think (by breaking down 3 boundaries) – resistance:

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

Transformations (mediations)

Answer 15

• 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)

Question 16

Technologies, scientific discourse, myth:

Answer 16

• Technologies and scientific discourses can be understood as frozen moments of the fluid social interactions constituting them
• Also: instrument for enforcing meanings
• Viewing a tool only through what it is made for would be enforcing meaning upon the tool

Question 17

Translation of the world into a problem of coding:

Answer 17

• Universalization of information
• Capitalist universality of circulation and processing
• Abstraction of value through money

Question 18

Link haraway and bateson

Answer 18

information is quantifiable element (with bateson, information has zero-location and is only important in quantities)

Question 19

Link haraway and deleuze

Answer 19

boundaries are differentially permeable to information (access to information with Deleuze, think control societies passwords etc)

Question 20

Two key insights haraway

Answer 20

• 1: Production of universal totalizing theory is a mistake that misses most of reality
• 2: Taking responsibility for social relations of science and technology means refusing anti-science metaphysics, and reconstructing boundaries of daily life in partial connection with others
• Cyborg imagery can lead us out of dualisms