Feminism Confronts Technology E-Book

Judy Wajcman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Feminism Confronts Technology provides a lively and engaging exploration of the impact of technology on women's lives from word processors to food processors, and genetic engineering to the design of cities. Comprehensive and critical, this book surveys the sociological and feminist literature on technology, highlighting the male bias in the way technology is defined as well as developed. Wajcman sets the scene with an overview of feminist theories of science and technology: encompassing the technologies of production and reproduction as well as domestic technology.

The author challenges the common assumption that technology is gender neutral, looking at whether technology can liberate women or whether the new technologies are reinforcing sexual divisions in society.

Leseprobe

In memory of my father Szloma Wajcman1905–1978

FEMINISM CONFRONTSTECHNOLOGY

J   U    D    YWAJCMAN

Polity

Copyright © Judy Wajcman 1991

First published 1991 by Polity Press

in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1993, 1996, 2000

Editorial office:

Polity Press, 65 Bridge Street,

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Blackwell Publishers Ltd

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Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–0777–2

ISBN 0–7456–0778–0 (pbk)

ISBN 978-0-7456-5662-5 (ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10½ on 12 pt Times

by Colset Private Limited, Singapore

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 Feminist Critiques of Science and Technology

2 The Technology of Production: Making a Job of Gender

3 Reproductive Technology: Delivered into Men’s Hands

4 Domestic Technology: Labour-saving or Enslaving?

5 The Built Environment: Women’s Place, Gendered Space

6 Technology as Masculine Culture

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

In acknowledging the help I received in producing this book, I must begin with Jenny Earle. She not only read and expertly edited every chapter, but discussed with me all the ideas, intellectual and political. I am indebted to her for constant support and encouragement throughout the entire process.

I started out intending to write an article – it was Donald MacKenzie who suggested I might as well write a book. I have often cursed him since! Now it is finished I can thank him for his suggestion and for initially fostering my interest in this area. He and Tony Giddens have seen the book through from beginning to end, promptly reading its many drafts and exhorting me to continue through despondency and ill-humour. I am grateful to them both and relieved that our friendships have survived. Cynthia Cockburn also read many drafts and her belief in the project was likewise very important to me.

The research and writing for the most part took place while I was a visitor at the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University. As in the past, this was an excellent workplace for me. I would like to thank Bob Blackburn, who arranged my visit, Ken Prandy, Jeremy Edwards, Lucia Hanmer and Kath Wilson all of whom made me welcome and were a continuing source of encouragement.

While in Cambridge, I was most fortunate to live in a household with Ros Morpeth and Lol Sullivan. They were both extremely generous to me, from patiently engaging about the ideas in the book to fixing my bicycle! In particular, I am grateful to Ros for her warm hospitality and unswerving friendship. I am indebted to many other friends in Cambridge, London and Edinburgh and I would particularly like to mention Karen Greenwood, Lynn Jamieson, Archie Onslow, Mary Ryan and Michelle Stanworth. For their helpful comments on particular chapters and for inspiring me with their own work, I must thank Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Sandra Harding, Maureen McNeil and others associated with the UK Gender and Information Technology Network. The last stages of the manuscript were completed when I returned to Australia and I would like to thank Pauline Garde, Richard Gillespie, Carol Johnson, Belinda Probert, Stuart Rosewarne and especially Michael Bittman for helping me with the final draft.

I had the benefit of a small research grant from the University of New South Wales and the Australian Research Council. I am grateful to Alex Heron, Karen Hughes, Jocelyn Pixley, Alison Tilson and especially Mandy Wharton for their exemplary, if all too brief, research assistance.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of contributors to my thinking and writing on gender and technology. A project with as broad a sweep as this, extending over an intensive two-year period, has of course involved me in numerous conversations particularly with other feminists working in the area. Feeling part of a collective feminist endeavour has sustained me and I hope the end product usefully contributes to this ongoing work.”

Preface

Over the last two decades feminists have identified men’s monopoly of technology as an important source of their power; women’s lack of technological skills as an important element in our dependence on men. From Women in Manual Trades, set up in the early 1970s to train women in traditionally male skills, to the Women and Computing courses of the 1980s, feminist groups and campaigns have attempted to break men’s grip on technical expertise and to win greater autonomy and technical competence for women. In the same period, women’s efforts to control their own fertility have extended from abortion and contraception to mobilizing around the new reproductive technologies. With dramatic advances in biotechnology and the prospect of genetic engineering, women’s bodies have in some respects become increasingly vulnerable to exploitation.

These and other political struggles around technology, and the difficulties they continue to confront, have opened up an exciting new field in feminist scholarship. To date however, most contributions to the debate on gender and technology have been of a somewhat specialist character, focused on a particular type of technology. This book represents an attempt at a more coherent approach, bringing together under one theoretical framework a number of different sites of technology. It is my intention both to explicate and to extend the newly emerging feminist analysis.

Turning to social science debates about technology we find a preoccupation with the impact of technological change on society. Many commentators, for example, claim we are in the midst of a microelectronic revolution, which will cause a radically new form of society to emerge. Regardless of their theoretical or political perspectives, women rarely enter their field of vision. Feminists have worked to put women and gender relations back into this frame, highlighting the differential effects of technological change on women and men. Although still largely concerned with ‘effects’, feminists also point beyond the relations of paid production to a recognition that technology impinges on every aspect of our public and private lives. While I will be engaging with these issues, I also intend to take the analysis into less charted waters.

The technological determinism implicit in much of both the sociological and feminist literature on the impact of technology has recently been subjected to criticism. The new sociology of technology has turned the focus around to examine the social factors that shape technological changes. Rather than only looking at the effects of technology on society, it also looks at the effects of society on technology.

The Social Shaping of Technology (1985), which I co-edited with Donald MacKenzie, was part of this project. As an edited collection, that book was to some extent deficient in its treatment of gender issues, reflecting the state of knowledge at that time. This book is motivated by a desire to redress the balance, exploring in more depth women’s relationship to and experience of technology. Rather than providing a comprehensive review of the now burgeoning literature in this area, I have selected research which can best exemplify the centrality of gender relations to the social shaping approach.

I have not attempted to encompass here all forms of technology. I have not, for example, dealt with the technologies of surveillance and political control, nor with energy technology. Various aspects of information and communication technologies have also been excluded. I have chosen to concentrate on advanced industrial societies, and the book has few references to the major issues concerning technology in the Third World. There is now an extensive literature on how technology transfer to the Third World has a powerful tendency to reinforce male dominance.1 In the end, the sheer scope of the topic prohibited its inclusion.

The book begins with an overview of feminist theories of science and technology. In this first chapter, I argue that the feminist critique of science cannot simply be translated into a feminist perspective on technology. Although useful parallels can be drawn, technology needs to be understood as more than applied science. The following chapters have a less abstract focus and are organized around substantive areas of technology. Each chapter begins by looking at the impact of technological change on sexual divisions and goes on to develop the argument that technology itself is gendered.2

Chapter 2 assesses the impact of production technologies on sexual divisions in the sphere of paid work. It then looks at the extent to which these divisions, and gender relations in the workplace, themselves profoundly affect the direction and pace of technological change.

Perhaps it is the new technologies of human biological reproduction that have been most vigorously contested, both intellectually and politically, by feminists in recent years. Chapter 3 explores the arguments, placing them in the wider context of the growing supremacy of technology in Western medicine.

There is now a substantial body of feminist writing on domestic technologies and their bearing on housework. Chapter 4 examines this research in conjunction with more mainstream (malestream) sociological theories regarding the impact of technologies on the ‘post-industrial’ home.

Chapter 5 deals with the built environment. The first section considers the design of houses and their urban location. I argue that sexual divisions are literally built into houses and indeed into the whole structure of the urban system. The last section scrutinises transport technology and demonstrates how women in particular have been disadvantaged by the design of cities around the automobile.

Picking up on issues from the previous four chapters, chapter 6 presents an analysis of technology as a masculine culture. I argue that the close affinity between technology and the dominant ideology of masculinity itself shapes the production and use of particular technologies. The correspondingly tenuous nature of women’s relationship to this technical culture is the subject of the second part of the chapter.

In the conclusion, I hope to convince the reader that a recognition of the profoundly gendered character of technology need not lead to political pessimism or total rejection of existing technologies. The argument that women’s relationship to technology is a contradictory one, combined with the realization that technology is itself a social construct, opens up fresh possibilities for feminist scholarship and action.

NOTES

1 For an introduction to this literature, see McNeil’s (1987, pp. 227–9) bibliography on ‘Development, The “Third World” and Technology’. See also Ahmed (1985).

2 Throughout this book I use the term ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ interchangeably. This is symptomatic of the blurred boundaries that mark the distinction between what is construed as ‘natural’ and what is construed as ‘social’.

1

Feminist Critiques of Science and Technology

Writing in 1844 about relations between men and women, Marx said that ‘[i]t is possible to judge from this relationship the entire level of development of mankind’ (1975, p. 347). More commonly it is the level of scientific and technological development that is taken as the index of a society’s advancement. Our icons of progress are drawn from science, technology and medicine; we revere that which is defined as ‘rational’ as distinct from that which is judged ‘emotional’. As we approach the twenty-first century however we are no longer sure whether science and technology are the solution to world problems, such as environmental degradation, unemployment and war, or the cause of them. It is not surprising therefore that the relationship between science and society is currently being subjected to profound and urgent questioning.

The development of a feminist perspective on the history and philosophy of science is a relatively recent endeavour. Although this field is still quite small and by no means coherent, it has attracted more theoretical debate than the related subject of gender and technology. It will become apparent in what follows, however, that feminists pursued similar lines of argument when they turned their attention from science to technology. I will therefore start by examining some approaches to the issue of gender and science, before moving on to look at technology.

The Sexual Politics of Science

The interest in gender and science arose out of the contemporary women’s movement and a general concern for women’s position in the professions. Practising feminist scientists have questioned the historical and sociological relationships between gender and science at least since the early 1970s. The publication of biographical studies of great women scientists served as a useful corrective to mainstream histories of science in demonstrating that women have in fact made important contributions to scientific endeavour. The biographies of Rosalind Franklin and Barbara McClintock, by Anne Sayre (1975) and Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) respectively, are probably the best known examples. Recovering the history of women’s achievements has now become an integral part of feminist scholarship in a wide range of disciplines. However, as the extent and intransigent quality of women’s exclusion from science became more apparent, the approach gradually shifted from looking at exceptional women to examining the general patterns of women’s participation.