TechnoFeminism E-Book

Judy Wajcman

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

Seitenzahl: 215

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This timely and engaging book argues that technoscientific advances are radically transforming the woman-machine relationship. However, it is feminist politics rather than the technologies themselves that make the difference. TechnoFeminism fuses the visionary insights of cyberfeminism with a materialist analysis of the sexual politics of technology.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Preface

Introduction: Feminist Utopia or Dystopia?

1 Male Designs on Technology

From Access to Equity

Science as Ideology

Technology as Patriarchal

Sex, Class and Technology

2 Technoscience Reconfigured

Beyond Technological Determinism

From Gender-Blind to Gender-Aware

Combining Feminist and Technology Studies

3 Virtual Gender

Networked Community

Cyberfeminism: ‘The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix’

Performing Gender in Cyberspace

Technology as Freedom

4 The Cyborg Solution

Embracing Science and Technology

From Man of Science to FemaleMan©

OncoMouse™: Technologizing Life and Reprogramming Nature

Send in the Cyborgs

5 Metaphor and Materiality

Changing Technologies, Changing Subjectivities

Towards Technofeminism

Sociotechnical Practices: Expertise and Agency

Index

Copyright © Judy Wajcman 2004

The right of Judy Wajcman to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2004 by Polity Press.

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wajcman, Judy.

TechnoFeminism / Judy Wajcman.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7456-3043-X (hb : alk. paper) – ISBN 0-7456-3044-8 (pb : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-3806-5 (Single-user ebook) – ISBN 978-0-7456-3805-8 (Multi-user ebook)

1. Technology–Social aspects. 2. Sex role. 3. Women–Effect of technological innovations on. 4. Feminist theory. I. Title.

HM846.W35 2004

303.48'3–dc22

2003016990

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Preface

Over a decade ago I wrote Feminism Confronts Technology. That book made a strong case for building a feminist perspective into social science debates about technology. Taking an in-depth look at a whole range of technologies, each chapter considered the differential impact of technological change on women and men before turning the focus around to examine their social shaping of technology. That artefacts are themselves shaped by gender relations, meanings and identities was demonstrated – from refrigerators to contraceptives, from houses, cars and cities to word processors and weapons. The book thus explored the way hierarchies of sexual difference profoundly affect the design, development, diffusion and use of technologies.

TechnoFeminism is a continuation of the project. However, I have not attempted to traverse the same ground – that is, the full range of feminist scholarship on individual technologies. This would now be impossible to achieve in one slim volume. Feminism Confronts Technology can usefully be regarded as a companion volume to TechnoFeminism, providing as it does a wealth of historical and contemporary material that supports the overall argument.

The present book is more in the nature of an essay, in which I highlight the continuities and discontinuities between current and earlier feminist reflections on science and technology. Here I have purposely concentrated on the frontier technologies of information, communication and biomedicine. Both books are positioned at the intersection of feminist studies of technoscience and the field of science and technology studies (STS), where cross-fertilizations are inspiring new insights.

International feminist communities of technoscience scholars, as well as the network of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), have provided the context for writing this book. Many individuals have helped by discussing the ideas and commenting on drafts. My greatest debt as ever is to Jenny Earle. I also wish to thank Anne-Jorunn Berg, Danielle Chabaud-Rychter, John Holmwood, Lynn Jamieson, Martha Macintyre, Donald MacKenzie, Maureen McNeil, Stuart Rosewarne, Lucy Suchman and Dave Walsh. Ceridwen Roncelli provided excellent research assistance. I enjoyed stimulating exchanges with my colleagues and students at the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. For the increasingly scarce resource of time, I heartily thank the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Finally, I would like to thank John Thompson for suggesting that I write it.

Introduction: Feminist Utopia or Dystopia?

She shot smoothly upwards. The very fabric of life now, she thought as she rose, is magic. In the eighteenth century, we knew how everything was done; but here I rise through the air; I listen to voices in America; I see men flying – but how it’s done, I can’t even begin to wonder. So my belief in magic returns.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

The urge to defy gravity has been a continuing impulse in our quest to transcend the natural world. The elevator, the telephone, the radio, and the aeroplane referred to by Virginia Woolf were the mysteries of modern technology in her day. Compared to people in earlier times, we rarely have a chance to live outside technology. More and more of life is somehow mediated by technology, so that today there is hardly any human activity that occurs without it. Yet it doesn’t seem to have lost its mystery with familiarity. Nowadays, it is the rapidly evolving information and communication technologies that are experienced as magic, and evoke dreams and desires about the future.

For many, the global information society, characterized by the compression of space and time, marks a whole new epoch in the human condition. The nature of work, consumption and social interaction are all in a state of flux. There is much talk of the ‘digital divide’, between countries and within them, as the new source of inequality in the twenty-first century. The sheer rate of change in technoscience contributes to the pervasive late-modern sense of risk, insecurity and excitement. At the same time, new biomedical technologies that allow us to remodel the human body, profile individuals and populations, and commodify nature in unprecedented ways are changing the idea of what it means to be human, and even our sense of self. These developments call for some radical rethinking both of the processes of technological innovation and of their impact on the culture and practices of everyday life.

For everybody, technological change is the intractable fate of the world, an irreversible process. Frequently, the level of scientific and technological development 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’. Yet, as we enter the new millennium, we are no longer sure whether science and technology are the solution to the world’s problems – such as environmental degradation, unemployment and war – or the cause of them. It is not surprising, therefore, that the relationship between technoscience and society is currently being subjected to profound and urgent questioning.

For women, whose lives have undergone massive transformation in the course of the last century, these questions are particularly vexed. Women’s new-found economic independence, resulting from the feminization of the paid labour force, has been accompanied by a profound cultural shift and widespread public discourse about gender equity. A liberal commitment to equality between the sexes in both the public and the private spheres is now broadly accepted in Western societies, and is enshrined in law, even if substantial inequalities remain in practice. What it means to be a man or a woman is no longer ordained by ‘nature’ – gendered identities are contested terrain.

These dramatic social changes are associated with the unprecedented technological options available to us. Feminism has long been conflicted, however, about the impact of technology on women, torn between utopian and dystopian visions of what the future may hold. In both these scenarios, the future is crowded with automata, androids and robots. This fusion of technology with ideals, hopes and nightmares about the future has a venerable history. From Thomas More’s original Utopia to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, imaginary voyages and invented worlds, fantasies of timeless time and non-physical space, have been continuing themes in modern Western culture. Promises of emancipation from the frailties and failings of mortal flesh have reached a new crescendo in the cyberspace age. What might these imaginings about the future reveal about contemporary gender relations? How does the social and political revolution in women’s lives relate to the digital revolution?

Seen through one lens, virtual reality is a new space for undermining old social relations, a place of freedom and liberation from conventional gender roles. Cyberfeminists have coffee in cyber-cafes, surf the Internet, and imagine a gender-free future in cyberspace. Electronic networks offer women new possibilities for global information exchange and for participatory democracy. The influence of the anti-corporate globalization movement and NGO (non-governmental organization) activists is a testament to the effectiveness of the Internet for political mobilization. In this account, the World Wide Web is seen as beyond the control of any one group, and thus open to being deployed by women for their own social and political purposes. This is highly subversive of the conventional definition of women as biologically determined and confined to the private sphere. The twin visions of bodily transcendence in cyberspace and easy engagement in the public realm of international politics are certainly seductive.

Seen through another lens, the Internet is marked by its military origins and the white male hacker world that spawned it. The contemporary use of the Web by transnational corporations, financial markets, global criminal networks, military strategists and international racists is a means to evade social regulation, entrench political control, and concentrate economic power. Men still heavily dominate these institutions and groups, and there are dramatic gender differentials in access to, and control over, electronic networks. Furthermore, rather than celebrating cyberspace for providing the opportunity for free expression of people’s desires, we should lament the massive growth of pornographic web sites, amongst the most frequently visited and most profitable sites on the Internet. Sexual harassment, the international sex trade, paedophile networks, and anxiety about children’s vulnerability are the focus of this perspective.

Biomedical technologies are also the site of hopes and fears. These technologies appear to offer fantastic opportunities for self-realization – we can literally redesign our bodies and commission designer babies. Women can defy biology altogether by choosing not to have a child, choosing to have a child after menopause, or choosing the sex of their child. The ubiquitous cyborg has become an icon for the idea that the boundaries between the biological and the cultural, and between the human and the machine, have been dissolved. These dichotomies situated women as natural and different, and served to sustain the previously ordained gender order. Severing the link between femininity and maternity, as these new body technologies do, disrupts the categories of the body, sex, gender and sexuality. This is liberating for women, who have been captive to biology.

At the same time, there is the spectre of genetic engineering and cloning depriving women of any control over reproduction. In this apocalyptic view, technoscience is deeply implicated in the masculine project of the domination and control of women and nature. The classic trope of science fiction, Frankenstein and his monster, is invoked as the dark side of the cyborg – artificial life out of control. Fears abound about how knowledge of the genome will be used to intervene in and redesign nature, whether it be genetically modified foods, cloned animals or perfectly bred human beings. Life itself (human, plant and animal) is at risk of becoming biomedicalized and commodified. Genetic and reproductive engineering, then, are regarded as another attempt to usurp self-determination of women’s bodies.

Images of women’s prospects in the digital economy are also widely divergent. For some, the expansion of the information-intensive service sector is producing a society based on lifelong learning and a knowledge economy. The dominant form of work becomes based on expertise, judgement and discretion, requiring employees with high levels of skills and knowledge. Women will be at an advantage because service work increasingly utilizes the feminine aptitudes for communication and social skills. Similarly, women managers will be ideally suited to post-industrial corporations that increasingly require the more empathetic, ‘soft’ co-operative styles of management. One might conclude that the future of work is female.

This future can also be depicted as a proliferation of flexible, temporary and contingent jobs for women. Work in the new economy is typified by call centres and fast food establishments, involving simple, routine, predictable tasks requiring little skill from those who perform them. Contemporary computerized workplaces provide enhanced tools for electronic surveillance and monitoring of employees’ performance. Far from a family-friendly option, telework exacerbates women’s domestic burden and the intensification of work. Furthermore, the spatial flexibility afforded by information and communication technologies allows firms to shift a growing range of tasks offshore, to take advantage of low-cost female labour in developing countries. Accordingly, new forms of work in the knowledge economy replicate old patterns of exploitation and sex segregation in the labour market.

How do we make sense of such radically different interpretations of the same phenomena? Is there an alternative to the limited options of simply rejecting existing technologies or uncritically embracing technological change? Can feminism steer a path between technophobia and technophilia? This book provides an opportunity to explore the complex ways in which women’s everyday lives and technological change interrelate in the age of digitalization. My aim is to offer a way between utopian optimism and pessimistic fatalism for technofeminism, and between cultural contingency and social determinism in social theory.

The book begins with an overview of early attempts by feminist scholars to understand the link between technology and gender. Much of the literature discussed in this first chapter is concerned to explain men’s historical hold on machines and the continuing under-representation of women in scientific and technological fields. The core argument here is that technology is a key source of men’s power and a defining feature of masculinity. This approach served as a compelling critique of popular and sociological arguments that were, and still are, characterized by technological determinism. In this context, however, initial theories about the impact of technology on women’s lives often took the form of an essentialist account of gender, and an over-determined analysis of patriarchal technology. Technology may have been seen as socially shaped, but shaped by men to the exclusion of women. I argue that this generated a rather pessimistic view, one that emphasized the role of technology in reproducing the gendered division of labour.

With the emergence of radically new technologies, contemporary feminist debates have been much more optimistic about the possibilities that are opening up for women. At the same time, a fresh and increasingly sophisticated perspective known as the social studies of science and technology has evolved. The fruitful interchange between gender theory and developments in science and technology studies is explored in chapter 2. As a result of the cross-fertilization, feminists have drawn on and reconfigured sociological theories that treat technology as a sociotechnical product – that is, as shaped in the social relations that produce and use it. We have begun to conceive of a mutually shaping relationship between gender and technology, in which technology is both a source and a consequence of gender relations. This is what I will describe as the emerging technofeminist framework. An emphasis on the contingency and heterogeneity of technological change helps to locate its possibilities in wider social networks. Such an analysis introduces space for women’s agency in transforming technologies.

Into this space came cyberfeminism. The cultural turn against determinist arguments, emphasizing subjectivity and agency, generates a utopian perspective. This is particularly characteristic of post-feminist cultural theories of technology, the subject of the third chapter. A common argument here is that the digital revolution heralds the decline of traditional institutional practices and power bases – including patriarchal power. The virtuality of cyberspace is seen to spell the end of naturalized, biological embodiment as the basis for gender difference. The Internet is expressive of female ways of being, and thereby creates manifold opportunities for changing the woman–machine relationship. Technology itself is seen as liberating women.

While many have been drawn to cyberfeminism, it is the cyborg figure that has most strongly fired the feminist imagination. This can be understood as a reaction, on the one hand, to feminist theories that treat women as passive victims of technological change and, on the other, to those that see new technical forms as offering unlimited freedom. This reflects an enduring division within feminist theory. The appeal of Donna Haraway’s work on the prosthetic possibilities of biotechnologies lies in its bold attempt to bridge these polarized positions. The fourth chapter will assess Haraway’s ‘material-semiotic’ approach and discuss the myriad ways in which her work has been taken up and popularized. It will explore the ramifications of what I will refer to as the ‘cyborg solution’. I argue that while Haraway’s work has stimulated important new insights into the gender power relations of technology, she too – but even more so her acolytes – risk fetishizing new technologies.

The technofeminist approach I outline in the final chapter fuses the insights of cyborg feminism with those of the social shaping, or constructivist, theory of technology. I reflect on what technofeminism means both for analytical arguments and for politics. The old discourse of sex difference has been made increasingly untenable by the dramatic changes in technology, by the challenge of feminism, and by awareness of the mutating character of the natural world. A recognition that gender and technoscience are mutually constitutive opens up fresh possibilities for feminist scholarship and action. Engagement with the process of technical change must be part of the renegotiation of gender power relations.

I take this as my central concern, while fully recognizing that gender is not the only axis of social hierarchy and identity (just as there are sites not primarily marked by gender). Indeed, the enormous variability in gendering by place, nationality, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and generation makes a nuanced exploration of the similarities and differences between and across women’s and men’s experience of technoscience all the more necessary. In referring to technofeminism, rather than technofeminisms, then, I do not mean to imply a consensus, but rather a coming together of many diverse voices engaged in dialogue, influencing each other and each being modified in the process.

Revolutions in technology do not create new societies, but they do change the terms in which social, political and economic relations are played out. Feminist theory offers a long tradition of analysing the gendered effects of the power to define, to make distinctions, and to literally build worlds. It is a tribute to the richness of the feminist enterprise that such analysis continues to be extended to new fields of inquiry. Technoscience as a gendered domain is now firmly within our sights. This book is intended as a contribution to that project.

1

Male Designs on Technology

Technology is a medium of power.

Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance

In their ‘millennial’ reflections on the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, many social scientists as well as popular commentators see technology as providing the impetus for the most fundamental of social trends and transformations. Indeed, understanding the role of technologies in the economy and society is now central to social theory. While there are a variety of social theories that proclaim the radical transformation of society, all contain, at their core, claims about technological change and its social impact. This is as true of the three paradigmatic theories of the transformation that Western societies are undergoing – the theories of the information society, post-Fordism and postmodernity – as it is of more recent theories of globalization. Much emphasis is placed on major new clusters of scientific and technological innovations, particularly the widespread use of information and communications technologies and the convergence of technologically mediated ways of life around the globe.

According to globalization gurus such as Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells, states and societies across the world are experiencing historically unprecedented change as they try to adapt to a more interconnected but highly uncertain world.1 Prominence is given to the intensity, extensity and velocity of global flows, interactions and networks embracing all social domains. In the ‘information society’ or ‘knowledge economy’, the dominant form of work becomes information- and knowledge-based. At the same time leisure, education, family relationships and personal identities are seen as moulded by the pressures exerted by, and opportunities arising from, the new technical forces. For these writers, such changes entail the breakup of hierarchical arrangements and herald a new post-traditional network society.

These ideas – or ideas like them – are now commonplace in sociology, and I foreground them here to illustrate the centrality of technology to contemporary theories of social, cultural and economic change. There are strong echoes of the earlier ‘post-industrial society’ thesis in these accounts, and its tendency to adopt a technologically determinist stance.2 At that time, it was suggested that the industrial economy of manufacturing and factory production was being displaced by knowledge work. The old hierarchies of manual work would be replaced by more open and negotiated relationships.

Much critical writing at the time took issue with the idea of a post-industrial society, but with hindsight we can see that some of the underlying trends in the economy were well captured. The recent return to ideas of an information society and knowledge economy attests to this. Post-industrial theorists concentrated on hierarchies of class, rather than those of gender and, like their predecessors, the new theorists of technology also fail to consider whether this technological revolution might have a differential impact on women and men. While the common theme is that everything in the digital future will be different, it is not clear if the social relations of gender will also be different because the question is seldom raised. While the optimistic commentators on the digital revolution promise freedom, empowerment and wealth, rarely do they show any consciousness of the relationship between technology and gender. They seem oblivious to the fact that men still dominate scientific and technological fields and institutions. To be in command of the very latest technology signifies a greater involvement in, if not power over, the future.

It is no accident that the debates over post-industrialism coincided with the re-emergence to prominence of feminism. Clearly, profound social changes were under way in this period. But where post-industrial theorists were generally optimistic about the implications of technological change, second-wave feminism, and the growing body of feminist scholarship that flourished with it, identified women’s absence from these spheres of influence as a key feature of gender power relations. By ignoring this axis of inequality, mainstream social theorists missed a central dynamic of technological development. It is being missed, once again, in contemporary social theory.

This chapter charts the growth of a gender perspective on technology. 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 their dependence on men. Whilst there is broad agreement on this issue, the question whether the problem lies in men’s monopoly of technology or whether technology itself is inherently patriarchal remains more contentious.

Feminist theories of the relationship between gender and technology have taken diverse forms. While liberal feminism conceived of the problem as one of equality of access and opportunity, socialist and radical feminism analysed the gendered nature of technology itself. The social factors that shape different technologies came under scrutiny, especially the way technology reflects gender divisions and inequalities. This approach served as a compelling critique of popular and sociological arguments that were, and still are, characterized by technological determinism. However, although coming from fundamentally different perspectives, early feminist analyses of technology tended to generate a fatalism that emphasized the role of technology in reproducing patriarchy. As we shall see, it is this pessimism that needs to be modified in the light of more recent arguments about new technologies, whilst building on the rich contribution of this earlier feminist literature.

From Access to Equity

Interest in gender, science and technology arose out of the contemporary women’s movement and a general concern for women’s position in the professions. Since the early 1970s, the publication of biographical studies of great women scientists has 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 are probably the best-known examples.3 Recovering the history of women’s achievements became an integral part of feminist scholarship in a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this work, we now know that during the industrial era women invented or contributed to the invention of such crucial machines as the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the small electric motor, the McCormick reaper and the Jacquard loom.4 It has also been established that women played a major part in the early development of computers – a story that is still emerging from the recesses of Second World War history. However, as the extent and seemingly intransigent quality of women’s exclusion from technoscience became more apparent, the approach gradually shifted from looking at exceptional women to examining the general patterns of women’s participation.