TechnoFeminism

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Cultural Studies Culture & Technology Feminist theory/Women's studies

by Judy Wajcman

Polity Press

Due/Published April 2004, 160 pages, paper

ISBN 0745630448

Do technologies have sex? Until recently popular stereotypes have associated technology strongly with masculinity. But in the new digital age, wired women are populating cyberspace and embracing technological change. The cyborg figure has fired the feminist imagination as an icon of women's power and freedom from biological sex difference. What does the new global information society Ð interconnected, genetically engineered, digitally designed, remotely controlled Ð hold for women? While most commentators assert that everything in the digital future will be different, how true is this for the social relations of gender?

This 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. Drawing on new perspectives in postmodernism, feminist theory and science and technology studies, Judy Wajcman explores the ways in which technologies are gendered both in their design and use. At the same time, she shows how our very subjectivity is shaped by the technoscientific culture of the world we inhabit.

Contents

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 CommunityCyberfeminism: 'The clitoris is a direct line to the matrtix'
Performing Gender in CyberspaceTechnology as Freedom

4. The Cyborg Solution
Embracing Science and Technology
From Man of Science to FemaleMan©OncoMouseTM: Technologising Life and Reprogramming Nature
Send in the Cyborgs

5. Metaphor and Materiality
Changing Technologies, Changing Subjectivities
Towards Technofeminism
Sociotechincal Practices: Expertise and Agency