ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a feminist analysis of some of the issues that relate to technology, 'nature' and work using time as a focal point for discussion. The author is particularly interested in the machine time of clocks and its pervasiveness in social practices, structures and theories. While the traditional response to this pervasiveness has been to contrast machine time with the times of nature, social with body time and men's with women's time. The chapter examines instead the multiplicity of times: embedded, embodied, objectified, evaluated and commodified. It considers the implications for feminist praxis of taking an explicit account of time in research on technology, work and the environment. In her excellent study Feminism Confronts Technology, Wajcman shows feminist analyses of technology to present a contradictory and paradoxical picture. Decontextualized, disembodied, specialized, clock time is both a precondition and a vital tool for Newtonian science.
