ABSTRACT
Increasingly cultural criticism is questioning essentialist perspectives on technology which link it inescapably with masculinity, men's activities, and the absence of female participation (Stabile 1994; Ormrod 1995; Grint and Woolgar 1995; Terry and Calvert 1997). Indeed the categories of ‘gender’ and ‘technology’ may not be as discrete as is suggested by a formula in which gender is superimposed on technology, or vice versa. Feminist theorists of technology are moving away from approaches characterised by ‘explorations of how preexisting social relations of patriarchy express and shape technology’ (Ormrod 1995:31). Calvert and Terry begin their recent volume Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life (1997) with quotations from two feminist theorists who complicate the separation of the two terms gender and technology. First, for Haraway, a machine is not an ‘it’ to be animated, but ‘[it] is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment’ (1991b:180). Second, for de Lauretis, gender itself, amongst other factors, ‘is the product and process of various social technologies’ (1987:2). In this new positioning, technologies and genders are mutually constituted, and cannot but be touched by other factors in our embodiment and social practices such as sexuality and race, which until recently have been absent in the social studies of technology literature. ‘To do otherwise is to reify gender as binarism and technology as “thing”’ warns Ormrod (1995). She proposes that the task for feminist sociology is to articulate the imbricated relationship between gender and technology. She comments:
feminist sociology on technology must be able to show how relations of power are exercised and the processes by which gendered subjectivities are achieved. It must therefore attend to the range of discursive practices and the associations of (durable) materials, meanings and subjectivities with which gender and technology are defined and differentiated.
(1995:44)