Add Gender and Stir?

1. Add Gender and Stir? Feminist Theories of Technology INF 1005/6 Week 2 January 16 2013

2. Talk Outline • Do technologies have gendered codes? • Feminist theories of technology…now a rather rich history • Historical perspectives • Multi and inter-disciplinarity • ?what new research?

3. Gender • Social sorting: male/female • Not just biological attributes • Assigns power in certain contexts • As identity - performative & symbolic • As structures & institutions - sex-segregation in institutions, roles, expectations • As symbol & representation – assumptions about what men & women like, different styles, expectations, ideologies…based on portrayals of gender difference…

4. Gendered Material Codes • Mutual constitution of gender and technology; how technology shapes gender & vice-versa • How are our everyday material objects gendered, through design, use, and marketing? • How has this changed through the years?

5. Consider as well architectural space, and public vs. private space • How are these spaces gendered? • How is consumerism gender coded?Notion of audience commodity (Dallas Smythe), and the gendered audience commodity (Eileen Meehan)

6. Technologies can aid in social change…for which gender(s), and how? • Ex: contraception • Ex: computers in the workplace • Ex: the automobile • Ex: pharmaceuticals • They can also distort and inhibit social change, and create schisms between the powerful and the less powerful

7. Useful Boundaries • Technological/Social • Production/Consumption • Skilled/Unskilled • Expert/User • Public/private

8. Basic Orientation to Feminist Perspectives • Insistence on instilling a sense of the social consequences of technology • Preoccupied with ensuring equitable access to technological know-how in diverse settings: workplace, education, etc • Environmentally sound practices • Social justice concerns (Franklin, Eubanks)

9. A focus on women can…. • Highlight connections between production and consumption • …and production and reproduction… • Can pinpoint relevant social actors in design, diffusion and consumptive stages of a technology’s life-cycle

10. Judy Wajcman • Broaden definition of technology • Include domestic technologies • Conduct analysis not just at design level • Consider location of tech in both public and private spheres • Reject essentialist takes (ecofeminism)

11. Judy Wajcman • Research has focused on the mutual shaping of gender and technology • STS and feminism • Technology as culture – how this has been gendered through practices and modes of doing, institutions, organizational structures, everyday uses

12. Wajcman • Looks at sexual division of IT/ICT labour • Often socialized in edu settings • Attempts to get more women into STEM(science, tech, engineering, math) • How to rectify ‘gender deficit’? • How can institutions be reshaped to accommodate women (parenting?) • How can more women be included in tech communities? Their exclusion can impact on the “design, tech content and use of artefacts”

13. Maria Lohan…2000…Constructive Tensions in Feminist Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science 30: 895-916. • There are constructive tensions in STS and feminism • Can focus on how gender is implicated in power relationships

14. Lohan - concentrate on research sites • Look at non-institutional sites • Domesticity • Look at entire ‘circuit of technology’

15. Lohan…3 Concepts are Key for Feminist Analyses • Interpretive Flexibility (how do we reinterpret technological functions in our everyday lives? Ex: the telephone) • Scenario/Script (how can technological interpretations become inscribed as part of the material/symbolic properties of that technology? Ex: ‘feminization’ of technologies) • Actant (refers to non-human actors that are agents in everyday relations which then exert effects….Ex: technologies like the telephone and computer can create gendered relations within the home)

16. Lohan - ‘responsible reflexivity’ • Research identifies researcher and often research project as an actor and contributing element in the ‘circuit of research’…which contributes to knowledge… • PAR / Action research

17. Feminist takes on Cultures of Technologies • Takes a look at this in critical perspective • Takes an avowed political stance • Asks: what are the implications for women’s work, reproduction, & consumption? • In wider sphere of women’s lives…

18. Trajectories of Feminist Socio-technical Analysis • Rectifying historiographical omission of contributions & participation of women in technological innovation, design, and use • Paying attention to technologies that have been ignored/dismissed because they reside within ‘women’s sphere’

19. Trajectories, etc. • Examine historical exclusion of women from domain of technology, particularly in the labor process • Examine what technologies based on ‘women’s values’ would encompass • Envision ‘feminist technology design’

20. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and Technology in American Life, Technology and Culture (20)(1), (Jan., 1979):51-63. • Women as bearers and rearers of children • Women as workers • Women as homemakers • Women as anti-technocrats

21. Judith McGaw, “Why Feminine Technologies Matter”… • Consider wider domain of gender • How have gender assumptions shaped technology? • Look at ideology • Look at social shaping of men who designed technology-what type of masculinity? In  Gender and Technology: A Reader. Ed. Nina E. Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel and Arwen P. Mohun. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. 13-36

22. McGaw • Challenge men as active and women as passive users… • Consumption is an active process • The ‘consumption junction’ (Cowan) • Not just female consumption though..

23. McGaw-feminine technologies • “Looking at feminine technologies makes visible precisely those aspects of technology that we need to examine if we seek alternatives to a modern, Western technology that appears to be self-destructive, self justifying, and self perpetuating”

24. Feminine Technologies • The bra…a veritable high-tech phenomena. Fieldtrip: browse the lingerie section of your local department store…underwires, pads to enhance size-position, for sports-nursing, backless-strapless…. • McGaw: “How do you know it fits?”

25. Invisible Software/Labor • Technological expertise can be ‘invisible’, taken-for-granted, unacknowledged • McGaw: women’s closets and filing; issues of privacy • Example: history of the white collar - revealing class and gender divisions, and an intense technological labor-social system

26. McGaw… • “Feminine technology matters, because the technology of women’s work made both odor-free bathrooms and paper-filled offices possible. In the process, of course, women, at least, remained fully cognizant that family members excreted and that proliferating forms did not make bosses scientific. Of course, women were creatures of the private sphere - schooled through the decades to launder, rather than air, the dirty linen. It seemed safe to trust them with the secrets.” (p. 30)

27. McGaw… • “Some might argue that neglecting feminine technology means telling only half of the technological story. I submit that it means missing the most important parts.” (p. 32)

28. Boys and Their Toys • Do men have a love affair with technology? • Ruth Oldenziel - case study of Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild (hobbyist cultures) • Are boys socialized into hands-on tinkering? • Relationship to pleasure - often not considered

29. Gender Scripts – Ellen van Oost • Discourses of gender that tech designersencode into myriad consumer goods, derived from their assumptions about who the primary users of these objects should be. .

30. “Such artifacts are not neutral objects that only acquire a gendered connotation in advertising or in use; to a certain extent they ‘guide’ the process of giving meaning. . . . Gender scripts do not force users to construct specific gender identities, but scripts surely act invitingly and/or inhibitingly” • Ellen van Oost, “Materialized Gender: How Shavers Configure the Users’ Femininity and Masculinity,” in How Users Matter: The Co-construction of Users and Technologies, ed. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 194, 196.

31. Inari Anna Aaltojarvi • Do domestic objects have gender? • Do domestic objects embody gender?What are these attributes?Appearances, design attributes, uses, sound, level of technicality, rate of novelty

32. Feminist Technology Assessment • Why decline in TA? • Why little public debate? • Public policy tends to be deterministic on technology