Add Gender and Stir?

1. Add Gender and Stir? Thinking About Technologies and GenderFebruary 3, 2014

2. Gender • Social sorting: male/female • Not just biological attributes • Assigns power • As identity - performative & symbolic • As structures & institutions - sex-segregation • As symbol & representation - gender differences reveal ideologies

3. Gendered Material Codes • How are our everyday material objects gendered, through design, use, and marketing? • Consider as well architectural space, and public vs. private space • How is consumerism gender coded?

4. Technologies can aid in social change… • 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

5. A focus on gender 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

6. Maria Lohan…3 Concepts are Key for Feminist Analyses • Interpretitive Flexibility (how do we reinterpret technological functions in our everyday lives? Ex: the telephone) • Scenario/Script (how can techological 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)

7. Ellen Van Oost: Gender Script the representations an artifact’s designers have or construct of gender relations and gender identities—representations that they then inscribe into the materiality of that artifact. Like gender itself, which is defined as a multi-level process, gender scripts function on an individual and a symbolic level, reflecting and constructing gender differences in the division of labor. (2004, p. 195)

8. 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

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

10. 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”

11. 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?”

12. 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)

13. 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)

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