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FEMINISM, TECHNOLOGY AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY Learning from the past, imagining the future

2008; Routledge; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13691180701859065

1468-4462

Sally Wyatt,

Information Society and Technology Trends

Abstract This article examines second wave and post-second wave feminist writing about the possibilities of (contemporaneously) new information and communication technologies. A number of texts by key authors, including Shulamith Firestone, Valerie Solanas, Cynthia Cockburn, Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, are examined in light of the social and political context of their time of writing as well as in relation to 'mainstream' information society theorists such as Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells. The main focus is on how these authors understand the transformative potential of technologies, and attention is drawn to the swings between optimism and pessimism about the role of technology for a feminist political agenda. The role and nature of manifestos are also explored, and the question of whether it is time for another feminist technology manifesto is raised. The article concludes by posing some methodological and theoretical challenges of developing an anti-essentialist (in relation to both gender and technology), politically engaged and relevant feminist research agenda that takes seriously both lived experience and structures of power. The footnotes are an experiment in autobiographical writing in which I make explicit my own connection to this literature and the politics of these debates. Keywords: Feminisminformation and communication technologiesinformation societymanifestos(auto)biography Acknowledgements As the readers of the notes will be aware, this essay reflects upon a 25-year engagement with feminist technology studies. It is simply not possible in the space provided for the author to convey her gratitude to all of the inspiring sisters, comrades and colleagues with whom she has had the privilege of working over those years. There are some groups and individuals who played a crucial role in enabling her to put these reflections on that long engagement in some sort of order. Thus, she would like to thank the organizers and participants of the international symposium entitled 'Gender Perspectives, Increasing Diversity for Information Society Technology', hosted by the University of Bremen, Germany in June 2004 for the invitation which first led her to reflect on her own relationship with feminist technology studies. The ESRC Seminar Series on the Future of Feminist Technoscience, held at the University of Surrey in January 2005, and the WINIT International Conference, hosted by the University of Salford in March 2006, provided further occasions in which to refine the arguments. Finally, she is grateful to Marianne Franklin, editor of this Key Thinkers series, for encouraging her to prepare this piece for publication, and to both her and an anonymous reviewer for their very valuable feedback on an earlier version. Notes 1. Such an approach is radical for me, largely because my early academic training was in economics, not a discipline renowned for innovative or reflexive methodologies; nor is it a discipline informed by feminism or women's studies or gender studies. When I studied economics at McGill University between 1976 and 1979, I was one of three women in a class of 100, and I never saw a woman professor. McGill is in Montreal, in the province of Quebec and 1976 was the year the Parti Québécois came to power, following several years of armed struggle. At that time, I was involved in the politics of language, long before such a thing was fashionable, and in various solidarity campaigns with refugees from Chile and Nicaragua, back in the days when we expressed solidarity with political refugees. It was only when I moved to England to do my MA in economics that I discovered feminism. There still was not much of it in my studies, so my feminism was on the streets. I was involved with my local women's centre and was a volunteer telephone counsellor for the rape crisis centre. On some International Women's Days (8 March), I went to Belfast to protest against the strip-searching of women political prisoners. I helped to organise Reclaim the Streets marches. Nowadays that refers to struggles to liberate streets from the polluting and dangerous presence of automobiles, something I also entirely support, but in the early 1980s, 'reclaim the streets' or 'reclaim the night' were the rallying cries of feminists who wanted women to be able to walk home whenever they wanted without fear of rape or attack. 2. I was born in 1959, near Toronto. In 1976, I began studying economics at McGill University in Montreal. In 1979, I moved to Brighton, England in order to do an MA in economics at Sussex University. In 1999, I moved to Amsterdam, for love, but was lucky enough to find gainful employment first at the University of Amsterdam and now at the Virtual Knowledge Studio. I provide these bare facts of my life in order to situate myself in relation to the literature being discussed here. I am writing from that historically privileged position of a late twentieth century, white, heterosexual Westerner, albeit a woman, of indeterminate national identity and just too young to have been part of the golden generation which came of age in 1968. I have published a few gender and technology-related pieces (Zmroczek et al. 1985 Zmroczek, C., Henwood, F. and Wyatt, S. 1985. "'Women and technology'". In The Invisible Decade, Edited by: Ashworth, G. and Bonnerjea, L. 121–132. Aldershot: Gower. [Google Scholar]; Henwood & Wyatt 1986 Henwood, F. and Wyatt, S. 1986. "'Women's work, technological change and shifts in the employment structure'". In The Geography of De-Industrialisation, Edited by: Martin, R. and Rowthorn, R. 106–137. London: Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2000 Henwood, F. and Wyatt, S. 2000. 'Persistent inequalities? Gender and technology in the year'. Feminist Review, 64(Spring): 128–131. [Google Scholar]; Cassidy & Wyatt 2001 Cassidy, J. and Wyatt, S. 2001. "'Plugging into the Mother Country'". In Cyborg Lives? Women's Technobiographies, Edited by: Henwood, F., Kennedy, H. and Miller, N. 63–75. York: Raw Nerve. [Google Scholar]; van Doorn et al. 2007 van Doorn, N., Zoonen, L. van and Wyatt, S. 2007. 'Writing from experience: presentations of gender identity on weblogs'. European Journal of Women's Studies, 14(2): 143–159. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), but it is not my main area of work. I describe myself as a feminist who does technology studies rather than as someone who does feminist technology studies – a crucial difference. This article develops some points first raised in Henwood and Wyatt (2000) Henwood, F. and Wyatt, S. 2000. 'Persistent inequalities? Gender and technology in the year'. Feminist Review, 64(Spring): 128–131. [Google Scholar] and Wyatt (2005) Wyatt, S. 2005. 'Book Review of Lie's He, She and IT Revisited and Wajcman's TechnoFeminism'. Science, Technology & Human Values, 30(3): 433–436. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], as well as providing substantially more material. 3. At the same time as I was busy in what we still called the women's liberation movement, I had finished my MA and was working as a research assistant at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/), developing measures of Britain's technological competitiveness, doing complicated statistics using computers that still read punch cards. (There was a single terminal in a small room next to the library where you could prepare your punch cards with your programme and data. Once you had done that, you took your cards to the computer centre, in another building, 500 metres away, where they would be read, put onto magnetic tapes and communicated to the super computer in Manchester. If you were lucky, your results, sometimes just an indication that you had made a mistake in the third card and would have to start the process again, would be ready in a few hours. Often you had to wait until the next day. But that is a different history – about the relationship between academics and technologies, and between scientific knowledge and its material practices (Agar 2006 Agar, J. 2006. 'What difference did computers make?'. Social Studies of Science, 36(6): 869–907. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).) There was a small group of women, also paid to do other research, but who were all interested in feminism and science and technology. We formed a reading group, and one of the things we read was Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto' when it first appeared in The Socialist Review in 1985. My economics training had not equipped me for such a text, and, on first reading, I did not understand a word, which is really rather unfortunate for something calling itself a manifesto. After reading and discussing amongst ourselves for a while, we decided to develop a course called simply 'women and technology' offered via the Workers' Education Association (http://www.wea.org.uk), an open access form of adult education. For me, this was an effort to bring together my street feminism with my academic work. For many of the participants, it was a consciousness-raising group around issues of science and technology. We included both Firestone (1970) Firestone, S. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex, The Case for Feminist Revolution, New York: Morrow. [Google Scholar] and Haraway (1985) Haraway, D. 1985. 'Manifesto for Cyborgs'. The Socialist Review, : 65–107. [Google Scholar] on the reading list. 4. 1979 was the year I arrived in Britain. After the relative openness of Canada, Thatcher's Britain was a grim place: the fascist National Front was visibly on the rise, unemployment was high and growing, traditional industries were in decline, and Thatcher's government was launching a concerted attack on the industrial working class and its representatives, namely the trade unions. 5. My own first publication on the topic of gender and technology is clearly of that time. I was party to the following: 'in the context of a world where men hold most of the powerful positions and control the use of resources, we understand technology as being imbued with essentially male-centred values… [A]ll men, regardless of race and class, benefit from their ability to control and dominate women. Access to and control over technological decision making is one means by which this control is maintained' (Zmroczek et al. 1985 Zmroczek, C., Henwood, F. and Wyatt, S. 1985. "'Women and technology'". In The Invisible Decade, Edited by: Ashworth, G. and Bonnerjea, L. 121–132. Aldershot: Gower. [Google Scholar], p.121, emphasis in the original). 6. Some things never change; in this case I am referring to the failure of 'malestream' authors to acknowledge the intellectual work of their feminist counterparts. The debate prompted by Frank Webster (2005) Webster, F. 2005. 'Making sense of the Information Age: Sociology and Cultural Studies'. Information, Communication & Society, 8(4): 439–458. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] is very worthwhile but neither Webster himself nor his three critics (Fuller 2005 Fuller, S. 2005. 'Another sense of the Information Age'. Information, Communication & Society, 8(4): 459–463. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Burrows 2005 Burrows, R. 2005. 'Sociological amnesia in an age of informational capitalism? A response to Frank Webster'. Information, Communication & Society, 8(4): 464–470. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]; Gane 2005 Gane, N. 2005. 'An Information Age without technology? A response to Webster'. Information, Communication & Society, 8(4): 471–476. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) deal with the feminist literature about technology, the information society or late modernity. Gane discusses the work of Haraway and Katherine Hayles but manages to do so without reference to their feminism. This neglect of feminist literature is also true of Bell and Castells. To be fair, the articles in the 'Gender and ICT' special issue of this journal which appeared in June 2007 hardly discuss the broader information society literature. There are only two references to Castells in the entire issue, neither of which is to his 'information age' trilogy. One of my pleas in this article is for greater openness on both sides. 7. One of the very painful lessons of second wave feminism was the recognition that women are not only defined by their sex and gender but also by, inter alia, their ethnicity, religion, sexuality and physical abilities. This article has focused predominantly on ethnically white, English-writing authors. There is a growing literature on postcolonial technoscience (Hecht & Anderson 2002 Hecht, G. and Anderson, W. 2002. Social Studies of Science, 32(5–6): 641–825. special issue on 'Postcolonial Technoscience'[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]; McNeil & Castañeda 2005 McNeil, M. and Castañeda, C. 2005. Science as Culture Edited by: McNeil, M. and Castañeda, C. 105–200. special issue on 'Postcolonial Technoscience', vol. 14, no. 2 [Google Scholar]) though the emphasis is on agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and genomics as objects and property rights and flows of capital and labour as themes. There is also a growing literature on ethnicity and cyberspace (Nakamura 2002 Nakamura, L. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]; Wright 2005 Wright, M. M. 2005. 'Finding a Place in Cyberspace: Black Women, Technology and Identity'. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 26(1): 48–59. Special Issue: 'Gender, Race and Information Technology'[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) which has emerged with the growing recognition that cyberspace is not the identity-free space some commentators had hoped for in the mid- and late-1990s. See notes 1 and 2 for some clues to my own identity and its implications for my limited and partial relationship to the literature.