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Australian Feminist StudiesPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cafs20

Theme: ChoreographingResistance: DoingMateriality and Subjectivityin Feminist TechnologyStudies - IntroductionAnni DugdalePublished online: 09 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: Anni Dugdale (2000) Theme: ChoreographingResistance: Doing Materiality and Subjectivity in Feminist TechnologyStudies - Introduction, Australian Feminist Studies, 15:32, 135-136, DOI:10.1080/08164640050138653

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164640050138653

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Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 15, No. 32, 2000

Theme: Choreographing Resistance: Doing Materiality andSubjectivity in Feminist Technology Studies

Guest Editor: ANNI DUGDALE

Introduction

The articles in this themed section collectively tell us something of where work on theborders of feminist theory and technology studies has recently been, and where it isgoing. Contributors have drawn on a range of disciplinary approaches to technologyincluding history, STS (science and technology in society), cultural studies, anthropology,and the study of human–machine interaction. But the authors brought together hereshare a commitment to bringing to bear on their work both feminist theory and thefeminist imperative to social and political change. The work included in this section iscommitted to writing ‘technology’ and ‘women’ in ways that make the discursive spacefor producing women as technological experts, whilst recognising that building such adiscursive space will also require the making of feminist sociotechnical futures.

The authors share a dissatisfaction with a number of contemporary feminist theoriesand approaches to technology. They are wary of the essentialism of radical feministcritiques that see technologies as re� ecting the hyper-masculinity of a scienti� c objec-tivism that privileges hand and brain over heart, and thus reproduces and extendspatriarchal power over women’s bodies. They are critical of the historicism of socialistfeminist critiques that have focused on how the production and consumption oftechnologies are shaped by power relations in ways that absorb new technologies intoexisting gender, race and class politics. They are also critical of the optimistic celebrationof technologies seen in some recent postmodernist writing. What the articles share is thatthey all look towards a future in which studies of women and technology will be betterable to elucidate the connections between the practices through which technologiesbecome part of everyday lives, the ways in which technologies enact new possibilities foragencies and constraints, and the place of technology in the making of speci� c ways ofliving the body and the social relations of sexual (and other) differences.

The title of this section re� ects several shifts that have occurred in the 1990s in bothwomen’s studies and in technology studies, shifts that underpin the work it contains. Letme mention two of them. The � rst shift is a story about reality, representation, andreaders. We might call this the semiotic move. This is not a move that privileges thelinguistic over the material, as is sometimes suggested. It is a move that throwsessentialism out the window; neither things nor humans have inherent properties andcharacteristics. It is a move that tells of both the material world and the human subject

ISSN 0816-4649 print/ISSN 1465-3303 online/00/320135-02 Ó 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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136 Introduction

as outcomes of relations. Things, both natural and technological, are brought into beingin and with speci� c cultures. Human subjectivity is not an inherent capacity from whichwe pursue our own interests, and behave as agents in the world. Objects and subjectsacquire their qualities and agencies and take their forms relationally; they become whatthey are as an effect of all the entities and practices in the situation in which they arelocated. Dualisms between reality and representation, body and mind, science andsociety, women and technology do not disappear, they are understood as effects. Rather,the solidity and explanatory priority so often accorded to reality, the body, science andtechnology are perceived as a construction of these same relational processes, to betackled not by reversing the poles of the dualism but by showing how the dualismsthemselves are constantly being made.

The second shift concerns the body and the precariousness of social relations.Feminists have long pointed out the illegitimacy of grounding the marginalisation andexclusion of women from all kinds of social relations on their biology. But if bodiesachieve their particular form relationally, then this means that they are performed in, byand through those relations. This means that certainties, even about bodies and sex, areillusory. It also means that we have to look elsewhere to understand the relative stabilityof gender relations that continue to make unequal distributions. One of the reasons forbringing together the work in this section is to argue the importance of technologies inchoreographing sex, gender and the relations between them.

As a group, I hope that the articles in this section show how inextricable the social,the technical and the human are, and how they are produced together.

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