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1 ■ Feminist Cultural Studies of Technoscience Portrait of an Implosion NINA LYKKE T his chapter gives an introductory overview of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, the hybrid and interdisciplinary field that makes up a shared frame of reference for the contributions to this book.1 I present here some interdisciplinary key dynamics of the field, to make things easier for readers of Bits of Life who are not familiar with the ways in which feminism, cultural studies, and technoscience studies—that is, the central components of feminist cultural studies of technoscience—have clashed as well as merged in recent decades. The productive dynamism of the field builds very much on a relentless interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary openness to inappropriate and impossible connections , and to explorations of theoretical in-between spaces where it is possible to think diªerently. To portray such dynamism is not an easy task. The risk is of freezing it into quasi-stable assemblages of bounded entities or building blocks, which easily may take on a tinge of “essential truth” about “fixed components.” To avoid such counterproductive freezing, and to fulfill the didactic purpose of giving an overview, I borrow two methodological devices from Donna Haraway. First, I apply Haraway’s notion of the “imploded object” (Haraway 1997: 12; see also chapter 3, this volume). I analyze feminist cultural studies of technoscience as a knot into which diªerent strands of the interdisciplinary nodes of research interests are imploding in an open-ended process. Second, I use a Venn diagram as an analyticalenginetospelloutthe“components”of feministculturalstudiesof technoscience .2 In this chapter, however, the Venn diagram is used in a playful mood, one inspired by the way in which Haraway once ironically interpellated the famous semiotic square of classic structuralism as a “clackety structuralist meaning-making machine” (Haraway 1992: 304). I let the Venn diagram act like the semiotic square in Haraway’s text, where, in its noisy insistence on a machinelike, modern way of 3 acting, it fulfilled an ironic poststructuralist demand for exposure of the technologies of research design. In an analogous vein, the Venn diagram can insist noisily on its machinic presence in my text, thus exposing the subjective and situated moment of design and construction. FROM SCANDINAVIA WITH LOVE: A POSITIONING Here, as a prelude to my overview of feminist cultural studies of technoscience, I will briefly contrast my Scandinavian genealogies with the Anglo-American ones that are traced in detail by Maureen McNeil in chapter 2. In so doing, I underline the complexities of the field and stress its relentless resistance to canons and master narratives. The label “cultural studies of technoscience” was introduced into the AngloAmerican context in the early 1990s. Before that time, as McNeil stresses, people were doing this kind of research, but without the joint nodal point that, for better or for worse, is engendered by a naming device. As a Scandinavian scholar of feministculturalstudiesof technoscience,IrecognizethegenealogiesoutlinedbyMcNeil as important international trends that have inspired me and my Scandinavian colleagues in the field. From a genealogical point of view, however, our story is somewhat diªerent. The most significant diªerence is perhaps the fact that studies of science and technology have been explicitly performed from the perspective of the humanities at several Scandinavian universities since the early 1980s. Feminist endeavors that were defined as feminist cultural studies of science and technology were part of this trend. When I started conducting this kind of research in Denmark ,inthemid-1980s,internationalfeministscienceandtechnologystudiesformed a significant platform. But Scandinavian sources of inspiration were equally important . For example, the department for interdisciplinary studies of technology and social change at Linköping University, in Sweden, has been vital. From its start, in the late 1970s, the department stressed the importance of interdisciplinary cultural studies of technology. In the early 1980s, it hosted several research projects on cultural studies of technoscience, such as one titled “The Machine and the Humanist ,” and its first Ph.D. degree was earned with a dissertation on Strindberg and machines(Kylhammar1985).Apioneeringfeministresearchprojecttitled“Women’s Culture, Men’s Culture, and the Culture of Technology: Looking for a BorderCrossing Language” was also being carried out at the department in the early 1980s. The latter project led to an important dissertation on the sewing machine (Waldén 1990). 4 ■ NINA LYKKE The feminist technoculture studies that came out of this department at Linköping University became a crucial inspiration for me and other feminists at the University of Southern Denmark...

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