Gendered Practices: Feminist Studies of Technology and Society

Like many contemporary feminist scholars, the eighteen contributors to Gendered Practices share a desire to “avoid simple certainties” as they discuss relations between gender and technology (p. 9). Their book fulfills this stated aim. Writing on topics ranging from railroad switchyards to RU 486/prostaglandin abortions, the authors of the collection’s empirical chapters offer complex and interesting interpretations of specific artifacts, practices, and social groups. Other contributors forgo empirical case studies in favor of extended discussions of theoretical and methodological concerns. The methodological essays and case studies share an overarching concern with the practice of feminist research and the peculiar obstacles facing feminist investigators in technology studies. As a result, the collection nicely illuminates part of “the experience of doing feminist research in technologically advanced countries” (p. 7).

Taken as a whole, Gendered Practices has a number of other strengths. Several essays move beyond simplistic equations of “gender” with “women” to examine the role of gender in locations where few or no women are present. Gender, these authors remind us, operates even in practices and places dominated by men, as in the engineering programs at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, or in the “reconstruction” of Saami camps in Stockholm’s Skansen Open-Air Museum. Moreover, the authors challenge universalizing ideas of “womanhood” or “feminism,” revealing subtle and important differences between women, and between feminist theorists. An intriguing article by Marja Vehviläinen, for instance, demonstrates how the divergent analytical perspectives of Dorothy Smith, Donna Haraway, Hèlëne Cixous, and Joan Acker might inform differing interpretations of one technological site—a study circle composed of Finnish women office workers in the 1980s. Finally, the volume combines the work of Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, American, and British feminist researchers in a single volume, exposing English-language audiences to a broad range of national and cultural perspectives on gendered technological practices.

The most troubling aspect of the collection—and an issue of more general import for the historiography of technology—lies in its authors’ too-frequent slippage between analyses of gender and descriptions of “men” and “women.” Several articles glide from incisive investigations of the sociohistorical production of womanliness and manliness to statements which imply behaviors based on innate sexual difference. One finds, for example, references to the projects of “male post-structuralists” (p. 276) or “the needs of women” (p. 153), as if the gendered quality of these projects or needs were revealed by the sex of the participants. In some cases, to be sure, the troubling slippage between the social and historical analysis of gender and more conventional discussions of male and female attributes could simply be a problem of translation. But the analytical elisions evident in Gendered Practices might also point us to a more general tendency in recent feminist discussions of technology: our frustrating inability to delineate the relationships between sexed bodies and gendered practices. (Only one article in Gendered Practices, a theoretical discussion by Elisabeth Sundin, goes so far as to address recent critiques of the presumed distinction between biological “sex” and social “gender” [p. 259]). Certainly feminist historians and sociologists of technology are not alone in wobbling between categories of sex and gender; the same analytical slippage occurs in other fields of academic inquiry. But our particular—and unusual—investment in the relationships between the material and the symbolic, between bodies and ideas, accentuates these slippages in our work. Perhaps we have exhausted the analytical utility of the sex/gender distinction? As this recent collection shows, further attention to the deployment of the category of gender can only sharpen the tools of our feminist research.