Visions of Technology, Gender, and Knowledge Production

It is often the case that I read a book that inspires me to rethink a particular phenomenon. However, it is rare that a book challenges me to think differently about what it means to think. Katie King’s Networked Reenactments accomplishes both things. It is, in significant ways, a very tough act to follow. Technologies of Inclusion, collaboratively researched and written by Knut Holtan Sørensen, Wendy Faulkner, and Els Rommes, presents an overview of recent work on women and information and computer technologies (ICT) conducted in Europe. This volume contributes to an already existing field of knowledge and challenges the dominance of the “exclusion” paradigm in relation to women and ICT. It is a synthesizing text that represents a summary of research regarding some of the key, structuring assumptions about women and ICT. That, in addition to its focus on European contexts, is its strength. These two books, Networked Reenactments and Technologies of Inclusion, represent markedly different ways of (1) conceptualizing knowledge production and (2) engaging with gender and “the digital.” The two books share a concern for gender and digital technologies. Yet this is where they part company in terms of conceptualization, methodology, and findings. As a queer feminist media studies scholar, I found that Networked Reenactments consistently challenged my own assumptions about disciplinarity, the idea of discrete objects of study, and temporal categorization. As a queer feminist media studies scholar, I found that Technologies of Inclusion tended to reconfirm what I already thought I knew about women and ICT.

King’s book gathers an impressive array of disparate objects, yet in doing so, the text tends to avoid what might be understood as a straight-forward textual analysis of these various objects. Yes, King’s book is about reenactment as a transdisciplinary phenomenon, but for readers who have a strict, taxonomic sense of what reenactment means, they may be disappointed.

From her approach to the multiple texts of Highlander, Xena: Warrior Princess, and the digital fandom that has grown around these programs, King rarely settles on one thing. This can be felt as frustration or as a dizzying, even exhilarating, movement through varying intensities of engagement across, rather than within, transmedia. King’s prose, at times poetic and at other times anecdotally provocative, is the reader’s guide. It’s an invitation to go on a journey in which the destination is not known in advance. That, for this reader, was a welcome change in relation to knowledge production in which so much contemporary scholarship tends to lead the reader on a cozy trek down anticipated paths. Using the key concepts of transmedia, posthumanities, and pastpresents, King is interested in the ways that reenactment, as a nongeneric mode, may be a hybrid frame for displacing interpretive, textual exercises. In the book’s conclusion, King offers the following explanation for her approach to this form of knowledge production: “It makes for an odd sort of book, this reenactment R and D. At one level it is a demonstration of how one sort of case study within a feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities might work. Reenactments are sometimes then an object for illustration, but never only that” (273). This book is a queer one, it is an odd one, in that it refuses to engage in scholarship that is predictable or reassuringly recognizable. To be sure, one of the things we learn most about in this book is King as a curious reader, as an odd reader who expresses queer affection for multiple “care abouts.”

The main “care about” of Technologies of Inclusion: Gender in the Information Society is women’s relationship to computer technologies. The book’s collective contribution is the result of a series of research projects that examined the ways that women use and engage with computer and information technologies in the early years of the twenty-first century. If one of...