“The imagined woman technoscientist”: reflections on feminist technoscience studies

• In Event: Latin American Science, Technology and Society: Women, Gender, and Sexuality Issues 2

Abstract

Feminist technoscience studies have increasingly become a theoretically sophisticated approach to the analysis of science, technology and medicine – technoscience. This has resulted in critical accounts of the making and doing of gender in technoscience, including post-colonial and intersectionality-related issues. However, we argue that there are important limitations to the achievements. Above all, we are concerned with a bias of feminist technoscience of being based mainly on studies of and/or theorising from studies of biomedicine, biology and computer science or from philosophical claims about technoscience. We substantiate this claim by analysing what we call the imagined woman technoscientist underlying those important contributions. ‘The imagined woman scientist’ is our discursive construct that highlights widely held assumptions/beliefs about characteristics like professional and gender identities, professional interests and motives, exclusion experiences, gender politics, social responsibility, and relations to technologies and natural phenomena. Our point is to show, without being unappreciative, that most critiques of gender relations in/of technoscience, include unexamined assumptions about women technoscientists (such as being a force of change, representing difference, etc.). Usually, these constructs are generalized from little empirical evidence, if any. We then show how this bias has limited feminist theorizing of technoscience.

Authors

• Knut H Sørensen, NTNU, Dept. Of Interdisciplinary Studies Of Culture

• Sharon Traweek, UCLA