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Rethinking the Gender and Technology from a Feminist Perspective
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Dans un dialogue avec les theories produites par les economistes sur les «standards», cet article resolument historien s'interesse a la facon dont les machines a ecrire se sont progressivement standardisees en meme temps que les pratiques de la dactylographie se sont uniformisees. Les premiers temps de l'histoire de la dactylographie sont marques par l'extreme variete des objets et configurations techniques et la rudesse de la concurrence entre marques de machines et dactylographes. Dans ce contexte, la standardisation de la disposition des lettres et signes sur le clavier n'est qu'un des aspects d'une competition humaine et technique qui se joue sur de nombreux autres facteurs. L'uniformisation progressive de la pratique dactylographique s'organise autour de la technique des « dix doigts », de la rememoration du clavier, de nouvelles postures corporelles. Elle temoigne de nouvelles exigences et conditionne la constitution de la profession.
What Do Women Give on the Web ?
The ambivalence and paradoxes of modern gift are constitutive of gift exchanges between strangers on the Web, which is conceived as being a space where users can connect, collaborate and create freely without the barriers of social hierarchy, power relations and gender. This article identifies the different ways in which women are present and active on the Web through the comparative analysis of sociological analyses on the subject. Furthermore, interpretations are given to try and explain the persistence of a digital divide or digital inequality. Women are in fact less prone than men to give on the Web, as a form of ‘virtual modesty’ stops them from contributing to the same extent as men to the construction of websites and the uploading of content.
■ In this article the mutual shaping of the Internet and gender is analysed. Common claims that the Internet constitutes a masculine or contrarily a feminine environment are critically discussed, as well as the cyberfeminist contention that the Internet enables new identities not limited by gender. It is argued instead that gender and the Internet are multidimensional concepts that are articulated in complex and contradictory ways. Drawing from cultural and technology studies, we assume that the gendered meanings of the Internet arise particularly at the moment of `domestication'. In-depth interviews with young couples are used to illustrate how the social, symbolic and individual dimensions of gender interact with everyday uses and interpretations of the Internet, showing four types of articulations constituting traditional, deliberative, reversed and individualized use cultures. Whereas male usage primarily explains these types, the interviews show that this does not automatically result in the construction of a masculine domain in the household. It opens up space for shared and feminine appropriations as well. ■
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AND GENDER Relations under construction
Based on the different issues that combine to clarify gendered differentiation in the use of ICT, this article explores the relations being formed between these technologies and gender. It first examines the different theoretical currents feeding into the debate, primarily from the English-speaking world. The theme is then constructed on the basis of three main approaches: acculturation to ICT and the construction of a gendered identity; the role of gendered social relations in the construction of uses; and, finally, the role of gender in computer-mediated communication. The author adopts a constructivist perspective and her examination of the main research findings reveals the mutual construction of gender and technology, with ICT still in an emergent phase.
FROM DOMINATION TO ACTION Gender in the use of information technologies
Based on an analysis of the Sociological Abstracts, this article proposes a critical panorama of the literature on gender and new information and communication technologies since the 1980s. Essentially a detailed inventory of the North American literature, it reports on the different topics addressed as well as the methodologies and findings of these studies. In the second part the article situates work on ICT and gender in the broader context of feminist studies and science and technology studies. The author then discusses the theoretical and political import of Donna Haraway’s view of “techno-opportunism”.
Users have become an integral part of technology studies. The essays in this volume look at the creative capacity of users to shape technology in all phases, from design to implementation. Using a variety of theoretical approaches, including a feminist focus on users and use (in place of the traditional emphasis on men and machines), concepts from semiotics, and the cultural studies view of consumption as a cultural activity, these essays examine what users do with technology and, in turn, what technology does to users. The contributors consider how users consume, modify, domesticate, design, reconfigure, and resist technological development—and how users are defined and transformed by technology.
The essays in part I show that resistance to and non-use of a technology can be a crucial factor in the eventual modification and improvement of that technology; examples considered include the introduction of the telephone into rural America and the influence of non-users of the Internet. The essays in part II look at advocacy groups and the many kinds of users they represent, particularly in the context of health care and clinical testing. The essays in part III examine the role of users in different phases of the design, testing, and selling of technology. Included here is an enlightening account of one company's design process for men's and women's shavers, which resulted in a "Ladyshave" for users assumed to be technophobes. Taken together, the essays in How Users Matter show that any understanding of users must take into consideration the multiplicity of roles they play—and that the conventional distinction between users and producers is largely artificial.
Over the past fifteen years, a new dimension to the analysis of science has emerged. Feminist theory, combined with the insights of recent developments in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, has raised a number of new and important questions about the content, practice, and traditional goals of science. Feminists have pointed to a bias in the choice and definition of problems with which scientists have concerned themselves, and in the actual design and interpretation of experiments, and have argued that modern science evolved out of a conceptual structuring of the world that incorporated particular and historically specific ideologies of gender. The seventeen outstanding articles in this volume reflect the diversity and strengths of feminist contributions to current thinking about science.
Danielle Chabaud-Rychter ; Industrial and domestic aspects in the conception of domestic appliances.
In the conception of technical objects for domestic use there exists a dichotomy between the “surface” - including the control panels, the accessories, the instructions - which is for the use of the consumer - and the “interior” where everything which enables the machine to function -motorisation, mechanism, electronic controls - is closed to their access.
This type of conception can be considered as a “detechnicalisation” of machines destined for domestic use and we can wonder, as do the feminists working on the question of the social construction of techniques, if this is in fact a gendering of technical objects intended for use by women. Through daily observation of a research and development team for small domestic appliances, I have tried to understand exactly what they do when they introduce this dichotomy into technical objects : how do they establish the boundary between the interior and the exterior, decide what should be hidden from the consumer, to what she should have access, and how and at what point they consider the sex of the consumer.
L'article qui suit porte sur la dynamique des interactions entre rapports de genre et rapports techniques. S'appuyant sur une étude qui a trait à la cuisine au micro-ondes, il met en évidence l'existence de rapports spécifiques entre hommes et femmes, d'ordre à la fois technique et sexué. La transformation du micro-ondes, «produit brun» initialement perçu comme un objet technique de pointe, en «produit blanc» assimilé à un appareil électroménager banal, s'est en effet accompagnée d'une redéfinition sexuée du rôle des acteurs, tant au niveau de la production que de la commercialisation et de l'utilisation. Par là même, ce déplacement a favorisé la reproduction de la hiérarchie de genre dans les rapports à la technologie.
Recently, with the advent of technoscience, and especially the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information and communication technology and the cognitive sciences (NBIC), has come the prospect of human enhancement. Even though the latter – the technological enhancement of human beings which has coalesced in the figure of the posthuman – has been the object of a heated, polarised, and ultimately deadlocked debate between bioconservatives and transhumanists, crucial dimensions that are needed to understand what is at stake with human enhancement have been omitted. While putative enhancement technologies are assumed to be dramatically challenging, revolutionising even, for human beings, the very relations between humans and technologies and the emergence of new configurations are ignored. Rather, a generic yet highly normative and exclusive conception of the human informs the bioconservative and transhumanist understandings of human enhancement. In this context, how to apprehend and conceptualise the relations between humans and enhancement technologies so as to improve the current discussion on enhancement? This is the question that guides this thesis; and as argued in the latter, it is by addressing – and attempting to answer – this interrogation both conceptually and empirically that it becomes possible to account for what it means to be human within enhancement technologies, that is, within technologies that are increasingly getting closer to the (human) bodies they offer
to modify.
Les technologies façonnent les comportements, les actions et les perceptions des êtres humains, mais n’agissent pas sur tous les corps de la même façon. Traditionnellement associées à la masculinité, elles participent au façonnement des rapports de genre. Les études féministes – lorsqu’elles abandonnent la technophobie qui marque leurs premières analyses et se tournent vers les processus de design et d’utilisation des objets technologiques – montrent que le genre et la technologie sont imbriqués dans des dynamiques de co-construction. En outre, dans les sociétés occidentales contemporaines où l’universel et la norme tendent à s’incarner dans les corps masculins, blancs, hétérosexuels, valides, plutôt jeunes et de classe moyenne, le design technologique risque de reproduire leurs intérêts et privilèges au détriment des corps jugés différents, voire déviants – des corps illégitimes. Les technologies peuvent dès lors s’inscrire dans des dynamiques discriminantes et excluantes pour certain·e·s. Questionner les technologies est d’autant plus important et urgent qu’elles se situent aussi au plus près – et de plus en plus près – des corps.
Cette thèse porte sur les expositions de jeux vidéo présentées dans les institutions muséales, dans lesquelles on trouve des jeux issus du commerce. L’analyse s’intéresse aux changements de signification et d’usage que subissent ces jeux vidéo en passant tour à tour du salon familial aux espaces de conception muséographique, puis au lieu d’exposition. La thèse s’appuie sur une enquête de terrain lors de l’une de ces expositions. Elle est complétée par l’étude des politiques publiques en faveur du jeu vidéo, ainsi que par un état des lieux de l’utilisation du jeu vidéo dans les institutions muséales. Ce travail adopte une démarche interdisciplinaire afin d’étudier les dimensions symbolique, sociale et matérielle de l’objet. Ancrée dans les Cultural Studies et l’étude de la dimension culturelle des changements sociaux, ce travail tire également profit de travaux et méthodes des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication, de la Sociologie ainsi que des études de genre. La thèse rend compte de l’articulation entre trois moments de la construction du jeu vidéo comme objet muséal. Le premier est la reconnaissance du jeu vidéo comme bien culturel par des politiques publiques et des institutions. Le second est celui de la conception d’une exposition sur le jeu vidéo dans un centre de sciences, qui suppose le détournement de jeux vidéo pour concevoir des installations interactives. Le troisième est celui de la visite de l’exposition par les publics et des significations qu’ils produisent. Loin d’être isolés les uns des autres, ces trois moments s’enchevêtrent et nous portons une attention particulière à la manière dont les pratiques des un·e·s et des autres se co-construisent.
À partir d’une approche combinant sociologie des usages d’internet et gérontologie critique, le but de cette thèse est d’abord de montrer que le contexte sociohistorique de ces dernières décennies, qui a vu apparaître des représentations positives de la vieillesse, à travers l’émergence du « troisième âge » puis de la figure du « senior » dynamique, a conduit au renouvellement des normes sociales concernant les adultes âgés. Dans la continuité des prescriptions plus anciennes du « vieillissement réussi », l’incitation est désormais forte, pour lutter contre le « déclin » associé au vieillissement, de mener un mode de vie à la fois actif et connecté. Ce travail cherche ensuite à montrer comment les usages des technologies numériques de l’information et de la communication (TNIC) par les adultes âgés sont informés par ces représentations, et inversement. Pour cela, une enquête s’appuyant sur des matériaux variés a été mise en place, incluant des entretiens avec des personnes de 62 à 82 ans, des observations ethnographiques dans des cours d’initiation à l’informatique proposés par des associations de retraités, et enfin l’analyse d’un corpus de sites web de sociabilité pour « seniors ».
Il s’avère que les usages sociaux des TNIC et leurs représentations accompagnent des processus de définition identitaire complexes pour le groupe social des adultes âgés. Leur forme varie en fonction de l’orientation des institutions (commerciales ou associatives) qui portent les discours du « bien-vieillir connecté » et des publics auxquels elles s’adressent, ainsi que de la trajectoire et de l’appartenance en termes de génération, de genre et de classe des individus. Néanmoins, ces injonctions normatives font l’objet d’appropriation variées ; et par leurs pratiques et leurs aspirations, les adultes âgés peuvent aussi contribuer à les renforcer. En outre, si le mode de vie actif et connecté est plutôt l’apanage des classes moyennes et supérieures, on observe aussi des points communs dans la relation que les adultes âgés dans leur ensemble entretiennent avec les TNIC, s’expliquant par l’expérience partagée de la retraite et de la condition de personne vieillissante dans une société de plus en plus « numérisée ».
We explore data from a field test of how an algorithm delivered ads promoting job opportunities in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. This ad was explicitly intended to be gender neutral in its delivery. Empirically, however, fewer women saw the ad than men. This happened because younger women are a prized demographic and are more expensive to show ads to. An algorithm that simply optimizes cost-effectiveness in ad delivery will deliver ads that were intended to be gender neutral in an apparently discriminatory way, because of crowding out. We show that this empirical regularity extends to other major digital platforms.
This paper was accepted by Joshua Gans, business strategy.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
Au XIXe siècle, «l’ancien régime typographique» laisse la place à l’ère des productions imprimées industrielles. Si l’impression se transforme rapidement dès la première moitié du XIXe siècle, le travail d’assemblage des caractères en plomb réalisé par le compositeur change peu avant l’introduction des linotypes au tournant du XXe siècle. Cette stabilité du système technique, généralement expliquée par l’imperfection des méthodes de composition mécanique, s’enracine en réalité dans la complexité des rapports sociaux et des enjeux culturels soulevés par les nouveaux procédés. En France en effet, comme en Angleterre, les premières machines à composer mises au point au cours des années 1840 sont précocement associées au travail des femmes. Les fabricants jouent de cette identification pour promouvoir des machines permettant d’utiliser une main-d’œuvre bon marché. De leur côté, les ouvriers du livre instrumentalisent la dimension sexuée des artefacts techniques pour préserver l’espace de travail. Ni transformation inexorable, ni impossibilité technique, le changement des méthodes de composition émerge finalement au terme d’un processus lent d’acclimatation et de négociation entre les différents acteurs du monde de l’imprimerie.
Consultable sur Internet : www.cairn.info/revue-terrains-et-travaux-2006-1-page-194.htm
From normalisation to cyborg studies: Rethinking disability
In this essay I have surveyed a set of somewhat overlapping discourses which question what is human and normal. I have explored whether and how they can be appropriated for a project to subvert the norms of ability and disability, and to refigure what counts as human, normal and abled. As I argue here, normalisation — as a strategy to include disabled people into the community — attempts to include by means of an exclusive manœuvre, and thus is doomed to fail. Prosthetic discourse normalises the prosthesis, but neglects to query the self or normative subjectivity, and allows the individualised human actors to stand centre stage. In contrast, the actor-network discourse abandons the individualised human subject as the only possible starting point, and asks how this kind of agency and subjectivity is rendered possible. Actor-network discourse places ability and disability on an equal footing, as the result of how specific sets of relations of which we are part, is arranged and organised. But still, the actor-network discourse cannot account for the struggles to create continuity and to establish connections — the struggles to retain one’s place in a few subject positions and to create connections between them. This struggle is possible from within the cyborg discourse : in this feminist and radical discourse, the cyborg is appropriated, twisted, turned and refigured to help us articulate new figures of subjectivity, as well as of humanity. Cyborg help us to embody complex, heterogeneous, partially related subjectivities, as well as a more open and inclusive humanity.
In addition to enabling collective mobilizations in order to reach social visibility, mainstream media can authenticate the particular social issue formulated by protest groups. In valuing the testimony of non-white female teenagers in their productions, journalists construct the causes of gender-related violence in French suburbs as argued by the Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissive) movement from January 2002 onward as having a social existence. This authentication process leads to legitimizing the movement's fight in the eyes of public opinion and the political sphere.
Ce texte a pour objet les relations que les concepteurs d'appareils electromenagers etablissent avec les pratiques domestiques au cours de leur travail. Il traite de la mise en forme des pratiques culinaires des femmes operee par l'innovateur pour leur transmutation en operations mecaniques d'appareils de cuisine. Divers processus par lesquels l'experience pratique domestique est traduite pour etre rendue lisible et faconnable dans le monde industriel sont ainsi mis en evidence. Puis on tente de montrer comment les activites domestiques sont prises en compte et reconfigurees dans le travail que fait l'innovateur sur les proprietes et les dispositifs des appareils offerts a la perception, a la reflexion et a la manipulation au cours de l'usage.
“POLITICAL WOMAN”: A QUESTION OF GENDER?
In a study in which she explored interviews with political women – published in the daily Le Monde from 1995 to 2000, and in two years’ issues of the magazine Elle (1995 and 1997) – and all the public speeches of eight cabinet ministers (men and women) from June 1997 to December 2000, Simone Bonnafous examines the specific characteristics of women’s self-expression in politics. She distinguishes three different modes of expression: explicit argumentation through gender issues, indirect or implicit argumentation, and, finally, the partly unconscious mobilization of specific stylistic and enunciative modes.
WOMEN AND MEDIA: REVISITING A PROBLEMATIQUE
In a tone of personal engagement, the author describes the different phases that have marked the history of critical research on “Women and media”. She highlights France’s shortcomings in this field, an area where legitimacy has proved difficult to construct in all contexts. The formation of certain research strands, such as Cultural Studies, has nevertheless facilitated its development in Britain and its extension throughout the world. The author seeks here to identify the common points in the histories of two debates: one that emerged in the sixties and seventies within feminist theories and practices, and another that started to mobilize critical theory of the media during the same period. This research field, where the ambiguities of post-modernism and post-feminism are currently becoming apparent, is characterized by a proliferation of questions, especially on the future of disciplines.
MEN, WOMEN AND MICROCOMPUTERS An ideology of competencies
This article examines the organization of men’s and women’s relations with this technical object. The aim is to verify the existence of typically masculine and feminine references at the intersection of a quasi-contractual situation and subconscious habits. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with a sample of socially diversified families in the Paris area, the author shows the persistence of a form of gender differentiation without the restoration of inequality.
The praxis-oriented interdisciplinary field of feminist technology studies (FTS) has done most among the social sciences to build a vibrant and coherent school of gender and technology studies. Given their shared commitment to exploring emergent forms of power in the contemporary world, there is surprisingly little dialogue between FTS and mainstream cultural anthropology. This review begins by outlining FTS and its concepts and methods. I then turn to the anthropology of technology, which also offers useful conceptual frameworks and methods for exploring gender regimes. Then, to highlight the ideological and methodological contrasts between social and cultural analyses of technology and the implications for gender analysis, I discuss the treatment of technology in two leading theoretical fields in the cultural anthropology of modernity and globalization: the anthropology of technoscience, and material culture studies. I conclude by asking which forms of engagement might be envisaged between the fields.
Différence des sexes” sur Twitter: les conditions d’observabilité d’un engagement affectif et émotionnel’ (habilitation thesis
- Virginie Julliard
- La
Monique Wittig: de la matérialité du langage
- Stéphanie Kunert
Teaching Feminist Technology Design
- Frances Bronet
- Linda L Layne
The Arena of Knowledge: Antigone and Feminist Standpoint Thinking
- Sarah Bracke
- Maria Puig De La Bellacasa
Des Usages de la télématique aux
- Josiane Jouët