a talk prepared for the Plenary Session on "Feminist Contributions to Studying Technology" at the SEWSA Gender & Technology Conference: Research, revisions, policies and consequences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, 20 March 2003
Katie King
Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Haraway's technoscience approaches I used in graduate work to study the technological instantiations of poems in academic and feminist activist infrastructures, just as others might have used them to study various instrumentation in a set of laboratories. I was a teaching assistant in courses in which early 20th c. avant-garde film and sculpture theorized and instantiated relationships among arts and technologies. Frankly, it was not until I got my first job in an interdisciplinary women's studies program 15 years ago that I was required to justify and to endlessly explain why work in gender and technology was fundamental to feminist scholarship and how my work in particular fit into it. The anxieties and mystifications about technology, science studies and practices, and their theorizations then became visible to me as fundamental to institutionalizations in women's studies in disciplinary terms I was completely unprepared for.
As a graduate student I came to call the interdisciplinary field in which I worked feminism and writing technologies, and taught my first course in it in 1986. Megan Boler was my teaching collaborator. I used to say that this field investigated the politics of making a distinction between various "somethings" we call "the oral" and "the written"--a divide I understood to be historically and cross-culturally diverse and contingent, political in terms with strong feminist implications, and not a single human universal. But this definition would elicit so much rancor that I had to alter the terms of my explanations. Over time I learned to describe it instead to include histories that indexed more intuitively obvious specific technologies--such as internet, satellite TV and other interpenetrating communications infrastructures; printing, xeroxing and other forms of reproduction; computers, book wheels and other linking devices; alphabets, chirographs and other forms of inscription; pencils, typewriters and other marking implements; epic poetry, telenovelas and other formalized oralities; pictographs, web sites and other artifacts of visual culture. In this way I could explain that 'writing" here comprehends its largest meaning; it participates in oralities, rather than becoming their opposite. It stresses meaning-making in many cultural forms; it stresses social processes that are momentarily stabilized in human devices. And "technologies" here are not just the latest machines for sale, or the instruments and infrastructures of science, but the cultural refinements of skills and tools, extensions of human bodies and minds with which the world is continually reshaping in complex interconnecting agencies. "Writing technologies" are the objects of study, but "writing" technologies is also the process of engaging these objects.
Neither did cyberculture studies or as an institutionalized field of study, the history of the book, yet exist. Both of these interdisciplines come into being very differently over the course of changes in contemporary writing technologies these last 15 odd years. To describe some of the effects and opportunities of these changes for feminists I now locate "writing technologies" as the broader historical and cross-cultural category into which "new technologies and media" fall as particular contemporary instances. The expansive meanings that both "writing" and "technologies" necessarily engage today register these rapidly changing historical interrelationships, and I call these complex processes of intra-action "writing technology ecologies." For example, communication forms today converge with television, telephone and their broadcast, satellite and cable systems of delivery. Words, images, sounds altogether create this particular understanding of "writing"; the descriptions of divisions between oral, handwritten, print, and electronic communication that appeared useful once turn out to obscure such convergences. One result of a focus on feminism and writing technologies is that such convergences now appear to be pivotal today and also to have been pivotal in the past. Another result of such a focus is to open up cultural production to new inspections, to enlivened realities of cultural practice. When we alter what counts as technology, what counts as cultural production, we open up realities in which the contributions of women become visibly more numerous, more valuable and increasingly complex. And finally a further result of this focus is a search for models for a dynamic mode of writing technological histories that speak to how our understandings of contemporary technologies and of gender relations alter what we see of writing technologies and women in the past.
Working in a women's studies department I am always aware that Women's Studies tends to see itself as a beleaguered perspective offering a large generalized critique of what others seem to be enthusiastically celebrating as Cyberculture. Often it sees itself standing
The very word "technology" becomes a vibrant target of these resistances, as well as complexly an emblem of anxiety and anger about the skills women, girls, working class people, and people of color do not learn in economic, racial, and gender educational stratifications. Note that women's studies does not see as the solution to that anxiety and anger or to the need to learn such skills the increased penetration of all levels of education by "technology." And, although feeling often that it is a lone social voice, women's studies is not the only political agency of such opposition. You can see how the intellectual braiding together I do might seem very much beside the point to those politically preoccupied with these resistances and its target "technology." And by no means is Women's Studies my only or necessarily always even my most important "audience."
- in resistance to technology as reality and symbol of male intellectual dominations disguised as objective science
- in resistance to hyperoppression, that is, those exacerbations of economic and cultural social divisions along the lines of race, gender, class created by new media in globalized productions, distributions, and consumptions
- in resistance to the commercialization of the university (and K-12 education) under the guise of initiatives in teaching with technology, and to other forms of managed and corporatized education
I have been working on a short book introducing feminism and writing technologies, and while writing it musing about and writing about the work of two feminist theorists of technoscience, Leigh Star and Lucy Suchman. Both with sociological training, they describe the "working relations" that are essential to technology use, that are the shadows under the "tip-of-the-iceberg" surface that is those objects we valorize as the "technologies." (Star 1999; Suchman 1999 & 2000 online) They point out that instead technologies-in-use are actually "massive assemblages" of many devices (some sometimes not named or valued as "technology") together with the many skills used by particular people, all together located in specific spaces and times. Not "single, stable devices" but rather assemblages and working relations. Suchman says: "Working relations are understood as sociomaterial connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use." (Suchman 2000 online)
When I teach my course "Women in the Web: ways of writing in historical perspective," my own students usually claim at the beginning of the course that they have little or no experiences with technologies. Sewing machines, food processors, microwaves, even TVs, CD players and VCRs don't count: these are all domestic items, and therefore not quote-unquote "technologies." That is, the students explain to me patiently, because, they say, "technologies are male and new." But it is not just the putative "maleness" and "newness" that cancels out other meanings of technology; it is also that working relations are not understood to be elements in the meaning of technologies. If one instead does pay attention to such analytic elements they allow for spaces to see and imagine women's creative engagements with technologies, particularly for me, writing technologies. It is workers who construct "technologies" in the "articulation work" they do to create "a live practice." (Hales 1993) Articulation work is required because work sites are characterized by, as Suchman says: "artifactual richness." "...a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired, in bits and pieces, over time." (Suchman 1999) Users too provide the articulation work needed to construct technological processes out of the assemblage of devices and conditions of work. Says Suchman: "...the coherence of artifacts is a contingent and ongoing achievement of practices of design-in-use, in ways and to an extent that is missing from professional talk about finished products." (Suchman 1999)
The last time I taught "Women in the Web" I asked people to hand in a brief description of their experience with computers. I intended to teach them how to make a very simple web page, and I wanted to know something about them as a group so I could plan how best to approach the lesson. I assumed some already knew how to do web pages, while some might not have home access to computer equipment or have gotten computer accounts at school yet. My intentions were only to gather such background information. I asked "What equipment do you have access to? What can you do? What would you like to know how to do?" But what I got instead were powerful and poignant stories that momentarily overwhelmed me. Those who I told to go sign up for computer accounts all told of being needled at the computer center about the class being in women's studies! Others told stories of the history of computers in their family, one saying: "Throughout my childhood I believed that a computer was nothing more than an expensive complex clock that was more important to a father than his family." And others talked of their own fascination with computers from early childhood, of learning to program quite young and their musings on its strange personal impersonality. Sharing these stories with each other contributed substantially to the culture of the course, in which students collaborated and reflected upon assignments.
Recently I worked together with a former graduate student of mine, now a new professor of cyberculture, on a presentation to teachers and graduate students. In it he and I discovered how divergent the constituencies of our classes were. In his classes many of the students were drawn from technical fields, such as engineering, most of the students were white men, and most were uncritically pro-technology, progress and commerce. His challenge was to introduce some questioning, some doubts, some critical reflection on computers, the web, the social forces of which they are a part, and to focus some of the technical knowledge and energy of the students on large cultural questions. He didn't have to do as much hand-holding or encouraging when it came to teaching skills as I do. He didn't have to justify why we are using or studying new technologies at all. Each of us felt required to challenge the assumptions of our students, and for these divergent populations, we did this in ways that were sometimes diametrically opposite. While the two of us probably have somewhat exaggeratedly divergent populations of students, comprising two polar extremes, still a cross-section of students is going to include both of these kinds of populations and teaching with and about technology will more and more require teaching strategies that do both questioning and justifying learning new technologies, addressing social concerns for those who haven't thought about them at all and those who are sometimes virtually paralyzed by them, and that include a lot of coaching and handholding as well as encouraging risk-taking and rewarding mistakes, if we are not to allow the knowledge of such new technologies to be the principle apparatus of stratification by, at least, race, gender and class, not to mention, nationality, ability and geography.
Feminism and Writing Technologies suggests that the "writings" of the humanities, are always already "technologies." That the competition for resources that current institutional arrangements foster obscures the equally real interconnections among the natural and human "sciences." It suggests that it is these interconnections that are what matter today in reconfigurations of knowledge and knowledge institutions. Indeed, it suggests that what are needed are new educational institutionalizations that foster our apprehension of these interconnections and that limit the kinds of competition for resources that misleadingly overemphasize their separations in the course of urging status hierarchies among them and that consolidate corporate power. And finally, Feminism and Writing Technologies requires that such global disciplinary and interdisciplinary categories be interrogated by the kinds of interventions in knowledge construction feminism has undertaken in the academy, interventions that emphasize accountability in the making of knowledge, rather than efficiency in the production of knowledge workers. Writing technologies defined expansively can be the heartening entry way into the technologies of knowledge production in the natural and human sciences. Feminism and Writing Technologies enlivens understanding and participation in such knowledge production through historical and cultural perspectives that center human and other natural agencies complexly intertwined. Humanism, humanistic inquiry, the humanities and human agency are culturally and historically contextualized, engaged and interrogated. These are the stakes that a reconfiguring humanities has in Feminism and Writing Technologies: for scientists, social scientists and humanists all to be educated to grasp current technological and social change in perspective, to learn comparisons, cultural and historic, that illuminate what sorts of powers are shifting, embodied in the technologies of arts, science and culture altering before us.
© March 2003 Katie King. Citation: King, Katie. "Uncommon Interdisciplines Connecting Gender & Technology: Cyberculture Studies and the History of the Book." Paper presented at the Plenary Session on "Feminist Contributions to Studying Technology" at the SEWSA Gender & Technology Conference: Research, revisions, policies and consequences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, 20 March 2003. Available online at: http://uncominter.blogspot.com/ [last updated 3/18/03; <your visit>].
Handout for: Plenary Panel: Feminist Contributions to Studying Technology (20 March 2003)
Conference on " Gender and Technology: Research, Revisions, Policies, and Consequences, "
SEWSA at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA
Conference on " Gender and Technology: Research, Revisions, Policies, and Consequences, "
SEWSA at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg VA
Uncommon interdisciplines connecting Gender & Technology:cyberculture studies and the history of the book
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park / katking@umd.edu
Home Page: http://katiekin.weebly.com/
my book: introduction to feminism and writing technologies:in expansive and altering material meanings of the word "technology" and of the word "writing."
histories that index specific technologies--such as internet, satellite TV and other interpenetrating communications infrastructures; printing, xeroxing and other forms of reproduction; computers, book wheels and other linking devices; alphabets, chirographs and other forms of inscription; pencils, typewriters and other marking implements; epic poetry, telenovelas and other formalized oralities; pictographs, web sites and other artifacts of visual culture. "Writing technologies" are the objects of study, but "writing" technologies is also the process of engaging these objects.
• Women's Studies --by analyzing something like literary practice as technological process, "feminism and writing technologies" interconnects feminist historical analysis of cultural production with feminist research oncontemporary technologies. Thus feminist technoscience theory must see itself within a history of women's cultural productions, just as feminist cultural theory must see itself as always already "technology" and about technology.
• Cyberculture Studies --its still underdeveloped historical methodologies, and its nascent theories of gender and society require demonstrations that understandings of what counts as technology that are too narrow misleadingly undervalue women's cultural powers and agencies.
• The History of the Book --a dynamic and gendered reading of book technologies within writing technology ecologies requires histories that forefront how our very grasping of objects of study in and from the past come about within our own changing technological circumstances
• Studies in Orality and Literacy --the popular understandings of which valorize the technologically determinist and universalizing theories of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, instead need to be investigated as large knowledge infrastructures whose agencies inter-threaded with ours create usable and hybrid presents and pasts.
I see these intertwining interdisciplinary formations as perspectives each upon the other, as practices each producing the others, as modes of critique and forms of everyday life.
Women's Studies tends to see itself as a lone voice:
- in resistance to technology as reality and symbol of male intellectual dominations disguised as objective science
- in resistance to hyperoppression, that is, those exacerbations of economic and cultural social divisions along the lines of race, gender, class created by new media in globalized productions, distributions, consumptions
- in resistance to the commercialization of the university (and K-12 education) under the guise of initiatives in teaching with technology
Lucy Suchman on technologies-in-use:
actually "massive assemblages" of many devices (some sometimes not named or valued as "technology") together with the many skills used by particular people, all together located in specific spaces and times. Not "single, stable devices" but rather assemblages and working relations. Suchman says: "Working relations are understood as sociomaterial connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use." (Suchman, Lucy. 2000. Located Accountabilities in Technology Production. Online at:http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc039ls.html)
Writing Technologies and a reconfiguring humanities:
defined expansively can be the heartening entry way into the technologies of knowledge production in the natural and human sciences. Feminism and Writing Technologies enlivens understanding and participation in such knowledge production through historical and cultural perspectives that center human and other natural agencies complexly intertwined. Humanism, humanistic inquiry, the humanities and human agency are culturally and historically contextualized, engaged and interrogated. These are the stakes that a reconfiguring humanities has in Feminism and Writing Technologies: for scientists, social scientists and humanists all to be educated to grasp current technological and social change in perspective, to learn comparisons, cultural and historic, that illuminate what sorts of powers are shifting, embodied in the technologies of arts, science and culture altering before us.
Bits from case studies:
• female media fan of global televisions and their technologies-in-use:
Notice that issues of technological access here are not either/or: you have it or you do not, you can afford pricey equipment or not. There are many more complicated possibilities, involving substitutions of hardware, software, folk knowledges, international communications--substitutions each for the other, with implications for who knows and can do what, where and for how much. Access is too unidimensional a term to describe what is really about accumulation and assemblage: workarounds, borrowing, sharing, using what someone else is throwing away, patching old stuff together. Users are inventive: "access" does not capture what are in fact multiple forms of agency, individual and collective. Knowledges of such workarounds in the U.S. are not confined to media fans either: in fact, some of the best places to get multi-system players, as well as international and regional DVDs and Video tapes, CDs and audio tapes, and international phone cards, is in sites that cater to recent immigrants: South Asian Indian grocery stores or sari shops, Asian restaurants, Ethiopian food and music stores. These are cultural locations in which skills, devices and the resources for their multiple cultural productions and interconnections are shared.
• women's writing technologies in various pasts:
For example, the field of women's writing has generally focused upon the literary works of the last three centuries, with exceptional authors and texts surfacing only occasionally in earlier periods. This is because literacy has been understood as the limiting horizon of writing by women, and authors to be the necessary originators of visible works, cultural processes, and literary intelligibility. But shift the terms of value and the kinds of cultural productions that count, and far richer worlds of relationship among women and culture become intelligible and important. Feminism and writing technologies is a lens into those richer worlds. Readers and collectors of books emerge as gatekeepers, facilitators and patrons of literary culture. Ballad hawkers and retellers' acts of sedition and improvisation are recognized, documented in court records. Women printers and preachers participate in political and religious public life. Consider commonplace books and cookbooks: women as collators and copyists...prayers, visions and songs: women as visionaries and Trobairitz or troubadours...manuscript publication and circulation: women as intellectuals and colleagues...signatures and personal marks on public petitions: women as citizens and historical agents. Thus multiple objects and multiple agencies characterize feminism and writing technologies. Here, where authorship is not understood as the only or even the most important productive agency, but one of many in material systems of writing technologies, enlivened realities are made visible. These are writing technology ecologies of interdependent parts, under specific historical regimes of power. My point is not to produce a new functionalist history using the notion of ecologies, but rather to open up our understanding of how writing technology ecologies are dynamically interconnected, revealing materializing social change and cultural forms in flux.
© March 2003 Katie King. Citation: King, Katie. "Uncommon Interdisciplines Connecting Gender & Technology: Cyberculture Studies and the History of the Book." Paper presented at the Plenary Session on "Feminist Contributions to Studying Technology" at the SEWSA Gender & Technology Conference: Research, revisions, policies and consequences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, 20 March 2003.Available online at: http://uncominter.blogspot.com/ [last updated 3/18/03; <your visit>]
