---
title: "Feminist technoscience"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_technoscience"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:36:42.012246+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience, especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
Feminist technoscience focuses less on intrapersonal relationships between men and women, and more on broader issues concerning knowledge production and how bodies manifest and are acknowledged in societies.
Feminist technoscience studies are inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, and science, technology and society (STS).  It can also be referred to as feminist science studies, feminist STS, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, and gender and science.

== History ==
According to Judy Wajcman, the concept of technology has historically been bound to indigenous women.  The roles of harvesters, or caretakers of the domestic economy taken up by these women lead Wajcman to conclude they would have created tools such as the sickle and the pestle, making them the first technologists. During the eighteenth century, industrial engineering began to constitute the modern definition of technology. This transformed the meaning from including useful arts technology – such as needlework, metalwork, weaving, and mining – to strictly applied science.  As a result, "male machines" replaced the "female fabrics" as identifiers of modern technology when engineering was considered a masculine profession. Due to political movements of the 1960s and early 70s, science and technology were considered as industrial, governmental, and/or militaristic based practices, which were associated with masculinity, thus resulting in a lack of feminist discourse. Feminist scholarship identified the absence of women's presence in technological and scientific spheres, due to the use of sex stereotyping in education and sexual discrimination in the workforce, as well as the development of technology as a masculine construct.  Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET, a precursor to the internet developed by the United States Department of Defence, and the Manhattan Project.
The women's health movements of the 1970s in the United States and the United Kingdom provided momentum to the emergence of feminist politics around scientific knowledge. During the early states of second-wave feminism, campaigns for improved birth control and abortion rights were at the forefront in challenging the consolidation of male dominated sciences and technologies at the expense of women's health. After the first successful birth of a child using in vitro fertilization technology, critiques of reproductive technologies rapidly grew. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were fears that oppressive population policies would be enacted, since men could use technology to appropriate the reproductive abilities of women. For many feminist activists, such as Gena Corea and Maria Mies, such technologies changed women's bodies into industrialized factories for the production of more human beings, which these feminist activists viewed as another way of continuing the subjugation of women in society. Others viewed the act of regaining knowledge and control over women's bodies as a crucial component to women's liberation.Further advances in reproductive technologies allowed the possibility to allow new family types and lifestyles to form, beyond the heterosexual family unit.
Science was originally seen as an alien entity opposed to women's interests. Sciences and technologies developed under the misconception that women's needs were universal and inferior to the needs of men, forcing women into rigid, determined sex roles. A shift happened in the 1980s – Sandra Harding proposed "the female question in science" to raise "the question of the science in feminism", claiming that science is involved in projects that are not only neutral and objective, but that are strongly linked to male interests. The conceptualization of science and technology was expanded to reflect the all-pervasive ways in which technology is encountered in daily life, gaining attention of feminists out of concern for female positions in science and technological professions.  Rather than asking how women can be better treated within and by science, feminist critics instead chose to focus on how a science deeply involved in masculinity and masculine projects could be used for the emancipation of women.
Today's feminist critique often uses the former demonology of technology as a point of departure to tell a story of progress from liberal to postmodern feminism. According to Judy Wajcman, both liberal and Marxist feminists failed in the analysis of science and technology, because they considered the technology as neutral and did not pay attention to the symbolic dimension of technoscience.