---
title: "Feminist technoscience"
chunk: 2/3
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 technologies and technoscience studies ==
Feminist technoscience studies have become intrinsically linked with practices of Technofeminism and the development of feminist technologies in cultural and critical vernacular.  Feminist technoscience studies explore the coded social and historical implications of science and technology on the development of society, including how identity constructs and is constructed by these technologies.  Technofeminism emerged in the early 1980s, leaning on the different feminist movements. Feminist scholars reanalyzed the Scientific Revolution, and stated that the resulting science was based on the masculine ideology of exploiting the Earth and control.  During this time, nature and scientific inquiry were modelled after misogynous relationships to women.  Femininity was associated with nature and considered as something passive to be objectified. This was in contrast to culture, which was represented by objectifying masculinity.  This analysis depended on the use of gender imagery to conceptualize the nature of technoscientific masculine ideology.
Judy Wajcman draws parallels between Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and the construction of technology.  Butler conceives gender as a performative act as opposed to a naturalized condition one is born into.  Through a fluctuating process achieved in daily social interaction, gender identity is acted and constructed through relational behaviours – it is a fluid concept. Drawing from the work of Butler and Donna Haraway, Amade M'charek analyzes how objects, when linked to another object or signifier, construct identity through the use of human imagination:

Differences and similarities may be stable or not, depending on the maintenance work that goes into the relations that help to produce them. They are neither fundaments nor qualities that are always embodied… Differences are relational. They do not always materialize in bodies (in the flesh, genes, hormones, brains, or the skin). Rather they materialize in the very relations that help to enact them. 
In this theory, identity is not the byproduct of genes, but the constant upholding of hierarchical difference relations. Differences in identity are the effect of interferences, performing and enacting and being enacted upon.  Technology too, as proposed by Wajcman, is a product of mutual alliances, not objectively given but collectively created in a process of reiteration.  To this end, technology exists as both a source and a concurrence of identity relations.
Western technology and science is deeply implicated in the masculine projection and patriarchal domination of women and nature.   After the shift of feminist theory to focus more on technoscience, there was a call for new technology to be based on the needs and values of women, rather than masculine dominated technological development.  The differences between female and male needs were asserted by feminist movements, drawing attention to the exclusion of women being served by current technologies.  Reproductive technologies in particular were influenced by this movement. During this time, household technologies, new media, and new technosciences were, for the most part, disregarded.

=== Feminist technologies ===
Feminist technologies are ones that are formed from feminist social relations, but varied definitions and layers of feminism complicate the definition.  Deborah Johnson proposes four candidates for feminist technologies: 

Technologies that are good for women
Technologies that constitute gender-equitable social relations
Technologies that favor women
Technologies that constitute social relations that are more equitable than those that were constituted by a prior technology or than those that prevail in the wider society
The successes of certain technologies, such as the pap smear for cervical cancer testing, relied on the feminization of technician jobs.  The intervention of women outside the technological sphere, like from members of the women's health movement, and public health activists also aided in the tool's development.  However, other feminist technologies, such as birth control serve as an example of a feminist technology also shaped in part by dominant masculinity.
Combined oral contraceptive pills were first approved for use in the United States in 1960, during the time of the women's liberation movement. The birth control pill helped make it possible for more women to enter the workforce by giving them the ability to control their own fertility.  Decades prior to this, activists such as Margaret Sanger and Katharine McCormick fought for female contraceptives, seeing it as a necessity for the emancipation of women.  However, in the 1970s feminists raised critique on male control of the medical and pharmaceutical industry.  The male domination of these fields led technologies such as oral contraceptives to be developed around what men considered to be universal, defining characteristics of women (these being their sex and reproductive capabilities).  Birth control pills themselves also succeeded in perpetrating and creating this universality – shaped by moral considerations of the natural body, the length of the menstrual cycle was able to be engineered.
Feminist work in design including fields like industrial design, graphic design and fashion design parallels work on feminist technoscience and feminist technology. Isabel Prochner examines feminist design processes and the development of feminist artefacts and technology, stressing that the process should:

Emphasize human life and flourishing over output and growth
Follow best practices in labor, international production and trade
Take place in an empowering workspace
Involve non-hierarchical, interdisciplinary and collaborative work
Address user needs at multiple levels, including support for pleasure, fun and happiness
Create thoughtful products for female users
Create good jobs through production, execution and sale of the design solution 