The Gender-Technology Relation

Contemporary Theory And Research: An Introduction

Rosalind Gill, Keith Grint, Rosalind Gill CRICT, Brunel University; Keith Grint Templeton College, Oxford.

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781135340698
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Provides a review of contemporary theory and empirical research into the relationship between feminism and social constructivism. Through case studies, the book focuses on issues raised by different technologies and on developing theoretical understandings of the gender-technology relation.

Part I Theoretical Developments in the Gender-Technology Relation

Chapter 1
Feminist Sociology and Methodology: Leaky Black Boxes in Gender/Technology Relations

Susan Ormrod

Introduction

This chapter concerns the methodology of feminist research into gender and technology. In particular, it notes a tendency to employ a social theory which is reductive and conservative in effect. Very briefly, this tendency results from the deployment of a notion of patriarchy to explain relations of power within the social world and then to research the oppression of women that results from this explanation. In feminist research on gender and technology, for instance, this amounts to explorations of how pre-existing social relations of patriarchy express and shape technology. I shall explore two distinct but related approaches within post-structuralism which reject this notion of 'the social'.

In one of these, the social is constructed in and through discourse, meaning and representation which also construct human subjectivities. Accordingly, women are not simply oppressed by forces and practices of representation imposed upon them from outside, as it were. They are, instead, active in positioning themselves within discourses and in investing a commitment to subject positions. The discursive social world, according to this view, gives life and meaning to the individuality they (we) associate with their (our) gendered subject positions.

In the other of these, the social is seen as performed by actors, some of which may not be human, but each of which may be enrolled or 'translated' in the creation of technologies. Sometimes called actor network theory, this approach has developed specifically within technology studies and is associated with Michel Callon and Bruno Latour (Callón and Latour, 1981). It is from their early methodological statements that I draw the term 'leaky black boxes' in my title. For Callon and Latour, the phrase 'black box' refers to the analytical closure that occurs in conceiving of the social and natural worlds separately and as of a different order. In other words, it is the creation of asymmetry. It also occurs when sociologists attribute different sizes to actors, in proposing macro-actors and micro-actors. So, when society and power are described as patriarchal, gender is 'black-boxed'. By this I mean that the content and behaviour of gender relations is assumed to be common knowledge, and their meanings are stabilized and no longer need to be considered.

Both these related approaches suggest methodological issues for doing research on gender. In the first place, neither conceives of the social world as being 'out there' for us to go out and examine. The 'data' is not simply there to be collected and described. Nor, as it turns out, do gender relations remain as stable as some feminists have assumed. If gender is constructed, continually negotiated, then the 'black boxes' will leak. Moreover, the issues go further than that of how the data is to be interpreted. It also concerns the questions that can be asked and the meaning that 'respondents' will impute to those questions. In other words, much of what is said within a research interview, for example, is conditioned by the assumption that, as feminists, we will be interested in patriarchy and women's oppression

Agency and Structure in Feminist Sociology

Rècent work on technology by feminist sociologists has accepted the actor-network approach, up to a point. However, detecting gender-blindness, voluntarism, relativism and ahistoricism, they remain highly sceptical. Cockburn, for instance, argues that there is 'an incomplete representation of the historical dimensions of power... [where] men as a sex dominate women as a sex' in Callón and Latour's work (Cockburn, 1992, p. 39). Wajcman argues that actor network theory ignores gender interests and that its focus has tended to be on sites where women are absent (1991, pp. 23-4). For both Cockburn and Wajcman, a feminist sociology of technology, because of its concern with gender, must engage with subjectivity and attend explicitly to the formation of identity. While the actor-network approach does indeed engage with the relations which hold a technology together, the serious omission for these feminists is its lack of attention to relations of gender. Instead, feminist sociologies of technology tend towards approaches which examine how long-standing, institutionalized and structural patterns of male power, sometimes designated as patriarchy, express and shape technology (Benston, 1988; Cockburn, 1983, 1985, 1992; Hacker, 1989, 1990; Wajcman, 1991).

The prime assumption in feminism's use of patriarchy is that men collectively exercise a force throughout society which collectively oppresses or represses women. It is an assumption which often imputes a motive force: the exercise of power in pursuit of what men perceive to be their interests. While this concept of patriarchy may be qualified by reference to class, race and sexuality, it nevertheless assumes a model of power which I believe we must contest. It conforms with a more generally held view of what power is, how it operates, and the primacy of interests. In this view, power is held and used to cause people with less power to act in accordance with those with authority, sovereignty or legitimate power. Although there is an infinite variety of accounts of its location and distribution, power is conventionally conceived in what Hindess describes as the 'capacity-outcome' model (Hindess, 1986). Patriarchy adopts the model in a particular form, locating power in male hands. Outcomes, however, are not secure and cannot be determined in advance of struggle. Interests cannot be assumed as a precondition of a stable structure, as imputed by patriarchy. Rather they are 'a function of the discursive conditions and outcomes of struggle' (Law, 1986b. p. 12).

The concept of patriarchy, which accepts the predominant concept of power as capacity which is held and wielded over others, arises through feminist acceptance of a mainstream sociology which distinguishes between the individual and society or between agency and structure. This distinction is the basis for sociology's separation from psychology and the humanities. It is also the basis for sociology's difficulties in reaching a resolution between the determinism of functionalism and structuralism, on one hand, and the voluntarism of ethnography and phenomenology on the other. Do structures or rules govern human agents and human activity? Or do human agents construct social reality? The attempt made by Giddens to synthesize this relationship in his 'structuration theory' (Giddens, 1984) fails because of its emphasis on a subjectivist assumption of knowledgeable actors making sense of the world and 'making a difference' in it (Barbalet, 1987; Habermas, 1982, p. 286; Layder, 1987). Giddens' understanding of the human agent is sociologically conventional: the agent is defined as a unitary, rational, knowledgeable, conscious, pre-given entity.¹ The social, on the other hand, is conventionally understood in sociology as a total ordered whole, demarcated from the 'natural' world. Sociology's task is to understand and represent this totality and it is deficient to the extent that it omits certain dimensions from its appointed task. Thus feminist sociology seeks to add the gender dimension into sociology's narrative account of society. In even the most sophisticated versions where gender is analysed as socially constructed, the same presumption of a pre-existing subject that constructs the world and is socially constructed, is adopted (Connell, 1987; Game and Pringle, 1983).

Ann Game convincingly argues that the individual is insufficiently problematized in sociology by simply shifting to the level of the group, class, race, or gender (1991, pp. 32-3). 'Oppressed groups' are constituted as the objects of sociological knowledge in a project of liberation where sociology aims to raise their consciousness as subjects. Sociology is at an impasse because of its premise that social determination constitutes explanation and because sociologists also want to claim simultaneously that 'human agency' is the source of change. Game points to the contradiction in asking how we sociologists can give them a voice (p. 30). Feminist sociologists claim to be able to represent women by virtue of being women and by having a feminist consciousness. It is this which authorizes feminist research and its rejection of traditional malestream sociology which distinguishes between researcher and researched. Yet, as Game argues, 'The very idea of representing women, even if in the form of "letting them speak", is to constitute women as object' (p. 31).

This is a discomforting argument and a challenge which must be faced up to. In accepting the defining characteristics of sociology's concern with the dualism of agency structure, feminist sociology is accepting the same conception of knowledge where consciousness corresponds to reality, the real. Approaches which divert from sociology's concern with agency structure are ruled out as not sociological, not theoretical, or not historical. Approaches which divert from feminist sociology's acceptance of (and subservience to) an agency structure dualism run the risk of being ruled out also as unfeminist.

Power and Gendered Subjectivity

Feminism might successfully theorize gender subjectivity and sidestep the unresolvable agency structure dualism by avoiding the theory of power demanded by patriarchy, which structures femininity and masculinity as opposites in a dichotomy, where women are the object of male power. Gender is spoken of in terms of two categories. The effect is to polarize and concentrate on the fixity and continuity of gender relations. There is a long history of characterizing gender in such a way, one which has also been appropriated by feminism to political effect. Indeed, it is important to document the ways in which men and women have been constituted in relation to one another, as different, complementary and unequal: the masculine superordinate; the feminine subordinate. But as Hollway argues, femininity and masculinity cannot be taken as 'fixed features located exclusively in women and men' (1984, p. 228). And it is not the case that women and men are automatically and passively inscribed into existing power relations (Pringle, 1989). If we are to understand gender differentiation in a way which can account for changes, then we must avoid an analysis which sees discourses of gender as mechanically repeating themselves (Hollway, 1984). Otherwise feminism will be unable to successfully challenge the dominances now being achieved in their distinctively modern form. It will be unable to make productive alliances with pro-feminist men and disassociate itself from anti-feminist women. It will simply be locked into a 'battle of the sexes'.

To talk of strategies concerning subjectivities that might replace a battle between sexual dichotomies is to introduce a way of speaking about power different from the 'capacity-outcomes' model which underpins notions of 'male power'. Rather than equating power with oppression as a negative force, power is conceived of as productive. It produces knowledges, meanings and values, and permits certain practices as opposed to others. This is a concept of power often associated with Foucault, but Clegg illustrates its antecedents in Machiavelli (Clegg, 1989). Here, power is the overall effect of strategies and is contingent to specific instances of its operation.²

As is well known, Foucault demonstrates the operation of power through discursive practices. These produce regimes of truth which make possible certain practices and subjectivities and exclude others. As Chris Weedon explains in a discussion of feminism and post-structuralism:

Discourses, in Foucault's work, are ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and the relations between them. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the 'nature' of the body, unconscious and conscious mind and the emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern. (Weedon, 1987, p. 108)

Post-structuralism posits a subject that is not pre-formed as a rational unitary being, but is produced in its social and historical forms through discursive practices and modes of signification. Rather than an agency which negotiates the social, both are jointly created together. Butler pursues this idea in arguing that gender is not a noun but a verb, an active and continuous process, a becoming (1990). In other words, gender is performative, a process of constituting the apparent stability of gender identity. Identity politics tends to assume a foundationalist reasoning relying on a viable subject who is understood to have some stable existence prior to the cultural field that she negotiates. According to Butler, the problem for much feminism is that there is often presumed to be a doer behind the deed because an agent is held to be a necessary precursor to initiating and transforming relations of power in society. Butler theorizes subjectivity as a process of signification rather than a problem of identity. The question of agency is then re-formulated as a question of how identity, conceived as a signifying practice, works.

To deconstruct the subject-as-agent is to understand the subject as a position within a particular discourse (Henriques et al., 1984, p. 203). While displacing the individual as coherent and unitary, we must still attend to how the fragments of multiple positionings are held together. Henriques et al. suggest that signifying practices of subjectivity work by both offering the security of valued social identities and also providing the desire and motivation for change. This introduces an openness to subjectivity while accounting for continuity by stressing the importance attached to available subject positions within signifying practices. In other words, this analysis accounts for both predictability and change within gender relations.

Gendered subjectivity, then, is historically produced in a series of competing discourses, which make available different positions and different powers for women and men, rather than being the product of a single patriarchal ideology. Male dominance may be the end result of particular operations of power, but this is not simply imposed on women (and some other men). Rather, gender relations are a process involving strategies and counter-strategies of power. Present differentiations of gender may produce the dominance of a certain version of masculinity (and particular men) around certain practices of technology. But this is not simply achieved through a circulation of the same old discourses of gender dichotomy mechanically repeating themselves. Wendy Hollway u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research
• Part I Theoretical Developments in the Gender-Technology Relation
• Part II Case Studies of the Gender-Technology Relation
• Notes on Contributors
• Index