Feminist technoscience

Feminist technoscience is a transdisciplinary field which emerged out of 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 continues 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 studies are inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, science, technology and society. It can also be referred to as feminist science studies, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, gender and science, et al.

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 as masculine profession. Due to political movements of the 1960s and early 70s, science and technology were considered for a profit industrial, governmental, or militaristic based practice, and associated with masculinity resulting in a lack of feminist discourse. Feminist scholarship identified the absence of women's presence in technological and scientific spheres, due 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.

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