About the Exhibits

Our Objective:

The goal of this exhibit is to engage in a critical evaluation of technologies and technological artifacts, especially pertaining to the mutual shaping of gender, race, class, and technology.

What We Mean By Technology:

Technology is often coded socially as masculine, and often refers to large machines, high-tech apparatus, and advanced techno-science. Feminist historians of technology challenged the male-centered definition of technology, and highlighted technologies that women invented and/or used. For the purpose of this exhibit, technology is not limited to high-tech, but includes everyday practical apparatuses, such as vacuum cleaner and razors. Studying technologies can tell us much about women’s lives and about how gender inequality is sustained and challenged. Studying gender can tell us much about the meanings, uses, and abuses of technologies.

Academic Framework:

Do Artifacts Embody Gender Politics?
We say, “yes,” and this exhibit reflects our position.

In 1980, Langdon Winner argued in his essay, “Do Artifacts have Politics?” (Daedalus, 109: 121-36), that technologies and technological artifacts can be designed or arranged in such a way to create a certain political order in a community. For instance, many overpasses of Long Island Parkway were purposely designed to be too low for buses to enter the more affluent areas with public beaches and parks. Affluent white people mostly drove cars, whereas people of lower socio-economic class and racial minorities used public transportation; hence, the overpasses maintained the racial and class divide. Winner’s analysis shows that technological artifacts can embody specific forms of social order and that it is important to interrogate the social and political background behind technological developments.

Extending Winner’s analysis and building on a growing body of feminist scholarship on technology, this exhibit shows that technology has gender politics (as well as racial, social-class, and ageist politics). Exhibit contributors created artworks and statements that interrogate the social order built into the development, design, arrangement, and use of particular technologies. They also ask whether technologies empower (all) women, and explore feminist positions on old and new technologies.

Acknowledgement:

This exhibit builds on the success of a series of on-campus Gender and Technology exhibits, which was first organized by Dr. Martha McCaughey at Virginia Tech University.