Feminist technoscience studies

Abstract

Feminist technoscience studies is a relentlessly transdisciplinary field of research which emerged out of decades of feminist critiques. These critiques have revealed the ways in which gender, in its intersections with other sociocultural power differentials and identity markers, is entangled in natural, medical and technical sciences as well as in the sociotechnical networks and practices of a globalized world. As the sociocultural embeddedness of all scientific and technological theories and practices is a basic assumption among researchers within this field, the positivist distinction between scientific theories and their technological/practical applications is taken to be unsustainable. The term ‘technoscience’ is meant to challenge critically this distinction and the ensuing separation of ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ science. For researchers within the overlapping fields of science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies, there is no such thing as a pure and politically innocent ‘basic’ science that can be transformed into technological applications to be ‘applied’ in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ ways at a comfortable distance from the ‘clean’ hands of the researcher engaged in the former. It is a shared assumption of researchers within the fields of STS and feminist technoscience studies that ‘pure’, ‘basic’ science is as entangled in societal interests, and can be held as politically and ethically accountable, as the technological practices and interventions to which it may give rise. The compound word ‘technoscience’ was coined to emphasize this unavoidable link. Following the tradition of, among others, feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway (1997a), we have chosen to emphasize this link as crucial to feminist critiques of science and technology by using the umbrella term feminist technoscience studies for this special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies (EJWS). However, to avoid terminological confusion we should underline that the field is sometimes (including in some of the articles in this special issue) referred to by other names, such as feminist science studies, feminist cultural studies of science, feminist studies of science and technology, gender and science, etc. Genealogically, feminist technoscience studies is inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, society, science and technology. However, it is important to underline that these studies, together with other kinds of material or postconstructionist feminisms (Lykke, 2008, 2010a), has also transgressed social constructionism, forcefully drawing attention to the ways in which the discursive and material aspects of sociotechnical relations and processes of materialization are inextricably intertwined. This is reflected in the articles on the following pages. They are all, in Editorial

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