Feminist Approaches: Diversity and Power

12 important questions on Feminist Approaches: Diversity and Power

What concerns the femenists for their interest in users?

The concern is about the potential problematic consequences of technologies for women and about the absence of women in historical accounts of technology.

What is the neglect of women's role in the development of technology?

Women were historically underrepresented as innovators of technology, and historians of technology often focused exclusively on the design and production of technologies, the history of technology came to be dominated by stories about men and their machines.

How did Cowan bring the fields of history of technology and women's history together?

By emphasizing that women as users of technology perceive technological change in significantly different ways from men.
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What is "the consumption junction"?

The place and time at which the consumer makes choices between competing technologies.

What did Cowen advise concerning the definition of the user?

She urged historians and sociologists of technology to choose the user, rather than the artifact or the technologist, as a point of departure in network analyses of technology, and to look at networks from the consumer's point of view.

What do gender studies reflect?

They reflect a shift in the conceptualization of users from passive recipients to active participants.

How has the role of feminists literature changed over time?

In the early feminist literature, women's relation to technology had been conceptualized predominantly in terms of victims of technology. However, over the last two decades the emphasis have been on women's active role in the appropriation of technology.

What is central to the feminist approach to user-technology relations?

Granting agency to users, particularly women.

What does diversity mean in the user-technology relation?

Users come in many different shapes and sizes.
Because of this heterogeneity, not all users will have the same position in relation to a specific technology.

What does diversifying users lead to?

The very act of identifying specific individuals or groups as users may facilitate or constrain the actual roles of specific groups of users in shaping the development and use of technologies.

What are "implicated actors"?

Implicated actors are those silent or not present but affected by the action.

What are the two categories of implicated actors?

Those not physically present but who are discursively constructed and targeted by others, and those who are physically present but who are generally silenced/ignored/made invisible by those in power.

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