Boel Berner, Introduction, "Doing Feminist Research on Technology and Society",

In this section, Berner outlines the central project of the book, which is to examine how "gender is constructed and enacted in different sociocultural arenas, and… how technology is constituted in gendered practices." (p.9) This project is a feminist project, and as such has a political dimension, although the relationship between theory and practice is not always the same. Berner identifies three streams of feminist research practice which are differently situated with regard to political action. First, a "herstory" of technology in which women are written back into the technological narrative as objects of study: as users, creators, etc. Theory is used to remember what has gone before and to envision possibilities for change. The first section of the book is devoted to examining diverse sociotechnical contexts in order to observe how gender relations and differences are produced and performed in commonplace technological practices.

Second, more rooted in praxis, is feminist struggle and reform around concrete practices such as those that form the workplace, medicine, and the educational system, with the aim being to shape and change a variety of actual social relations. The second section of the book discusses efforts to alter patriarchal practices around technology.

The third stream of feminist work is around the development of new conceptual tools, with which to produce more progressive theory. This stream uses some aspects of existing theory with a view to incorporation and innovation. Berner here cites Donna Haraway as an author whose work spans all three streams. Thus the final section of the book includes articles which utilize her work.

Berner notes here that there is no single conceptual framework with which to understand the gender/technology relation, but rather feminists use a variety of theoretical stances and methodologies with varying effectiveness. Thus consideration of how best to develop a workable theoretical paradigm is a significant concern for feminist theorists.

Birgitta Edelman, "These Girls are no Ordinary Girls"

In this article, Edelman examines a male-dominated workplace to explain "what created a context in which women were accepted, and even welcomed."(p.20) She presents a central contradiction of technological workplace ideology: that women are welcome in theory, but women who succeed at the job are not "ordinary girls". Thus women are both desired as a generality but appreciated for being an apparent exception to their gender.

Edelmen identifies several factors which contribute to the formation of a positive workplace for women despite its male-dominated character: strict hierarchy based on seniority, great risk which requires trust and teamwork; a collective rather than an individual project, and a commitment to obtaining skills over the long term.

Boel Berner and Ulf Mellström, "Looking for Mister Engineer: Understanding Masculinity and Technology at two Fin de Siécles."

In this article, Berner and Mellström describe how the engineering profession engages with notions of masculinity to construct relations of difference not only between men and women, but more importantly between men. With respect to women in engineering, three major patterns exist: a polarization of male and female spheres which actively excluded women; a segregation of male and female technical fields; and finally, when women moved into the same fields as men, subordination of women within the field. Beginning from this theoretical underpinning, Berner and Mellström apply the results of two research projects to the "genderization of engineering", in which practices on a macro and microlevel produce and inform masculinity. They discuss how "engineers' occupational identities are created in gendered forms through everyday practices, institutional arrangements and symbolic representations in microsettings."(p.40)

The first study, by Berner, examines educational practices in engineering schools in Sweden around the late 1800s-early 1900s, a time in which engineering was "institutionalized as a specialized and socially valued masculine expertise."(p.41) The second study, by Mellström, is set 100 years later, and combines an ethnography of engineering labour within two technology firms, and experiential narratives of engineers. In the juxtaposition of these studies, Berner and Mellström show recurring motifs in the production of a particular kind of masculine engineering identity. They point out that intersections of both gender and class, as well as market relations, produce dominant paradigms for what it means to be an engineer.

The first study examines an all-male Polytechnic engineering university from 1880-1920 to see what kinds of masculinities were constructed in the context of this training for an elite profession. Berner's unit of analysis in this study is the everyday practices which expressed how masculinity was related to technical expertise, and he uses the methodology of both sociology/anthropology and the sociology of education.

To situate this study in its historical context, Berner notes that this was both a period of increased industrialization and struggles around access for women to social institutions. Although campaigns had been led to get women into higher education, little attention was devoted to promoting women in technical fields. Berner argues that this was, in part, because engineering was socially constituted as a particular kind of masculine field. He divides his study of practices into three themes: repertoires of knowledge, everyday educational practices, and everyday homosocial relationships. He concludes that these practices not only determined masculinity as separate from femininity, it divided masculinity within itself to distinguish a particular kind of man who was representative of the ideal engineer.

Interestingly, two areas were coded as appropriate for women: architecture, clearly appropriate because it directed women's energies towards home improvement; and chemistry, a more obliquely appropriate field. Upon examination of the latter, Berner discovered that it was designated as appropriate because of its relative lack of required field experience. As Berner later expands upon, ideal masculine knowledge here combined both theory and practice as well as different kinds of theoretical knowledge. The more faculties a subject required, the more likely it was to be designated male. Narrow and specialized fields at this time were coded as appropriate for women. Moreover, the distinction between scientific and practical knowledge was played out here in terms of divisions between men. Interdisciplinarity was used to establish a public masculine hierarchy: competence, when played out in public field experience and participation in public endeavours, was a particularly male ideal. The closer a discipline to private research, the lower its relative status. The ideal male engineer was both a man of science and man of the people; he studied hard and got his hands dirty; in other words, he was able to move freely within both private and public spheres. He was the technological equivalent of the "flâneur". His public demonstration of his skills was what separated him from women and from other men.

The third theme, homosocial school organization, is developed through an examination of how engineering students were "socialized into a picture of themselves as belonging to an elite." (p.54) Fundamentally, "[t]he school provided a testing ground, a 'homosocial' environment where appropriate behaviour was learnt, and the young men were assisted in their transition to a competitive and demanding work life." (p.54) Berner refers to "anticipatory socialization" (p.55) to describe the ascendance through the academic ranks by elite young men who were being groomed from the outset to be part of an industrial, social, and technological elite. Thus engineering education was also about creating an imagined male community of elites as well as of technically skilled workers.

Since talk-based interaction was central to workplace practices here, Mellström found it useful to study the gendered use of metaphors to provide some indication of how gender was produced in relation to technological practice, and identifies sports metaphors as functioning in this way.

Referencing Turkle's work, Mellström points out that "mastery" is a central concept in relations with machines, particularly in terms of mastering complexity. Winning and competition "are the basics of much social activity" (p.60) (we can see here how this ties in to the sports metaphor).

The most important aspect of early socialization processes, according to Mellström, is "the extent to which it is based on a male centred practice."(p.61) The role models of technology "controllers" and users, for children, are always male. As a result, "spheres of activity become emotionally gendered early in life." (p.61)

Time and space is likewise organized by gender. "Male and female spheres of activity are described as compartmentalized worlds with their own directions and meanings."(p.62) Male and female labour is spatially separated as well as temporally separated, with male-identified time being linear and part of the "dominant temporal consciousness of our industrial age." (p.63)

Berner and Mellström conclude by summing up their central concepts by noting that their research has "concentrated on what we may call gendered forms of practice and experience." In the first instance, they examined the gendering of technology as an institutional practice; in the second, they examined the "personal and interactive symbolic forms used by men (and women) engineers to understand their world." (p.63) Thus they identify patterns which operate in both a behavioural and symbolic way:

• the continuing identification of certain kinds of technology with masculinity despite growing gender neutrality of other kinds of technology
• the continued tight organization of engineering studies in order to prepare "a hard-working, multi-competent career oriented engineer."(p.64)
• the continuing homosocial character of the engineering world which in its practices and discourses actively excludes women
• the dichotomization of time and space such that men and women are divided both spatially and temporally

Berner and Mellström argue that these categories which distinguish among men "as belonging to a hegemonic form of masculinity, usually linked to the experiences of white, heterosexual, married, and urban middle class males."(p.65) They refer to it as "marketplace manhood", thus indicating the intersections of patriarchy and capitalism in structuring gendered technological identities and spaces.

Magdalena Hillström, "Museums and Gendered Articulations of Modernity"

In this article, Hillström argues that museums, situated as they were in "the politics of male subjectivity of [the] late nineteenth century… articulate a 'modern' world story, defining the meanings of history and future, nature and culture." (p.71) Museums function to hegemonically regulate the behaviour of individuals, designating norms of culture and action particular to the social values of the 19^th century. In this instance, the "modern"/industrial capitalist, knowing, male subject, is set up in opposition to the "primitive", unknowing/unknowable, female/nonhuman object.

Anita Nyberg, "On Our Way Into—Or Out Of—The Self-Service Economy?"

In this article, Nyberg examines gendered divisions of labour to show how notions of "service" are gender specific, such that the ostensible rise of the "self-service" economy applies largely to sectors where women do not perform unpaid labour.

Janice Raymond, "RU 486: A Case Study in the Ethics and Politics of New Reproductive Drugs"

In this article, Raymond reviews the discourse and practice around RU-486 to conclude that "there is an urgent need for more critical discussion of RU 486, not on the terms of the anti-abortionists who, in the United States, have misused health and safety concerns about the drug for their own opportunistic campaign against abortion, but from a women's health perspective." (p. 115). Drawing in themes identified in the Hynes anthology as well as in Stabile and Balsamo around the surveillance and medicalization of the maternal body, Raymond argues that "[t]he kind of medical management that RU 486 requires is not physician oversight from afar, but a highly medicalized treatment regimen which is multi-stepped, time-consuming and, for many women, pain-producing and long-suffering."(p.118)

Rather than giving women control over their bodies, Raymond states that RU 486 in fact increases the degree of medical control over the female body. Furthermore, this control operates in a context of class, race, nationality, and gender such that RU 486 provides so-called options only for privileged women who have access to medical facilities.

Another argument for the erasure of the maternal body that Stabile and Balsamo identify is the discourse around pain and complication management by the medical establishment. Raymond notes that in the medical literature, "the normative conclusion is that complications are 'minimal' [which] not only contradicts the facts about the severity of complications but also transforms women's pain into insignificance." (p.123) The desires, wants, and needs of the maternal body (as Stabile would say, the material conditions under which real maternal bodies operate) are, to a great degree, irrelevant in this context. It is assumed in standard medical discourse that women are prepared to "endure anything to become pregnant or to prevent pregnancy" (emphasis in original, p.124)

This erasure of the pregnant body in the material sense, as Stabile also argues, produces a context which is conducive for right-wing control "as the defenders of women's health and safety" (p.125) and moreover, champions of the fetus. Raymond argues that feminists have a responsibility to generate viable critiques of technology in order to avoid this eventuality.

Patricia Hynes, "Environmental Justice, Women, and the Urban Environment"

In this chapter Hynes points out women's greater degree of environmental activism relative to men, and noted that in the emerging environmental justice movement, the primary players are women of colour. She links this to the fact that environmental justice discourse and practice is grounded in lived experience, and moreover that a large number of significant environmental problems occur in less privileged urban environments (she calls the practice of deliberately unequal distribution of environmental problems "environmental racism"). Since much of the activism of women is situated around the concerns of their communities, the question of environmental justice as mediated through lived experience is central to their work. Hynes proposes as part of a solution a model of "classroom education, community service, and research" which makes links between educational institutions and communities.

Juliet Webster, "Information Technology, Women and their Work"

In this article, Webster identifies the central contradiction of new technologies in the workplace within the historical debates of the 20^th century: "On the one hand, people identified the potential of the technology to eliminate the repetitious tasks characteristic of many jobs and thereby to free people to develop new skills and abilities; on the other hand, people feared the possibility of mass unemployment for many, coupled with an increasing intensification of work and enslavement to machines for those remaining in jobs."(p.141) One major problem with this structuring of the discussion, according to Webster, is that all of it took place in reference to male-dominated jobs, such as skilled manual labour. Thus, Webster is concerned with re-focusing the discussion on the implications of technology for women's work, as well as thinking through the relationship between women's work and technological change, "to suggest that technological developments are as much shaped by gendered divisions of labour as those divisions are shaped by technological developments." (p.142)

Taking stock of the body of feminist work around technological workplace change, Webster notes that there is a diversity of explanatory frameworks. She is most interested in socialist feminist accounts of capitalist patriarchal relations in which technological work is sorted both according to class and gender. Initially, in the 1970s, socialist feminists were concerned with what they saw as the potential disappearance of much of the low-status women's work, as well as deskilling and reskilling. Problems emerged with the analysis, both in the choice of research subjects (office workers) and in the quantification of the role of technology since massive job losses and re-organizations also occurred due to a variety of economic factors. However, the research did confirm that within the workplace, women's status remained low, and was structured by capitalist patriarchal relations.

However, this research did not support either utopic or dystopic predictions, nor did it show that technology would shake up the traditional division of labour, which has remained for the most part consistent. What it did show is that a number of independent factors affected the form of technological influence on women's work. First, work setting and context were important: which jobs were studied? What skills and tasks did they involve? How were they organized in reference to management and unions? Etc. Second, what was the objective of the employers who introduced technology? Third, what was the broader economic and historical context? Thus, after consideration of these questions, it becomes apparent that producing a linear analysis about the relationship of women to the technology is difficult. What these questions produced, though, was an understanding that a multi-causal and multi-factorial analysis had to be developed in studying technology and gender, since "technology, far from being somehow neutral or free-floating or separate from its social context, is intimately bound up with that social context and is intensely political."(p.147)

Thus to understand the gender-technology-work relation at the present time, we must take the context of globalization into consideration, which has resulted in profound changes in the location and nature of women's jobs around the world. As Webster notes, "Information and communications technologies have facilitated this process, permitting the relocation of corporate activities away from the more expensive regions in the so-called 'First World', either to less favoured regions within the same countries, or to entirely different countries in the Third World."(p.148) There is a rise in what is known as "teleworking", and this kind of work takes different forms for men and women: men work as high-status, self-employed, high-tech professional teleworkers while women work as low-status, clerical teleworkers who work difficult hours for low pay.

Webster sums up her findings thus:

• although there have been substantial changes in the conditions and location of women's work, she is unable to posit a direct causal relationship between these changes and the introduction of technology, which is at best a supporting player
• technology has not substantially altered the nature or status of women's work, and women's relationship to technology (as Berner and Mellström also note) remains one of separation and exclusion

Webster then turns to an examination of how technology has become coded as masculine, and what this means for the relationship of technology, gender, and work.

She argues that "the creation and consumption of technologies, including information technology, is subject to an extreme sexual division of labour… [women] are notably absent from the design of technologies, and from decision-making concerning their implementation." (p.151) Women tend to be constituted as external or marginal to technology use and creation, and are homogenized as unskilled users or objects of technology. Furthermore, cultures of technology, such as computing culture, as Massey also notes, are "not only alienating to many women, but incompatible with their lives."(p.152) Thus there are structural and cultural factors at work which exclude and marginalize women, such that the problem is then constituted as women's deficit in skills, talent, or inclination, which can be remediated through training and recruitment.

Webster identifies two potential areas for technology policy intervention. First, an understanding of the mechanisms which explain women's attrition rate in technological spheres. Second, a feminist systems challenge to processes and practices of IT professions, which views women as active participatory agents in initiating change.

Marja Vehviläinen, "Women's Groups, Standpoints, Technical Subjectivities, and 'Ecriture Féminin' in Technology"

In this article, Vehviläinen examines the issue of women's voice/s in the context of information technology. She uses feminist theories and methodologies of gendered voice to situate her study of female office workers and their narratives of their experiences with technology. She began her study with the concept of office workers as agents who could participate in shaping their technological work, and she looked to see whether or not they could use information technology in a way that was positive and empowering. This perspective is informed not only by feminist theory but also by a strong Nordic tradition of worker democracy and worker participation in determining conditions of their own work. However, as Vehviläinen notes, labour unions were not necessarily the best allies in empowering women around technology, as their union policies did not sufficiently address the concrete challenges of these workers. Thus Vehviläinen turned her attention to examining what factors would positively influence women office worker's experiences with technology.

Vehviläinen works heavily with Dorothy Smith's theories on social relations, standpoints and textuality. Smith argues that social relations are an ongoing and systematically negotiated processes grounded in lived experiences and activities, and are not things but rather methods by which to understand practices amongst people. This is connected to the notion of a standpoint by which people make sense of their everyday practices, and thus researchers studying this must be mindful of the concrete activities in which people participate to shape this standpoint. Furthermore, a responsible researcher locates herself in the study, understanding that her interaction with people changes social relations and standpoints, not just for the subjects of study, but also for herself. Finally, Smith's theory of texts and textuality argues that texts are both active and ongoing processes within social relations, and things that "have their own life" in both "textual time" and "intertextual relations". (p.167) Vehviläinen considered information systems as both texts and as processes of creating, developing, interpreting, and using them.

Vehviläinen also used theories of gendered divisions of labour, and the "social and textual relations of information systems development that seemed to have a persistent or permanent character, in spite of office workers' efforts of [sic] transforming information technology." (p.168) Finally, she uses Haraway's cyborg theories to understand the notion of multiple and shifting subjectivities.

Vehviläinen examined how a group of office workers defined information systems, "redefined their own subjectivities, their own thinking, and their own practices, and [how] they participated in the reshaping of social and gendering relations intertwined with information systems and their working life settings."(p.172) In thinking through the notion of "écriture féminine", and whether by virtue of their lived experiences which contribute to particular standpoints, Vehviläinen examines the idea of whether or not women would create and use technology differently than men if given the resources and ability to do so.

Minna Salminen-Karlsson, "Reforming a Masculine Bastion: State-Supported Reform of Engineering Education"

In this article Salminen-Karlsson examines the procedures of planning and implementing a new study program in computer engineering at a technical university, in order to observe how "educational and gender power mechanisms" intersect in a government-sponsored reform of engineering education, designed to increase the numbers of female students. It is useful here to keep Berner and Mellström's work in mind, given the themes they have identified in male-dominated technical fields.

Salminen-Karlsson notes Yvonne Hirdman's model of "gender contract", which argues that male dominance in society is established through separation of the genders, and unequal valuation of the genders such that the male is the norm or standard. Thus, not only do women and men perform different tasks, but the tasks that men do are valued more highly. Hirdman also adds that this operates on three levels with descending degrees of scale: cultural, institutional, and individual. In order to significantly disrupt this contract, one or both of its central tenets must be challenged. When there is a risk of contravention of this contract, Hirdman argues, there are four common responses, aimed at regaining gendered homeostasis: making the female the problem, diminishing the female and seeing her as inherently weak rather than as one party in a power dispute; re-defining the problem such that it is recast as about something other than gender; and seeing the female as the gender with power.

Salminen-Karlsson then turns her attention to examining the gender contract at a technical university, situating it both in relation to macrorelations of gender which operate at the societal level, and in relation to meso- and microrelations of gender which structure the institution and interpersonal relations. Separating the sexes at this university means, for the most part, occupational segregation in which females perform lower-status service work. Female faculty are seen as exceptions, which as Salminen-Karlsson notes, is an example of how the male norm is reified (we can see evidence of a similar pattern in Edelman's study of the switchyard, in which women who performed the work were not seen as normal women). Thus, gender is removed from the equation, and the pretense that gender does not matter is maintained. Women in this university exist in a contradictorily gendered position: they are both "men" who participate in the homosocial kinds of practices that Berner and Mellstrom identify, and "not-men" who bring particular qualities to the work and workplace.

The most common "feigned problematization" that Salminen-Karlsson identified was making women the problem (the familiar "deficit model" of women's involvement in technology), followed by the re-definition of the problem (in this case, a desire to make things better for "all students" rather than women).

Salminen-Karlsson notes the model of "vertical" and "horizontal" power as developed by Ulf Lundgren, which posits that "[w]hat happens in curriculum planning depends… on the relation between education and production, the power structures that are supported by the production system… and the history and traditions of education… [t]hese texts for education codify what the dominating stratum regards as the aims of education and the contents that will lead to achieving these aims."(p.194) Vertical reproduction here refers to a reproduction of the work force, such as giving students knowledge and skills, a moral qualification (punctuality, diligence, etc.), a certain identity (as workers in the system), and creating employment for teachers. Horizontal reproduction designates the fact that education transmits knowledge and skills which are not explicitly required by the labour force, but by the institution's own systems and traditions, such as: the basis for curricula, the selection of teachers, the division of labour in education, the planning and usage of available space, and the level of acknowledged control of the state in dictating the agenda. Thus, two kinds of power interact within the educational institution, and both have implications for the gender contract.

While Berner and Mellstrom noted that engineering education fostered particular values (horizontal), Salminen-Karlsson notes that the demands of the labour market have changed somewhat to value things like knowledgeable cooperation with people rather than mastery of objects, so that female students receive contradictory messages about which model to emulate, and systems of horizontal and vertical power come into conflict.

Returning to Hirdman's model of how to break the gender contract, Salminen-Karlsson suggests that change in the educational system "might be done either by integrating technological education with other subjects, and thus breaking the dichotomy, or by degrading the status of technology in favour of other subjects, that is, lowering the value of the masculine."(p.199) However, the scope of such an endeavour is overwhelming.

Catharina Landström, "Laboratory Studies or Feminist Critique?"

In this article, Landström examines the relationship between laboratory studies (as a discipline) and feminist critique, particularly in regard to three points of theoretical divergence between the two. Landström, like Wajcman and Adam, is concerned with developing an analysis which is neither too situated (for example, a study which examines practices but divorces them from their social and structural context) nor too broad (for example, a study which examines structures and systems but does not look at actual material conditions). Feminist theory provides tools for understanding science as an activity grounded in structural power relations of work and epistemology, while laboratory studies forces an attention to exactly who is doing what.

The first point of dispute is the philosophical histories of the traditions: laboratory studies began within philosophy of science with a rebuttal of traditional positivism, while feminist critique began with a critique of a male-dominated worldview. In terms of critiquing positivism, laboratory studies opposed the notion of a transcendent reality devoid of human context, while feminist theory situated positivism within a male-dominated context of asymmetrical power relations. Thus for laboratory studies, the problem was in the philosophy, while for feminist theory, the problem was in the structures and institutions.

The second point of divergence is the methodological tools used: laboratory studies is situated in sociological, ethographical, and anthropological practices, while feminist critique uses more analysis of scientific discourse. Laboratory studies used the "Strong Programme", which "insisted on the constitutive character of social facts, the need for causal explanations of scientific knowledge, that explanatory methods should be symmetrical, and that the science studies investigator should be impartial regarding truth"(p.213); social constructivism, which focused on how linguistic interaction structured social relations, and actor-network theory (ANT), which posited people and things as part of a network of actors (a feminist critique of ANT is taken up by Sætnan in this volume, and by Susan Ormrod in The Gender-Technology Relation). Feminist work, by comparison, engaged in methods such as historical recovery of women, critique of representation, examination of androcentrism in structuring of research and epistemology. Thus, according to Landström, while laboratory studies have moved towards examining the experiences of people working within a laboratory setting, feminist critique has moved into more abstract examinations of textual representation.

The final point of divergence between feminist work and laboratory studies is what Landström terms "'organizational tension' with reference to how institutional settings generate opposing positions."(p.205) As far as laboratory studies is concerned, institutionalization has been a smooth process and its validity as a field has not been questioned; however, feminism has had a much more rocky course to traverse in the process of working within the institution, as it critiques many of the structural factors of the institution.

Thus, argues Landström, while laboratory studies views science as "a social activity, "generating products for use in society and focusing on how these products are made, feminist critique constructs science as social institutions, producing textual discourses, to be criticized like any other institution as it carries severe male bias."(p.219) Landström's ultimate conclusion is that these two things cannot be reconciled. I would argue that this is because she does not have an adequate feminist model with which to work, and that many of the socialist feminist theories on technology would be a good place to start.

Ann Rudinow Sætnan, "Standing One's Ground Requires Finding Some Ground to Stand On"

In this highly autobiographical article, Sætnan explains her reconciliation of a feminist consciousness with the two analytical tools of actor-network theory (ANT) and social construction of technology (SCOT). She provides two models of theorizing "causally". In theorizing "from technology to gender", "technologies would enter the grammar of gender as symbols and as practices (relationships, behaviours) which would to some extent shape the scope for identity formation, but they would also have to be appropriated and interpreted by individuals in order to become part of that process."(p.238) In theorizing the opposite way, from gender to technology, "gender would be part of the available scope for interest mobilization which governs the shaping and the relative success of proposed technologies."(p.238) Sætnan fears that combining the two would somehow sacrifice the explanatory potential of both in that one would not be able to be an independent variable; moreover positing a relationship of mutual causality requires a highly complex analysis.

She begins to articulate a possible course between the two by identifying some internal inconsistencies in ANT and SCOT which could be fruitful. The first point of entry is the flexibility and blurriness of boundaries between creators/designers and users (and others who encounter the technologies). The second is the problem of theorizing power relations in a system where all things are isolated as a system (though not from each other within the system), and actors are accorded roughly equal weight. Thus, Sætnan makes an attempt to do a particular reading of these two theories in order to open up a space for political action which is conscious of gender, power, and agency. She concludes by acknowledging the dynamic and mutually determining nature of gender and technology as explanatory categories, and the potential of ANT/SCOT for incorporation into the study of gender.

Elisabeth Sundin, "Gender and Technology: Mutually Constituting and Limiting"

Sundin begins her article by pointing out that most studies of gender and technology assume a theoretical framework which is directed at identifying what "is not", a variation of the theme of women as negation or problem. Women are constituted in relation to technology as having some kind of deficit which makes them unable or unwilling to engage with technology in a positive way. Sundin makes it her project to critically examine this problematic combination of women and technology (or, "womenandtechnology", as I read it in my head, in a reference to Cynthia Enloe's "womenandchildren"). She presents the multiple definitions of what technology is, and situates them in their theoretical context, viewing them as "socially constructed artefacts… messages of socio-cultural patterns."(p.251)

Her first source for technological definitions is the work of Svante Lindqvist, who identifies eight familiar definitions of technology in a research context:

1. the use of machines, implements, and tools;
2. applied natural sciences
3. methods to control nature;
4. methods to control the physical environment;
5. methods for satisfying needs through the use of physical objects;
6. methods which are used to process raw materials with the aim of increasing their usefulness;
7. methods to satisfy one's wishes through the use of physical artefacts;
8. all rational, effective activity.

Her second source of definitions is the work of Ole Elgström and Ulla Riis, who work with technology as part of school curriculum. They understand technology as "everyday knowledge, work-life orientation, knowledge with which to meet leisure time in a meaningful manner, a base for further studies… [,] an understanding of the development of society… and, finally as an investigative work method for scientifically oriented subjects…"(p.254, emphasis in original) As Sundin points out, none of either set of definitions have any reference to sex or gender. "It is as if", she writes, "the complicated relationship between women and technology did not exist."(p.254)

Sundin then goes through all of the definitions to point out their lack of attention to how gender might affect each definition. Control (or lack thereof) figures prominently in many of the definitions, which Sundin argues gives it a male image. In addition, she argues that although ostensibly tool use by males and females renders technology equal, the symbolic association of technology with masculinity is the problem (and this is not addressed in the definitions). Sundin concludes with the assertion that gender constructs technology.

Asdal et al, "A Cyborg for Change: A Presentation of Donna Haraway's Perspective on Knowledge Practices"

In this article, Asdal et al work through Haraway's theory in order to develop "new concepts of politics and knowledges, and new forms of practice in order to realize these."(p.269) They view a politics of complicity as fundamental to the process of change: acknowledging one's participation in particular relations and an active desire to alter them. They view Haraway as working from within, since "[s]cience is too important to be left to the enemy."(p.270) They stress Haraway's motif of building bridges and alliances, of attempting to translate across different points of view with the acknowledgement that such projects (projects, not studies; projects is used to connote active engagement with cultural practice) will necessarily be partial and incomplete.

Central to this article, for Asdal et al, is Haraway's discussion of whether or not a standpoint for women exists, in the sense of a common ground from which to work and build a new scientific paradigm; they conclude that this is a problematic goal. They take up Haraway's assertion of "nature" as something which is "constructed rather than discovered". They identify Haraway's three "no! practices" (saying no to essentialization, naturalization, and universalization) and link it to the "god-trick", or omnipotent mastery which elides responsibility. Thus a committed and conscious political science cannot indulge in these three things.