The central premise of Stabile's analysis is the "enduring pervasiveness of woman/nature, man/culture binarism… and its implications for feminist approaches to technology and modernity." (p.1) She identifies two feminist responses to technology: technophobia, characterized by "reactionary essentialist formations", and technomania, characterized by "equally problematic political strategies framed around fragmentary and destabilized theories of identity."(p.1) In both cases, argues Stabile, class is an absent category of analysis. This lack of class analysis is concomitant with larger political, social, theoretical developments. I am not entirely convinced by this assessment, given the work of theorists such as Cockburn which quite explicitly address the role of class.

While both so-called left and right camps are convinced of the significance of technology, Stabile argues that neither agrees on the actual incarnation of this significance or what changes it should bring. The right has a commitment to the "unstoppable march of capital", and technoscience is seen as an inherently progressive operation. Stabile here identifies the right's fundamental contradiction of the deterioration of institutions and ideologies and attempts to resuscitate them, juxtaposed with the promotion of policies which undermine them.

Thus, Stabile writes, this text "seeks a better understanding of the complex and often antagonistic relationship between feminist theory and activism and the conditions that structure the modern, technologized world."(p.6) She takes what she calls an interstitial approach to the problematic, to examine the systems/structures and assumptions behind both technomania and technophobia, since neither mania or phobia is a sufficient paradigm to address the complexities of present capitalism (postmodernity), or to develop viable and responsible political activism. Much of the theorizing, according to Stabile, in its privileging of gender as the primary category of analysis, makes invisible some important distinctions and boundaries, such as race, class, nationality, and so forth.

Seeing technophobia and technomania as both representative of larger issues within feminist thought itself, Stabile identifies her theoretical grounding as based in socialist feminist and historical materialist analysis. In defining socialism as class struggle against capitalism, she is arguing for a comprehensive analysis of social relations and power, placing historically articulated relations of production at heart of analysis, while recognizing the differences which express the social formation.(p.9) She argues that although it is essential to understand the different manifestations of social identities and oppressions, various oppressions find their most extreme and violent expression through economic exploitation. Furthermore, she argues that rejection of socialist feminism reflects theoretical essentialism driven by notions that economic interest excludes feminist concerns; and the idea that unless a text authored by a man accords gender absolute primacy (here she is speaking about Marx), it is not viable. In using a theoretical framework which leans towards fragmentation and single-issue politics, and away from so-called totalizing metanarratives, feminists lose the possibility of a multifaceted structural analysis that positions the relations of capitalism in conjunction with multiple intersecting factors. Stabile thus argues that the problems confronting women today require that feminists engage with and analyze oppression on a structural level without losing sight of multiplicity and intersectionality. Postmodernism, for Stabile, removes a structural analysis which is important for an ethical and just theory; it results in what she terms critical theory devoid of critique, a radical intellectual devoid of radicalism, and social theory devoid of a theory of the social.

However, she does not entirely dismiss postmodernist theory. She sees in the postmodernist theory of aesthetics/discourse a potential theory of the social, which, when examined, can yield "an index to the material interests that motivate such inquiries."(p.15) Indeed, technophobia and technomania can be viewed as indicative of feminist attitudes towards postmodernism as well as to technology itself.

After outlining some of the central tenets of postmodernism, Stabile argues that rather than relying on slippery notions of the "death of the subject", feminists are obligated to provide a more comprehensive analysis of women's oppressions, and "rearticulating feminism with a progressive politics."(p.20)

Chapter One, "Recycled Histories"

In this chapter, Stabile considers feminist attitudes towards technology and modernity as expressed in speculative fiction, both utopic and dystopic, as well as related feminist literary criticism. She proposes that the apparent realism of science fiction as a genre is in fact a form of hyperrealism: "a reference to a real which does not exist but is presented as a real that may yet exist…"(p.26) SF "establishes the present as a historical moment viewed from an elsewhere known as the future."(p.27) Thus, actual historical and ideological conditions are relegated to the past.

For technophobic feminists, who reify the nature-culture binarism and tip the balance in favour of nature, the future is constructed out of nostalgia for an imagined "natural" past. Technophobic feminists tend to argue in favour of a "real" past in which women's contributions were essential, many, and valued. Stabile identifies three techniques by which this is done with texts: revising, re-inventing, and recuperating. Such a model posits a parallel alternative literary and social tradition created by women which developed alongside but subsumed by masculinist cultural production. Stabile argues that this model is problematic in its uncritical acceptance of an imagined or selectively remembered past, models of essential female character and societies, and linkage of women with nature. It does not acknowledge the diversity, contradictions, and ambivalences of women's experiences and histories.

For technomaniac feminists, the present and past are erased and/or transcended in favour of the creation of new utopic stories for the future. Boundaries are dissolved and identities merged such that no critical consciousness is possible.

In both instances, current material concerns and ideological anxieties are relevant only insofar as they relate to the present or past. Stabile argues that "this matrix of feminist desires" promotes "forms of disabling amnesia", and erases or obfuscates "contemporary social conditions that they help to produce" (p.27-8). Yet these two streams of thought illustrate the ongoing dialectic of feminism's relationship to postmodern theory: "an ideology based on gender difference versus an ideology based on the endless and multiple play of difference."(p.44) Stabile asks, to what extent are both of these positions politically debilitating? What relation does feminist literary production have to political activity? The next chapter takes up these questions.

Chapter Two, "'A Garden Inclosed is my Sister': Ecofeminism and Ecovalences"

In this chapter, Stabile traces political consequences from an aesthetic theory becoming, negatively, a social theory. She argues that while ostensibly feminist technophobia remains confined, for the most part, to cultural production, its ideas inform a variety of feminist theory. In addition, she argues that this kind of analysis springs from a privileged standpoint. Stabile links technophobia to the development of an ecofeminist position. Through examination of the way in which ecofeminism's ideas "circulate in regressive fashions", Stabile argues that ecofeminism is politically limited both strategically and theoretically, particularly in its reliance on the woman-nature link. As an alternative, she proposes "a feminist and socialist environmentalism that is committed to a global understanding and formulation of the concept of an ecosystem and its social relations--one that is more cognizant of, and attentive to, the complexities of that term."(p.50)

She begins by examining ecofeminist philosophy. Ecofeminism, rooted in radical feminism, posits gender as a primary site of oppression, and rely on naturalized links between "women" and "nature" to ground their analyses. They reject technology, viewing it as a tool of destruction and oppression for women. This model both homogenizes women and places them in a problematic "separate sphere", and produces a paradigm of reductive social relations which "can neither account for the contradictory aspects of this process at different historical moments nor adequately analyze intersecting yet structurally different forms of oppression."(p.52) Technology is theorized outside of structural social relations (except for homogenized gender relations). For example, Native American traditions are mythologized, with no acknowledgement of the actual environmental problems, related to capitalist technological development, plaguing Aboriginal communities; urgent environmental problems which confront the majority of North American women exist in the urban realm. Thus the problem cannot be critiqued as a problem of male culture, nor solved through a romanticized connection between women and nature. In addition, such an analysis erases the role of consumerism and commodification of environmentalism. Activism is reduced to one's consumption patterns. Thus, "without a theory that can account for this particularity and its relation to the larger system of capitalist production, ecofeminism's universalizing and essentializing claims consequently contribute to reinforcing the very imbalances they purport to remedy."(p.63)

Stabile thus concludes that technophobia and ecofeminism as it is manifested are a luxury of theorists who are positioned in particularly privileged configurations, such that a class based analysis is invisible, erased, and/or seen as unnecessary.

Chapter Three, "Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance"

In this chapter, Stabile analyzes historical shifts in thinking about motherhood, women's bodies, fetuses, and reproduction with regard to visual representation. She begins by asking how essentialist arguments, such as those espoused by ecofeminists, can be used in the service of anti-feminists, or, "how can re-contextualizations and de-contextualizations serve the interests of conservative politics?"(p.69) Specifically, how has appropriation of the ecofeminist valorization of motherhood by the New Right re-situated motherhood and the maternal body as an "instrument of oppressive power"?(p.69)

As a result, the maternal body becomes divorced from its material context. The maternal body is not situated in a social, historical, political, or economic position, so that questions of structural and systemic problems are irrelevant.

Stabile argues that both technophobia, in its reifying of motherhood with no critique of paternal authority, and technomania, in its eagerness to dispense with the body, both present problematic alternatives for resistance. Instead, Stabile proposes an approach that would be "neither pro- nor anti-natalist, but a negotiation between the two that could utilize both the critiques and positive aspects of mothering."(p.94) In addition, she argues in favour of understanding women's reproduction as labour, so as to shift the terms of engagement from an idealized abstraction to real, contradictory, material bodies.

Chapter Four, "Semper Fidelis: Daughters in their Father's Military"

In this chapter, Stabile examines representation of women in the military in both media depictions of the Gulf war, and feminist debates around militarism and women soldiers.

The increased representation accorded to women in the military during the hyper-represented Gulf war, and the resulting "series of crises erupting around the issue of women in the military offers a graphic illustration of the limitations of feminist technophobia and liberal, feminist technophilia…"(p.101) Here Stabile casts the conflict as between radical/ecofeminist based technophobia which posits women's essentially pacific nature, and liberal technophilia which, in its advocacy for women's equal access to institutions, left itself with few sites of critique of those institutions.

Stabile examines gender both in terms of a crisis produced by the media, and in terms of a crisis and solutions identified by feminists, with the central goal being to analyze how expository and descriptive devices and strategies used by both camps of feminists produced a truncated analysis of the event, and of North American military hegemony predicated on a variety of social oppressions.

In the traditional narrative, women stand for that which must be protected, and their essentially pacific female nature prevents them from indulging in combat. This construction of women in opposition to more aggressive men has stood as one of the hallmarks of a civilized society. Aggressive and militaristic women are seen as too close to a state of (bad) nature (this division is not applied to North American and Western European women in the military). "Other" women are either oppressed victims or unnatural mercenaries (who have been brainwashed by some nefarious agenda); either way they lack agency and subjectivity. Thus, this model has clear racial/ethnic as well as gender structures. Rape, for example, was only an issue if it promoted an anti-Iraqi agenda, and certainly not an issue when it occurred within the U.S. military.

Presenting a challenge to the notion of women's essential abhorrence of war and the military, liberal-feminist-led advocacy in favour of the inclusion of women in what was seen as a powerful institution and practice, as well as an integral part of citizenship. This advocacy is motivated by two problematic beliefs: first, that women within such institutions will provide a humanizing element that will shift the balance of power favourably; second, that lifting a ban on combat will improve the status of female soldiers. Again, dynamics of class and race are erased from this analysis, and thus neither the technophobic or technophilic stance can adequately theorize women's experiences or provide a model of critical social theory.

Chapter Five, "Calculating on a Frictionless Plane"

In this chapter, Stabile chronicles the development of feminist technomania, which despite its enthusiasm, remains confined for the most part to academic spheres. Accepting of the premises of postmodernism, technomania "claims this is the new and novel condition that will help to dismantle the terms of the woman/nature binarism."(p.135) To what degree, asks Stabile, is this a useful paradigm, and moreover to what degree is it informed by privilege and a belief in a crisis of subjectivity which actually helps to legitimate capitalism.

Stabile looks to Marxist theory to promote the notion of the "ever-increasing ability of capitalism to mystify its processes… A politics intentionally or unintentionally derived from the motif of travel, voluntaristic dislocations and relocations, and boundary confusion serves the interests of this system."(p.153) Thus capitalism depends on slippage, blurring, and obfuscation of difference and hierarchy. A political project of representation has been replaced with an aesthetic project of representation, which is ultimately powerless to effect change in real material relations. Despite its ostensible attention to differences, technomania lacks a concrete class analysis, and thus results in "a deepening sense of social and political apathy."(p.154) Affinity politics, as espoused by Haraway, is not an alternative to the identity politics of the technophobic feminists. Affinity, points out Stabile, "is structured and limited by intellectual habitus: interaction, except of the most contrived or accidental nature, is increasingly limited."(p.155) Difference is limited to postmodern play, and "consequently expressed within the parameters of a single class position…"(p.155)

As an alternative, Stabile proposes that feminists "forge theories and practices capable of sustaining and promoting socialist analyses… [T]ranslation, stuttering, and partial understandings always run the risk not simply of incomprehensibility, but of assimilations, incorporations, and elitist notions that can only work to the detriment of socialist-feminism."(p.156) Stabile thus calls for contextualization of a material analysis within a context of global struggles for emancipation.