Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert, "Introduction"

Arguing that we live in a culture which is "not only structured but saturated by gender, Terry and Calvert explore some of the general issues around gender and technology raised by this volume of work. Briefly touching on the asymmetrical binarism of gender and technology left by positivist philosophies of science and technology, they develop a picture of technology as "always encompassing relationships and exchanges among machines, designers, and users…contrary to a kind of technological determinism."(p.3) Terry and Calvert note that this nuanced analysis of technology necessitates ethical and moral implications for technology use, and an understanding of technologies within their particular historical, economic, and social context of design, realization, and use. Technologies are "always already" part of social relations (and it could be argued that technologies are social relations), rather than neutral objects which come to have social relations laid over top of them.

Terry and Calvert divide their anthology into three sections, corresponding to three significant areas of feminist engagement into technology: digital worlds, bodies, and the home.

Margaret Morse, "Virtually Female: Body and Code"

Thus the question becomes: "What is the contemporary situation for volitional action and intervention?"(p.29) In one sense, this new technology offers more plasticity than many which have gone before it; in another sense this technology is always already under control, limited as it is by access, skill, and opportunity. However, suggests Morse, "a network is defined as much by its holes or what it leaves out as its links."(p.29) She outlines her work with activist women in the arts, who share acts of boundary crossing "to create new domains that include technological have-nots."(p.31)

Christine Tamblyn, "Remote Control: The Electronic Transference"

Nina Wakeford, "Networking Women and Grrrls With Information/Communication Technology: Surfing Tales of the World Wide Web"

In this chapter, Wakeford explores women's online networks, and feminist interventions into the technology. She argues that constructing a discourse of gender as a priori problematic in relation to technology results in two significant difficulties: first, that the discourse of "problems" conceals the variable, contradictory, and often positive relationship that women have historically had with technology; and second, that "cyberspace" is not a coherent entity but a series of interrelated processes, practices, and things. 

Andrea Slane, "Romancing the System: Women, Narrative Film, and the Sexuality of Computers"

In this article, Slane takes a rather unusual perspective on gender, culture and technology: an examination of the discursive presence of computers in film, arguing that "[t]he history of the depiction of computers in narrative films centrally reflects (or helps construct) the imaginary place of computers in American visions of power, individual freedom, and democracy—concepts which, despite their appeal to universal humanism, continue to be gendered in substantial ways."(p.72) Most films, according to Slane, do not challenge traditional gender binaries in their use of technology, nor ideologies of women as inherently hostile to technological "progress". "By considering historical changes in the narrative roles computers have played, we can see how technologies might influence the narrative depiction of gendered conflicts—and the role historically variant constructions of gender have and are playing in the imaging of the social function of these devices."(p.72)

Computers call up a variety of ideological associations: "progress", reason, faith in science to control and manage human existence. Reason and rationality are paradoxically represented as the solution to and cause of problems; in narrative film this is often translated into a gender conflict (which is resolved at the end through a heterosexual union). Despite the potential for new forms of technology to expand possibilities for identity construction, as Stone and Wakeford also note in a somewhat different way, "these films leave gender, race, and indeed heterosexuality unproblematized as social constructs."(p.77)

Sara Diamond, "Taylor's Way: Women, Cultures, and Technology"

Diamond begins with the presumption that although there is nothing a priori transgressive or liberatory in new technologies in terms of gender, the design and social/cultural application of these technologies may allow new, potentially positive kinds of interactions and experiences. This is not to argue that cyberspace is "a feminine space of fluidity and undefined identity"(p.83); as Diamond cautions, gender is a significant organizer of lived technological relations. Furthermore, the apparent potential for information access and dispersal online may create a false sense of democracy and participation.

Ira Livingston, "Indiscretions: Of Body, Gender, Technology"

In this chapter, Livingston outlines a brief history of ideologies of the body to show how presently bodies are understood in terms of machines, with the two ideologies being mutually constitutive. Ideologies of postmodern flexible bodies intersect with ideologies of machines which are no longer clunky piles of gears, but rather reconfigurable, multifunctional objects which are as much ether as metal.

This relation of technology and the body disturbs both constructivist accounts wherein the body is infinitely malleable raw material, and essentialist accounts wherein the body is ontologically given. Livingston argues that theoretically, these two accounts are presented as uncomplicated "straw men so that the presenter can 'problematize' or 'complicate' or 'deconstruct' them, a maneuver that usually has the effect of re-installing the caricatures."(p.98) How then can we avoid replicating these theoretical relations?

One suggestion Livingston makes is to consider sexual difference not just as operative between us but also among us, as a "fractal difference" which "divides us from ourselves as it does from others".(p.100) Moreover, "it is this contradiction between being always already constructed and continually under construction that now animates gendered bodies."(p.101) Virtual spheres provide opportunities both for expansion of identies and more rigorous surveillance.

Evelyn M. Hammonds, "New Technologies of Race"

In this article, Hammonds argues that the concept of "race", both as a cultural and scientific notion, remains translated through terms of morphology, despite shifts in the meanings and manifestations of that morphology. Morphological understandings of race which posit "races" composed of discrete and identifiable physiological configurations are employed in ostensible boundary crossing through computer morphing programs. Under the pretense of fostering greater racial understanding, this use of the technology re-inscribes the omnipotent narrative power of elites, and elides real structural relations of inequality. The violent history of miscegenation is erased in seemingly egalitarian technological relations, and the right of white men to retain privileges of naming/encoding is re-affirmed.

Soheir Morsy, "Biotechnology and the Taming of Women's Bodies"

In this article, Morsy argues that reproductive technologies, with their multiple effects predicated on relations of gender, race/ethnicity, nationalism, and power, represents a new form of colonialism of women's bodies. The international discourse on "population" and anti-fertility vaccines represents a desire by affluent industrialized countries to effect regimes of regulation and control on the nation-bodies of impoverished women. The fetishized body of the Other is a source of both pleasure and danger in its promise of exotic fecundity.

B. Ruby Rich, "The Party Line: Gender and Technology in the Home"

In this highly autobiographical article, Rich details her experiences with the telephone as a site of subversion, pleasure, dis-ease and networking, and expands this model to suggest it as a possibility for technologically-driven forms of resistance, which paradoxically augments and limits communication.  Locations are dispersed and ephemeral, which provides a site of multiple points of entry, but also "eviscerates" the possibilities of working from a single location.