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Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine. (1997) in process Caputi, Jane. "The Metaphors of Radiation: Or, Why a Beautiful Woman is Like a Nuclear Power Plant", Women's Studies International Forum 14(5): 423-42 (1991). Cockburn, Cynthia. "Technological Change in a Changing Europe: Does it Mean the Same for Women as for Men?" Women's Studies International Forum 15(1): 85-90. Haraway, Donna. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. (1996)
The first section in Haraway's book deals with the concept of the "modest witness" as defined in pre-Enlightenment-era scientific practice. Haraway leads the reader through the development of the concept of the "modest witness", the objective view-from-nowhere describer of events and establisher of "facts", whose marking is ostensibly invisible but who is really a white, propertied, educated, male. She shows how the definition of the modest witness was inextricably tied to the model of the virtuous gentleman. It is just this problematic that Adams takes up in Artificial Knowing. Much of her book is predicated on showing the links between artificial intelligence (AI) theory and traditional empiricism. Not only, she argues, does AI emulate the idea of cognition devoid of perception in the abstract sense, but it emulates the ideals of its creators: white male technicians. She proposes a feminist critique of traditional empiricism (Code figures prominently) and shows how it can be applied to the metaphors and assumptions grounding AI. However, based on my conversations with an acquaintance who is a consciousness/AI theorist, I am inclined to think that the guiding philosophies of AI are less traditional than Adams proposes. While there is still little consciousness of the role of gender, there seems to be acknowledgement of the role of relationships, partiality, and interconnections. Haraway's second section is about the creation of new organisms, elements, and world orders. Here she introduces her theme of technoscience as a cultural and corporate practice, and argues for kinship between its many creations. In addition, she examines the idea of "border crossings" in transuranic elements, transgenic organisms, and organic-inorganic couplings (such as bio-CPUs). She proposes that "[t]ransgenic border crossing signifies serious challenges… for many members of Western cultures, which historically have been obsessed with racial purity, categories authorized by nature, and the well-defined self." Here Haraway continues Schiebinger's work in Nature's Body: Schiebinger analyzes the 18th- and 19th-century anxiety created by the liminal primates and Haraway examines the liminal spawns of technoscience. The tensions and social fictions are similar in both cases indicating that little has changed in foundational metaphors. The concerns that Haraway takes up in her section on the gene are similar to those voiced by Adam. Where Adam notes that AI theorists are devising cognitive maps, Haraway points out that the use of "mapping" itself as a trope indicates a drive to delineate and categorize. If Haraway argues that genes are fetishized, it might also be argued (though Adam does not) that cognition is also fetishized in AI theory. Haraway proposes that the gene (and, by extension, human bodies) is en route to being commodified (as evidenced by the patenting and sale of several organic items, from mice to DNA sequences). The gene's role as information cannot be overlooked, both in its juxtaposition with Adam's account of cognition commodification, as well as the concurrent commodification of information and communication. I also recall Adam's comments on the lack of embodiment in AI theory when I read Haraway's discussion of the metaphor of the speculum. Few metaphors combine the notion of technology and the body as effectively as the speculum, which is at once an invasive tool of medical surveillance and a means by which women can know their bodies. Caputi takes up the concept of embodiment in a different way: she points out the simultaneous abstraction-out-of-existence and eroticization of nuclear language. A recent commercial for a program about nuclear bombs, shown on The Learning Channel, makes this connection, combining now-familiar footage of nuclear blasts while a sultry voice-over promises the viewer scenes of "power" and "destruction" (my response to this was horror, by the way). Caputi proposes that nuclear discourse both normalizes and fetishizes nuclear technology. First, the tropes and metaphors of "nuclear fashion" make the technology seem a normal part of our society. We "nuke" food in the microwave and eat at the Atomic Café. Second, the fetishization of nuclear technology can take two forms: eroticization and/or fundamentalism (and these two seem to be often combined). Nuclear technology can be a highly gendered project, with links to traditional male preserves such as institutional science and the military, and the resulting metaphors merely illustrate concrete practices. Cockburn's article provides a nice frame to the issues of women and technology. Where Haraway, for instance, deals with the more abstract issues of global capital and its relationship to technoscience (though she is usually careful to provide situated examples), Cockburn takes on technology in the most prosaic of spaces: the domestic sphere. That she does so is a testament both to feminist scholarship on domestic work as well as the degree of technological intervention in household processes. We return to Haraway's language of "commodification" and "fetishization" in that household technology in the 20th century has been quite concerned with female consumers of domestic products. Thus, as Cockburn notes, "[t]echnology and technological change… matter to women."
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