The University of Michigan
School of Information and Department of Women's Studies WS483/006 & SI513: Women + Technology Winter 2001
Prof.: R. Frost, 417D West Hall; 647-6536 (ofc) 332-0031 (home);
Time/Place: Wednesdays, 2:00 - 5:00, 409 West Hall
Office Hours: Tuesdays 9-11, Wednesdays, 11-1.
course objectives:
Technology is neither good nor bad, but it is critically important to investigate how technical power and knowledge operate in contemporary society. Context is everything, so in this course we will examine the difficult relationship between women and technology.
Why a difficult relationship? Perhaps because technical know-how as a form of knowledge is so strongly male-identified, perhaps because in this era the acquisition of (or claim to) expertise provides access to power and accentuates the exclusion of women from power, perhaps because historically women were to be "served" by technological gadgets, perhaps because the recent emergence of formidable information technologies has sharply divided women between enthusiasts and loathers--whatever the reason, we had better investigate it.
In this course, we will examine centrally issues of technology, gender, power, and politics. In one sense we will examine how society shapes technologies and how technologies, once implanted, shape societies--that's fine, but we will more concisely examine how technological artifacts have been used to engender women in very specific ways, and how women have tried to reshape technologies for their own uses. For example, as part of an examination of technoenthusiastic rhetoric, we'll see how liberatory discourses were developed in order to "free" women from the demands of hard, paid labor and, in turn, to liberate them from "domestic servitude." From this, we will learn that, as Marcuse argued, some liberatory impulses can often oppress further.
If knowledge is power, this course will empower--in part by examining paths of disempowerment, in part by understanding the social dynamics of technology.
course readings:
(available exclusively at Shaman Drum, 315 South State Street)
Patrick D. Hopkins, ed., Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology ($22.36) ISBN: 0253212308 (Indiana UP)
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice ($11.65) ISBN: 0674445449 (Harvard UP)
Marge Piercy, He, She, and It ($5.39) ISBN: 0449220605
Technology and Culture XXXVIII:1 (January 1997), special issue, "Gender Analysis and the History of Technology" ISSN: 0040-165X
--plus a course pack (available at Dollar Bill, 611 Church St, 1/2 block south of S. University Ave.
--plus electronic readings available on the course WWW page:
http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/currcrse.html;
this includes a pdf and an html version of this syllabus as well, and both will be updated through the term.
assignments:
Students will be expected to complete a research paper--thesis chapters are acceptable--of about 20 pages on topics of their choice. Topics should first be cleared with the professor, and we will spend some class time discussing research approaches and proposals, which themselves will be required. Students will also be expected to select a relevant book or article and write a 5 to 7-page critique of it and integrate their reactions to it into the research paper. Some time will be spent in class on developing research (and researchable) topics. Weighting of scores: research proposals, 20%; research paper, 40%; recommended book critiques, 25%; class participation: 15%.
schedule of meetings & topics:
Week 1 (January 3). [No meeting due to UM calendar]
Week 2 (January 10). Introduction to Technology: What Constructs What?
Topics: Defining technology, technique, artifact, and image, heroic/masculine and banal/feminine artifacts; the secret life of things.
Readings: none.
Week 3 (January 17). Feminist Epistemology and Technology
Topics: Is there such a thing? Equality versus difference feminism in understanding technology; ecofeminism; problems of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
Also recommended: Merchant, C. (1980). The death of nature: women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. San Francisco, Harper & Row; Brecher, D. (1988). "Gender and Learning: Do Women learn differently?" in M. J. K. Tijdens, I. Wagner, and M. Weggelaar, eds., Women, Work, and Computerization: Forming New Alliances, Amsterdam, North Holland.
Week 4 (January 24). Theories and History of Women + Technology
Topics: Technological practice as a mode of exclusion--who else is marginalized?
Also recommended: Epstein, C. F. (1988). Deceptive distinctions : sex, gender, and the social order. (New Haven: Yale University Press Russell Sage Foundation.)
Week 5 (January 31). Masculinity and excluding women from science and technology
Topics: How are objects masculinized? What makes machines and codes male? Discussion of research framing and strategies
The powerpoint slides for the presentation on Doing Research (I tried to convert them to html, but M$'s html tools stink to html)
Week 6 (February 7).Technical Change &
the Gender Division of Paid Labor (I)
Topics: The troubled history of women's paid labor; from farm, to garrett, to factory.
Readings: Wacjman, Chapter 2, Sowerwine, Charles, "Workers and women in France before 1914: the debate over the Couriau affair," The Journal of Modern History 55:411-41 (Sep 1983); Coffin, Judith G. "Social science meets sweated labor: reinterpreting women's work in late nineteenth-century France," The Journal of Modern History 63:230-70 ( Jun '91) (the latter two articles are on JSTOR; you will need to use your UM uniqname to authenticate. If you have trouble accessing JSTOR, use these links for the Sowerwine and Coffin articles (they are sizeable .pdf files, so be patient if you're on a modem).
Also recommended: Tilly, L. and J. W. Scott (1978). Women, work, and family. New York, Holt Rinehart and Winston; Michelle Perrot, "The Three Ages of Industrial Discipline in Nineteenth-Century France,", in John Merriman, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Week 7 (Feb. 14). Technical Change & the Gender Division of Paid Labor (II)
Topics: Women's work in the High Machine and Information Ages.
Readings:. DownsCh3.html; Davis in Kramarae, 29-115; Schulman in Kramarae, 98-115; Kramarae in Kramarae, 147-160, Hopkins, Chapter 22, Horowitz in Technology & Culture.
Also recommended: TBA.
Week 8 (February 21). The Industrial Revolution in the Home
Topics: Gender difference and domestic labor-saving technologies, the rise of mother's helpers; inventing "domestic science"
Also recommended: Jenkins, V. S. (1994). The lawn : a history of an American obsession. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press; Williams, J. C. (1998), "Getting Housewives the Electric Message: Gender and Energy Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century," His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology. R. Horowitz. & A. Mohun. Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press.
>> Note Well: Book critiques due for Week 10! <<
Week 10 (March 14). Women in the Technology Professions I
Topics: Engineering, architecture and design, human resources management, medicine and the lab: criteria of competence and issues of measurement
Week 13 (April 4). Cyberculture and Feminist Visions of Dis-/U-topias
Topics: Gender making and masking: "On the Web, nobody knows you're a dog," cybergrrls, modalities of inclusion and exclusion; is there a single culture of the Internet?
Week 14 (April 11). Final Catch-up and Recapitulation.
Topics: (Time for catch-up, of needed); where do we go from here? Defining a collective analysis of a dialectics of gender and technology
Readings: Piercy, entire.
Also recommended: TBA
Here are the supplemental readings, including but not limited to:
Robert L. Frost, "Machine Liberation: Inventing Housewives and Home Appliances in Interwar France," French Historical Studies (April, 1993)
Judith McGaw, "Women and the History of American Technology" Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Summer 1982): 798-828.
Leavitt on the c-section in Leavitt, Judith Walzer, ed. Women and Health in America: Historical Readings.
Adam, A (1997) 'What should we do with cyberfeminism?', in R Lander and A Adam (eds) Women in Computing, 17-27
Martin, E (1991) `The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16(3): 485-501
Michelle Perrot, "The Three Ages of Industrial Discipline in Nineteenth-Century France,", in John Merriman, ed., Consciousness and Class Experience in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Merchant, C (1992) Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World
[Bijker on masculinity in the 1890s bicycle craze] in Bijker, W, Hughes, T and Pinch, T (eds)(1988) The Social Construction of Technological Systems
Sundin, E (1995) 'The social construction of gender and technology: A process with no definite answer', The European Journal of Women's Studies, (1995) Special Issue on Technology, 2(3): 335-53
Edwards, P (1990) 'The Army and the microworld: Computers and the politics of gender identity', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(1):102-27
Susan Leigh Star, "From Hestia to Home Page: Feminism and the Concept of Home in Cyberspace" in Nina Lykke & Rosi Braidotti (Eds.) Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs (London: ZED Books, 1996).
Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine
Rasmussen, B and Håpnes, T (1991), 'Excluding women from the technologies of the future? A case studies of the culture of computer science', Futures, December, 1107-1119
Joan Scott, "The Mechanization of Women's Work;" Scientific American (September 1982).
Turkle, S and Papert, S (1990) 'Epistemological pluralism: Styles and voices within the computer culture' Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16(1): 128-58
Hacker, S (1989) Pleasure, Power, and Technology
MacKenzie, D and Wajcman, J (eds)(1999) The Social Shaping of Technology
Haraway, D (1988), 'Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective', Feminist Studies, 14(3): 575-99
Dawn Dietrich, "(Re)-Fashioning the Techno-Erotic Woman: Gender and Textuality in the Cybercultural Matrix" in Steven Jones (Ed.) Virtual Culture
Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures
Haraway, Donna, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s," Socialist Review 80 (March-April 1985), pp. 65-107
Sherry Turkle, "Making a Pass at a Robot" from Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
Rachel P. Maines. The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The Industrial Revolution in the Home," Technology and Culture 17 (1976), pp. 1-23
Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age
Joan Rothschild, ed, Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology