Wajcman Confronts Cyberfeminism
Lucy A. Suchman · Social Studies of Science · 2006
Like any artefact, a book configures its audience. However explicitly or implicitly, an author imagines her reader(s) in the particular ways that she crafts her text. And, as readers, we find ourselves and our interests variously present or absent, represented or overlooked in the texts that we take up. Whether for our own projects or for the edification of our students, reading for many of us involves a process of asking who might be addressed by a text, looking for the delicate balance of familiarity and difference through which a text works its transformative effects. I found myself more than usually preoccupied with these questions as I read Judy Wajcman's newest book TechnoFeminism. Well known and widely admired within science and technology studies (STS) as a long-time feminist scholar focused on questions of work, technology and gender (for example, Wajcman, 1991, 1998), Wajcman's interlocutor emerges at first as a feminist researcher, more activist than academic. She is, at least initially, a reader working to come to grips with the gendered character of technol ogy but unfamiliar with recent work in STS, which the author argues could prove to be a powerful tool for thinking less deterministically and more generatively about technology. As I continue reading, however, this figure appears more unstable, shifting at one moment to a young scholar inter ested in the history of feminism's relations to science and technology, at another to someone perhaps like the author herself, already immersed in both feminist research and STS, but still thinking through questions of social contingency and material constraint. This shifting ground may mean that any given reader will experience moments of displacement by the others. It is also, however, what gives this book its liveliness and its availability for multiple forms of engagement.