Technofeminism and Ecofeminism

Technofeminism

Technofeminism is a culturally extremely progressive, transhumanist and usually left wing ideology which deems technology as the ultimate equalizer of gender and therefore that transhumanism is something that should be embraced and encouraged by feminists in search of total equality.

TechnoFeminism is a book by academic sociologist Judy Wajcman about the role that gender plays in technology. The book reframes the relationship between gender and technologies, and presents a feminist reading of the woman-machine relationship. It is considered a key contributor to the rise of feminist technoscience as a field.

Feminist technoscience is a transdiscriplinary branch of science studies which emerged from decades of feminist critique on the way gender and other identity markers are entangled in the combined fields of science and technology. The term technoscience especially in regard to the field of feminist technoscience studies, seeks to remove the distinction between scientific research and development with applied applications of technology while assuming science is entwined with the common interests of society. As a result, science is suggested to be held to the same level of political and ethical accountability as the technologies which develop from it. Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world. Feminist technoscience focuses less on intrapersonal relationships between men and women, and more on broader issues concerning knowledge production and how bodies manifest and are acknowledged in societies.

According to Judy Wajcman the concept of technology has historically been bound to indigenous women. The roles of harvesters, or caretakers of the domestic economy taken up by these women lead Wajcman to conclude they would have created tools such as the sickle and the pestal making them the first technologists. During the eighteenth century, industrial engineering began to constitute the modern definition of technology. This transformed the meaning from including useful arts technology – such as needlework, metalwork, weaving and mining– to strictly applied science. As a result, "male machines" replaced the "female fabrics" as identifiers of modern technology when engineering was considered a masculine profession. Due to political movements of the 1960s and early 70s, science and technology were considered as industrial, governmental, and/or militaristic based practices, which were associated with masculinity, thus resulting in a lack of feminist discourse. Feminist scholarship identified the absence of women's presence in technological and scientific spheres, due to the use of sex stereotyping in education and sexual discrimination in the workforce, as well as the development of technology as a masculine construct. Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET a precursor to the internet developed by the United States Department of Defense, and the Manhattan Project. 

The women's health movements of the 1970s in the United States and the United Kingdom provided momentum to the emergence of feminist politics around scientific knowledge. During the early states of second wave feminism campaigns for improved birth control and abortion rights were at the forefront in challenging the consolidation of male dominated sciences and technologies at the expense of women's health. After the first successful birth of a child using in vitro fertilization technology, critiques of reproductive technologies rapidly grew. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were fears that oppressive population policies would be enacted, since men could use technology to appropriate the reproductive abilities of women. For many feminist activists, such as Gena Corea, such technologies changed women's bodies into industrialized factories for the production of more human beings, which these feminist activists viewed as another way of continuing the subjugation of women in society. Others viewed the act of regaining knowledge and control over women's bodies as a crucial component to women's liberation. Further advances in reproductive technologies allowed the possibility to allow new family types and lifestyles to form, beyond the heterosexual family unit.

Science was originally seen as an alien entity opposed to women's interests. Sciences and technologies developed under the misconception that women's needs were universal and inferior to the needs of men, forcing women into rigid, determined sex roles. A shift happened in the 1980s – Sandra Harding proposed "the female question in science" to raise "the question of the science in feminism", claiming that science is involved in projects that are not only neutral and objective, but that are strongly linked to male interests. The conceptualization of science and technology was expanded to reflect the all-pervasive ways in which technology is encountered in daily life, gaining attention of feminists out of concern for female positions in science and technological professions. Rather than asking how women can be better treated within and by science, feminist critics instead chose to focus on how a science deeply involved in masculinity and masculine projects could be used for the emancipation of women.

Today's feminist critique often uses the former demonology of technology as a point of departure to tell a story of progress from liberal to postmodern feminism. According to Judy Wajcman, both liberal and Marxist feminists failed in the analysis of science and technology, because they considered the technology as neutral and did not pay attention to the symbolic dimension of technoscience.

Technofeminism is a feminist approach which foregrounds the relationship between cyberspace, the Internet, and technology. It can be used to refer to a philosophy, methodology or community. The term was coined in the early 1990s to describe the work of feminists interested in theorizing, critiquing, exploring and re-making the Internet, cyberspace and new-media technologies in general. The foundational catalyst for the formation of cyberfeminist thought is attributed to Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto", third wave feminism, post-structuralist feminism, and the feminist critique of the blatant erasure of women within discussions of technology.

The dominant cyberfeminist perspective takes a utopian view of cyberspace and the Internet as a means of freedom from social constructs such as gender, sex difference and race. For instance, a description of the concept described it as a struggle to be aware of the impact of new technologies on the lives of women as well as the so-called insidious gendering of technoculture in everyday life. It also sees technology as a means to link the body with machines. This is demonstrated in the way cyberfeminism—as maintained by theorists such as Barbara Kennedy—is said to define a specific cyborgian consciousness concept, which denotes a way of thinking that breaks down binary and oppositional discourses. There is also the case of the renegotiation of the artificial intelligence (AI), which is considered top-down masculinist, into bottom-up feminized version labeled as ALife programming. 

VNS Matrix member Julianne Pierce defines cyberfeminism: "In 1991, in a cozy Australian city called Adelaide, four bored girls decided to have some fun with art and French Feminist theory... with homage to Donna Haraway they began to play around with the idea of cyberfeminism."

Authors Hawthorne and Klein explain the different analyses of cyberfeminism in their book: "Just as there are liberal, socialist, radical and postmodern feminists, so too one finds these positions reflected in the interpretations of cyberfeminism." Cyberfeminism is not just the subject matter, but is the approach taken to examine subject matter. For example: Cyberfeminism can be a critique at equality in cyberspace, challenge the gender stereotype in the cyberspace, examine the gender relationship in cyberspace, examine the collaboration between human and technology, examine the relationship between women and technology and more.

Ecofeminism 

Ecofeminism is a feminist ideology which believes that ecology doesn't place women in the dominant position but rather calls for a collaborative, equal society. It explores connections between women and nature. While not inherently on the left, Ecofeminism criticizes Capitalism for its patriarchal values and believes it does not benefit women.

Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyze the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.

Ecofeminist analysis explores the connections between women and nature in culture, economy, religion, politics, literature and iconography, and addresses the parallels between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women. These parallels include but are not limited to seeing women and nature as property, seeing men as the curators of culture and women as the curators of nature, and how men dominate women and humans dominate nature. Ecofeminism emphasizes that both women and nature must be respected.

Though the scope of ecofeminist analysis is broad and dynamic, American author and ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak has offered one way of categorizing ecofeminist work: 1) through the study of political theory as well as history; 2) through the belief and study of nature-based religions; 3) through environmentalism.

While diverse ecofeminist perspectives have emerged from women activists and thinkers all over the world, academic studies of ecofeminism have been dominated by the North American universities. Thus, in the 1993 essay entitled "Ecofeminism: Toward Global Justice and Planetary Health" authors Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen outline what they call the "ecofeminist framework". The essay provides a wealth of data and statistics in addition to outlining the theoretical aspects of the ecofeminist critique. The framework described is intended to establish ways of viewing and understanding our current global situations so that we can better understand how we arrived at this point and what may be done to ameliorate the ills.

Building on the work of North American scholars Rosemary Ruether and Carolyn Merchant, Gaard and Gruen argue that there are four sides to this framework:

1. The mechanistic materialist model of the universe that resulted from the scientific revolution and the subsequent reduction of all things into mere resources to be optimized, dead inert matter to be used.
2. The rise of patriarchal religions and their establishment of gender hierarchies along with their denial of immanent divinity.
3. Self and other dualisms and the inherent power and domination ethic it entails.
4. Capitalism and its claimed intrinsic need for the exploitation, destruction and instrumentalization of animals, earth and people for the sole purpose of creating wealth.

They hold that these four factors have brought us to what ecofeminists see as a "separation between nature and culture" that is for them the root source of our planetary ills.

Ecofeminism developed out of anarcha-feminist concerns with abolishing all forms of domination, while focusing on the oppressive nature of humanity's relationship to the natural world. According to Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974), ecofeminism relates the oppression and domination of all marginalized groups (women, people of color, children, the poor) to the oppression and domination of nature (animals, land, water, air, etc.). In the book, the author argues that oppression, domination, exploitation, and colonization from the Western patriarchal society has directly caused irreversible environmental damage. Françoise d'Eaubonne was an activist and organizer, and her writing encouraged the eradication of all social injustice, not just injustice against women and the environment. This tradition includes a number of influential texts including: Women and Nature (Susan Griffin 1978), The Death of Nature (Carolyn Merchant 1980) and Gyn/Ecology (Mary Daly 1978). These texts helped to propel the association between domination by man on women and the domination of culture on nature.