WORK
Feminism Confronts Technology (Work)
Wajcman's 1991 foundational text that established the framework of social shaping in feminist technology studies and argued, against both technological determinism and the view of technology as monolithically patriarchal, that technologies are co-produced with the gender relations within which they are designed and deployed.
Feminism Confronts Technology was the book that put Wajcman on the intellectual map and established the framework of mutual shaping that would organize three decades of her subsequent work. Published by Polity Press in 1991, it synthesized the then-fragmented literatures of feminist theory and technology studies into a coherent analytical framework. Its core argument was that the relationship between technology and gender is neither deterministic (with technology autonomously producing social effects) nor purely ideological (with technology endlessly malleable by interpretation) but dialectical: gender shapes technology, technology shapes gender, and the process is continuous at every stage from research through use.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book intervened in a debate that had been polarized between two unsatisfactory positions. On one side, technology studies treated technologies as autonomous forces with inherent effects; on the other, a strand of feminist theory treated all technology as monolithically