International Journal of Feminist Technoscience

Enter cyborg: tracing the historiography and ontological turn of feminist technoscience studies | Cecilia Åsberg

Peter Giger — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:06:15 +0000

The cyborg is a figure we now easily connect with early 1990s feminist technoscience studies, indeed it is a foundational figure of the field. However, cyborgs do not just trace older, but also a lot more ambiguous and less feminist roots within our technoscientific modernity. The aim of this article is to provide a genealogical map of feminist entanglements with especially the biological sciences and with the body. In particular, I aim here to show how the figure of the cyborg in fact might be positioned as the first sign materializing and anticipating what we today might call the ontological turn within feminist theory and technoscience studies.

Performing gender and ethnicity in socio-technological networks: entangling feminist technoscience and post-colonial theory | Koen Leurs

Peter Giger — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:40:19 +0000

This paper addresses the self and subjectivity in contemporary digital technology-rich contexts. A mutual shaping perspective is elaborated to understand both processes of gender and ethnicity inscription of technologies on the human subject and his/her gendered and ethnic subscription to technologically mediated cultural, economic, social and symbolic power relations. An interpretative frame is sketched that builds on the performance of gender/ethnicity, actor-network-theory and feminist techno-science. Finally a reading of post-structuralist and post-colonial theories on hypertext is offered. Hypertext, as a figuration, is helpful in mapping out performativity in digital contexts as it may uncover power dissymetries as well as male/masculine, ‘racial’/ethnic and female/feminine specificities that may be left unheard elsewhere.

Function as the Objective Form. An essay on making things transparent. | Rebecka Molin

Rebecka Molin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:10:11 +0000

In this essay I put forward how the notion of positivist objectivity could be thought of as a move towards transparency, where the eye is cleared of content in order to produce science and truth. In relation to this I argue for the need to recognize the obscure as an inevitable part of thinking in and knowing about the world. Part of my argument here involves the ideas emphasized by adherents of mode 2, where utility for society is stressed as a vital premise for research and science.

Feminist Thought and Science Fiction: From Deconstruction to Affirmation | Elektra Paschali

Rebecka Molin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:58:39 +0000

Reading feminist Science Fiction from the 60s until nowadays, we can trace the development of feminist theories towards a deconstruction of the categories that constitute the notion of ‘woman’, such as ‘gender’ or ‘body’. SF, adopting feminist theoretical ideas goes beyond mere deconstruction to affirmative reconstruction of a world freed from bias and set social categories, while offering a space for inspiration and experimentation with new ideas. The article presents some central feminist theoretical ideas around the notion of ‘woman’, ‘gender’ and ‘body’ and the concept of ‘gender/militarization’ through a parallel reading of important feminist SF novels and points out spaces where feminist theory expands ideas developed in SF narratives.

HATE/CODE | William Pawlett

Peter Giger — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 05:28:09 +0000

This paper examines Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the Code and applies it, briefly, to the urgent issues of hatred and violence. Baudrillard’s little-known notion of the “the hate” is explored in detail and the psychoanalytic terminology re-deployed in his work on hatred is clarified. Though Baudrillard never explicitly linked his notion of the Code to hatred, an argument is made that these concepts are closely related and that, placed in conjunction, they offer new and compelling ways of thinking about both hatred and its alternatives. This paper provides the theoretical groundwork to such an analysis; subsequent work will attempt a ‘radical empiricist’ exploration of hatred through case studies.

Finally the figure of the Other and radical alterity, frequently evoked by Baudrillard, is central to my closing suggestion that radical alterity provides an alternative to, or protection from, the hate.

Follow the phlegm: Tracing the infinitesimal in male networks of power | Karl Palmås

Peter Giger — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:46:23 +0000

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the work of Gabriel Tarde. Arguably, the theories he proposed – and methodologies he imagined – constitute a radical break with established theories of the ontology of social structures. Taking its cue from this promise, this paper studies the logics that underpin the emergence of a particular male-dominated network of power (gubbslem in Swedish). Using a large data set from back- slapping patterns in the blogosphere coupled with ethnographic data, the text aims to show how the “becoming” of this network emanates from a myriad of infinitesimal processes, which cannot be reduced to being mere results of a certain social milieu. Following a general introduction to the project, section two and three will outline the theory and method proposed by Gabriel Tarde some hundred years ago. Here, the presentation will roughly follow Bruno Latour in his recent endeavour to align Tarde with contemporary sociology. Section four will discuss the method, and section five the results, of the research in question. The paper is concluded with some notes on the practical uses of this body of theory, and on the operationalisation of similar projects in the future.

Meaninglessness in the Desert of the Real. Arguing for a Form of Meaning and Unpretentious Objects. | Rebecka Molin

Rebecka Molin — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:13:05 +0000

This working paper attempts to give meaninglessness a face. Or at most, to bring about some questions in relation to the notion of meaninglessness, as it is posed by Jean Baudrillard. To accept the world’s meaninglessness, Baudrillard states, is to enable for a significant shift in the ongoing “desertization” of the real to happen. Consequently this would lessen the hyperreal expansion and expenditure. The question I am considering in this paper is if it is possible to address such an undertaking of a meaninglessness end by means of playing with forms. In the light of meaninglessness and forms in general, it seems as though ‘we’ cannot stop (re)making images. Behind the ongoing proliferation of images questions secretly lurks. About who asserts the qualities needed in and for meaninglessness to take place. About whether creating a meaninglessness in a context of digital visual production is possible. And about neutralizing and counteracting the purpose of meaninglessness through its advocation, as it then tends to configure into “strategic meaninglessness”.

An intervention into present knowledge production: open peer review

lena — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 12:35:16 +0000

An unease with the current scientific publishing system was addressed in two open panels at last year’s EASST conference. Now, a new journal has been launched in order to tackle some of the issues discussed at EASST 2006. The Open peer review process of the International Journal of Feminist Technoscience (IJFT) makes use of ”an interactive framework to secure quality, relevance, efficiency and democracy in scientific publishing” and to foster an open dialogue between actors in the field of technoscience. Programmatically, the first issue is entitled Processes of Cooperation. At stake is the distributed knowledge production in the digital age and the challenges as to the current academic publishing system.

Published 12 June 2007 in Biomedicine on Display - a blog of Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen focusing their inquiring minds on the display of visual and material culture in the clinic, the laboratory and the museum. The aim is to promote wide public engagement with contemporary biomedicine.

Technology Review: Human-Animal Cybrids

Peter Giger — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 08:18:55 +0000

Research mixing human and animal eggs and sperm has garnered considerable ethical concern and been banned in several countries. The banning was started in part by fears that scientists will create animals with human genes or other ethically questionable organisms, and in part by concerns that mixing animal and human materials diminishes the sanctity of human life. But researchers say that public outcry has largely failed to distinguish between important medical research, such as therapeutic cloning, and more dubious experiments. For example, in the United Kingdom, proposals to use animal eggs for human cloning sparked outcry from an overzealous media portending half-human creatures.

Quoted from: Technology Review: Human-Animal Cybrids

Techno-activism and free software: Tools for the renovation of political action | Blanca Callén, Daniel López, Miquel Domènech, Francisco

Peter Giger — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 12:14:26 +0000

For some considerable time now, the practice of developing and creating Free Software has been the centre of attention for studies related to economics, knowledge production, law and the legal and intellectual property framework. However, the practice that constitutes this initiative also means a call to rethink current forms of political action and the in-depth meaning of what we understand by “political”. This constitutes the field that we have called techno-activism. Along these lines we propose a particular reading of the political challenge that is Free Software from the standpoint of Hardt and Negri’s theoretical work (2000) and we put forward various contributions –regarding the organization, agents and the form of political action- which as we consider, poses a crisis for traditional proposals and urges us to renew our way of relating to information and the exercise of government in our current societies.