FEMINISM, TECHNOLOGY AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY – Learning from the past, imagining the future. -Sally Wyatt –
Sally Wyatt presents a kind of historical chronology of the different feminist’s waves and what was there claims and their principal actors.
The goal of the text is to have a reflection about what kind of technology do we want ? What objectives do we want technology to support ?
From Firestone, we learn that :
“Both movements (feminism and revolutionary ecology) have arisen in response to the same contradiction : animal life within technology. In the case of feminism the problem is a moral one : the biological family unit has always oppressed women and children, but now, for the first time in history, technology has created real preconditions for overthrowing these oppressive “natural” conditions.”
That was the point of view during the optimistic period. Then from the 1980s, the ideas are less optimistic : we have to change technology’s nature.
Cynthia Cockburn think that we search in the wrong direction, because technologies are in general dominated by male, and since the school education. The solutions proposed by this feminism wave is rather radical, they want rejected technology.
Later, Haraway will write that “women are not in a position to refuse technology outright”. For her, technology is “full part of us”, “They are absolutely central to our everyday lives”, like we saw in the previous texts.
It is in the human nature to go always further. Look for news technologies. But in his conquest of discoveries, humans move away more and more of nature, and of the natural forms of things. A real unbalance has been created between human, nature and technologies.
How far the human could push the creation new inventions ? In a posthuman landscape, do humans could they abandon or transform all the primary instincts ? There is still so many things to discover.
How could evolved the need to eat and to cook, in a posthuman landscape ? There is already a tendency for the alimentary complements composed of all the vitamins and proteins that we need. The future of the food, is it to be substituted by “medicinal” food ? Humans have exploited so deeply their natural environment, the nature, so it could be the solution to the resources’s extinctions. And without need to cook for eat, what would be a house without kitchen, could it finally have a redefinition of the social gender relationship ?
But it’s not what do we want today. Since few years humans changed their behaviour. We are now trying to reconnect with the nature. In our style lives like in our food habits.
The biological food is getting more and more popular, the respect of the environment and the wish to build more green spaces in the cities are now the main preoccupation of the humans, and are the starting point of many technology’s researches.
Elise Dorby
archandphil 
December 8, 2014 at 10:13 am
I am very fascinated with the idea of removing the kitchen from our perceived idea of the home. Following your argument, this would also lead to the disappearance of restaurants. This would not mean that food is no longer prepared; this task would merely been relocated beyond our view. It would probably also not result in ending our “exploitation of nature”, but merely change its scope.
What would happen, though, is the complete reformation of the social dimension of food. Gathering around food is very central to many cultures, whether it be at home, at a restaurant or a barbecue party. This practice is not upheld by necessity, but by – the much more irrational – pleasure. In Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer, conceived for an exhibition on cooperative design in Ghent in 1924, the room is furnished with the bare minimum in order to reflect a classless society in which everyone would own the same minimum. The only superfluous object is a record player, which breaks with the notion of necessity and marks the importance of “unproductive time” in a society in which every activity is increasingly seen as production.
In that same vein, while acknowledging its redundancy, maybe we should keep the kitchen as a space for unproductive time.