The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research ed. by Keith Grint and Rosalind Gill

Abstract

Book Reviews The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research. Ed­ ited by Keith Grint and Rosalind Gill. London: Taylor & Francis, 1995. Pp. vii+216; notes, index. $24.95 (paper). The publication of Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, and Thomas Hughes’s edited volume The Social Construction ofTechnological Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987) introduced many historians of technology to the methods and scholarship of sociologists of tech­ nology. Within the pages of that yellow volume some of us made our first acquaintance with SCOT, EPOR, and Actor Network Theory (ANT). The Gender-Technology Relation offers readers interested in fol­ lowing the development of the “broad church of social construc­ tion” (p. 18) a new set of issues and methods to engage with. Like previous encounters, this volume offers historians a mixture of po­ tentially useful tools and innovative ideas as well as frustratingjargon and unexamined assumptions about both technology and history. Historians are not the intended primary audience for this collec­ tion of essays. Instead, the authors hope to contribute to a debate between feminists and other researchers taking a constructivist posi­ tion. They have systematically set about convincing other sociologists that gender analysis is important and that it is best carried out within certain theoretical boundaries. The description of their project as “feminist” is significant. Many of the essays in this volume are im­ plicitly or explicitly prescriptive, intended to suggest solutions to women’s subordinate status in modern technological society. The first three essays lay out theoretical positions. Most of the au­ thors reject an essentialistview ofwomen’s relationship with technol­ ogy. Instead, they argue for understanding technology as a form of “masculine culture.” In their introduction, Grint and Gill contend that it is important to understand that “technology” has most often been considered masculine in Western societies. The term “technol­ ogy” is never fully problematized or defined—a serious problem in this reviewer’s opinion. One could just as well argue that the tools and ways of doing things most identified with men and masculinity are often called “technology” in the 20th century. In the essay that follows the editors’ introduction, Susan Ormrod proposes a methodology for doing feminist research into gender and technology. Ormrod is a subtle and sophisticated thinker, and her essay is particularly useful for understanding how fundamental theoretical assumptions within sociology, particularly dualities bePermission to reprint a book review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer. 232 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 233 tween structure and agency, have led to the development oftheories like ANT. She offers a variation on poststructuralist analysis as a solu­ tion to some of these dilemmas. The theoretical circle is closed by Grint and Steve Woolgar, who critique “failures of nerve” in con­ structivist and feminist analyses of technology (p. 48). The volume also includes six case studies. Telephones, household appliances, reproductive technologies, software, and computers are the technologies analyzed. The methods and sources used vary widely. For instance: Valerie Frissen’s essay on the gendering of tele­ phone use borrows from a wide variety of contemporary and histori­ cal secondary sources. Danielle Chabaud-Rychter followed a group of appliance designers through the design process of coffeemakers and food processors. The result is a suggestive analysis of the gen­ dered nature of the producer-consumer dichotomy. Vicky Singleton offers a highly theorized use ofANT in analyzing cervical screening programs. These case studies are most convincing when they employ field research rather than examples gleaned from secondary sources. Most ofthe technologies in question have already been wellstudied and are gendered in conspicuous ways. Hopefully, as this debate continues, researchers will take on other, less obvious, cases. In the introduction to The Social Construction of Technological Sys­ tems, Bijker, Pinch, and Hughes wrote that it began as a conversation between historians and sociologists over glasses of pink champagne. Both the virtues and the shortcomings of Grint and Gill’s volume suggest that perhaps another conversation is in order, between histo­ rians and sociologists interested in gender. This time, the cham­ pagne need not be pink. Arwen Palmer Mohun Dr. Mohun is an assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. She is currently completing a comparative history...