FOREWORD
by Judy Wajcman

As we enter the twenty-first century, it is satisfying to note that the relationship between gender and technology is now an established area of inquiry. Indeed, it has been a significant influence on mainstream social studies of technology which developed during the same period. While technology studies have emphasised the way technological innovations are socially shaped, feminists have demonstrated that gender relations and identities are a vital aspect of the social. As a result of the proliferation in recent decades of feminist research and writing on technology, we now have a much more complex understanding of gender, of technology, and of the mutually constitutive relationship between them. Increasingly, we now work from the basis that neither masculinity, femininity nor technology are fixed, unitary categories but that they contain multiple possibilities and are constructed in relation to each other.

Some of these possibilities are here brought to life in a fresh and innovative way. For the first time, this book seeks to explore individual women’s experiences and relationships to technology. While the contemporary women’s movement emphasised the value of everyday experience as a basis for knowledge, there have to date been few attempts to draw on this rich source in technology studies. In an exciting new departure, the authors of this volume examine their own relationships to technology using an explicitly autobiographical approach. Adopting the term ‘technobiographies’, they bring to bear on technology studies a methodology that has been widely used in gender studies and elsewhere in the social sciences and the humanities. The use of autobiography as a methodology throws new light on women’s relationship to technology, bringing into sharp relief the way our experiences are filtered through differences such as race/ethnicity, class, sexuality and generation.

Presenting a diversity of personal narratives like this enables us to transcend once and for all the traditional dichotomy of technology as either empowering or disempowering for women. Instead we see here the many and contradictory meanings, identities and social relations involved.

The book is a delight to read and represents a major contribution to understanding the complex ties between gender, technology and subjectivity.

Judy Wajcman is Professor of Sociology, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University and Visiting Centennial Professor, Gender Institute, London School of Economics.