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I just read the feminist technoscience article and I found it very interesting and can imagine it being very relevant to some people. The ARPANET thing is actually an interesting example, because the Department of Defense (war) is very obviously masculine-coded. It seems reasonably true to say that a lot of technology and science is masculine coded for all sorts of different reasons. Honestly, it’s trivially true to suggest that engineering is seen as a masculine profession because of particular historical circumstances, some of which probably had to do with explicitly patriarchal societies, so I don’t see what the fuss is. I can totally see why someone who spends a lot of time thinking about gender and ways of making a more egalitarian society would find this interesting and useful. It might be very niche, but so is any sufficiently advanced topic in research. I also don’t really know who is to say one thing (machine learning) is more useful than another (feminism). You could be right, but that is a value driven claim which, ironically, is something that is going to be parsed out in philosophical debate and prose, not lines of code. It seems to me that most complaints against the “fuzziness” of studies in the humanities are the politically bent ones, which makes me suspicious that the disdain is for particular political views or conclusions, as if to dismiss these views as spurious and non-academic. It’s certainly not scientific, but that does not mean it is not serious, and science is certainly not the final or only arbiter of what is real or worthy of intellectual consideration. |
Okay, but "feminist technoscience" and "feminism" are not the same thing.
"Machine learning" is a tool which can obviously be used to do useful things–although no doubt harmful things too. "Feminism" is a diverse set of values and policy preferences, which promote themselves as beneficial for women – and while we can debate the details, very few would disagree that many women have derived real-world personal benefits from at least some of those policies. My late grandmother used to complain about how – in the late 1940s – she was forced to resign from her bank job (which she loved) the week before her wedding, because the bank's policy was not to employ married women. She absolutely welcomed the law being changed to make those kinds of corporate policies illegal, and while she didn't benefit from that law change personally, her daughters-in-law (my mother included) and grand-daughters did. We can debate whether everything feminists ask for is right (they aren't all asking for the same things anyway), but (unless you are some kind of ultra-reactionary), it is rather obvious that some of their ideas have been positive developments for women, and for society in general. By contrast, what good could "feminist technoscience" do for my grandmothers, my mother, my wife, my sister, my daughter?