TechnoFeminism

Judy Wajcman’s TechnoFeminism intervenes between two deterministic stories: that technology naturally liberates women by dissolving bodily and social limits, or that machines inevitably extend masculine domination. Drawing together feminist technoscience, cyberfeminism, and a materialist analysis of work and production, Wajcman argues that gender and technology are mutually constituted. Artifacts acquire gender through the institutions, skills, divisions of labor, and cultural meanings involved in making and using them; gender relations are in turn reorganized through technological change. Neither side of this relationship is fixed in advance.

This co-production framework changes feminist strategy. If technology is not an autonomous force descending on society, political questions enter at every stage: who is trained as an expert, whose labor is made invisible, which problems receive investment, what bodies a design presumes, and who controls the conditions of use. Wajcman values cyberfeminism’s imaginative challenge to naturalized sex difference but resists the idea that digital space alone can dissolve material inequality. Feminist politics, rather than novelty itself, determines whether technoscience opens possibilities or consolidates hierarchy. The argument therefore joins cultural representation to factories, workplaces, households, and technical institutions.

Written in 2004, the book predates smartphones, platform monopolies, contemporary data extraction, and generative AI, so it cannot supply a current inventory of digital harms. Its conceptual architecture remains powerful precisely because it prevents every new device from being treated as an unprecedented moral event. For FemRes readers, TechnoFeminism provides a vocabulary for moving beyond “women in tech” toward the sexual politics of technological systems. Its limit is also a productive invitation: later work must extend co-production through race, disability, coloniality, global supply chains, and environmental cost, domains that determine whose technological futures become possible.