Proposal for dissertation:
“Engendering Technology: the social practice of educational computing”
Hank Bromley
July 1993
1. Overview
The central substantive concern of my dissertation is the relationship between technology
and gender. Drawing primarily on the field of educational computing for examples, I am
exploring the ways in which the introduction of new technologies facilitates the maintenance
and/or transformation of existing gender relations. This agenda entails addressing the more
specific topics of: (a) how technologies are shaped by the cultures in which they are developed,
and carry the values prevalent in that context into the sites where they are used; (b) how
preexisting power relations where a technology is applied also shape the way it is used and
towards what ends (sometimes in alignment and sometimes in conflict with the values embedded
in it); and (c) the construction of gender identity, and the role played by technology within that
process.
In its several possible readings, my title alludes to these same topics: “engendering
technology” refers to the ways technology is engendered in the sense of being produced or
shaped in whichever site, as well as in the sense of being assigned characteristics which identify
it with masculinity or femininity; “engendering technology” also refers to technology which
engenders, i.e., participates in the assignment (including self-assignment) of gender identity to
people.
My approach to these questions is conceptual and methodological, involving careful
analysis of what existing scholarship can—and cannot—tell us about these matters. I wrestle
with how we think about technology and its social context, both in the performance of academic
studies and in our culture more generally.
2. Relevance to Educational Policy
In the fifteen or so years since microcomputers first entered U.S. schools, interest in them
has grown explosively, with many school districts rushing to invest in the new technology.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on hardware and software in hopes of
“equipping” students with skills said to be needed in today’s world of intense economic
competition. At a time when shrinking resources at all levels of government have made it
extremely difficult for many school districts to keep up with overdue building maintenance, buy
up-to-date textbooks, or even, in some cities, keep schools open for the requisite number of days
each year, purchasing computers means taking money away from essential programs to invest in
a technology that may have little effect, or even worse, may exacerbate existing inequities.
Pressure to ensure that our students acquire computer-related skills has arisen from
several directions, including the business community, professional educators, and parents. For all
of these groups, a computer-based curriculum serves as a symbol of the quality of the education
children are receiving. The power of this symbol depends on an unstated yet powerful set of
assumptions about the nature of technology. Among those assumptions are that computing
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technology benefits all students equally, as a neutral instrument with no connection to the
unequal distribution of power along lines of gender, race, class, religion, ethnicity, etc.; that
access to such technology is a guarantee of upward social mobility; and that wider facility with
high technology will solve the problems of the United States economy. It is assumed that
anything involving new technologies must be an improvement, that it can, and indeed will, make
life much easier for educators who now suffer in under-technologized situations.
One of the most significant assumptions is the belief that we can deal with the new
technologies in a purely instrumental way. The issues are seen as simply and only the technical
ones of how best to apply the technology towards goals around which a consensus is assumed to
exist. A supposedly neutral instrument—like the computer—can then be thought about in the
narrow terms of, say, cost benefit analysis. If it meets “our” goals—elevated test scores,
improved competitiveness, a more highly-skilled workforce, and so on—it is “good,” and we
need think only of how to use it most efficiently in pursuit of those goals.
Despite their popularity, these assumptions are of dubious validity. Far from being neutral
instruments, computers—like other technologies—are involved in many ways in the construction
and use of power: in the way they are designed and built, how they are sold and to whom, and
how they are used. They partake in an epistemology that promotes certain visions of knowledge
and notions of who counts as a knowing subject.
We need to ask what it is about the characteristics of the technology, and how they
interact with the social context of its use, that benefit some people at the expense of others, that
reinforce existing power relations; and what possibilities exist for constructing alternative
contexts of use favoring more progressive outcomes, for breaking down existing power relations.
The relevant issues are demonstrably not technical ones; this is what I mean in advocating the
view that technology is a social practice.
I’ve suggested the debate over educational computing policy is driven by the symbolic
import of the computing presence in schools; the computer is a symbol, and the kind of education
(and society) it represents is the object of strong desires. But just what the symbol represents is a
disputed matter. This dissertation is meant to be an intervention in that dispute over what to read
in the-computer-as-symbol. The way we describe any phenomenon, the stories we tell about it,
shape what we do and don’t see in it. The “technological determinism” story, for instance,
presents the emergence of a new technology in a way that highlights its impact on the way we
live; the “technology as a social process” story, on the other hand, highlights the actions of those
individuals and institutions responsible for introducing the technology. Which story one tells is a
political matter of grave importance.
In this work I advocate the use of some stories rather than others, hoping to convince
educators that certain stories about computing and gender identity (“social process” ones, broadly
speaking) reveal significant dynamics obscured by other stories. The stories teachers use to think
about computers in their classrooms help shape their view of what’s possible to do and what the
results will be, both for their own students and for society more generally. I aspire to call into
question some very popular stories whose implications I find pernicious, and to advance others
which I believe disclose crucial social relations embedded in computers and surrounding their
use.
3. Theoretical Sources
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My concerns in this work necessarily place me in the midst of broad debates over the
relationship between technology and society, over the ways power operates within institutional
settings, over the nature of identity and the place of subjectivity in everyday life, and even over
what constitute appropriate and valid methods for addressing such questions. My involvement in
these debates over time has led me to draw liberally on work in a variety of fields, most notably
Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism.
I don’t locate myself wholly within any of these traditions. Each approach helps reveal
some phenomena and tends to obscure others. That does not mean, however, that I am free to
arbitrarily mix and match whichever parts of each I happen to find appealing. The techniques of
each tradition imply certain intellectual commitments, and the three sets of premises are by no
means wholly compatible. There are, in fact, contradictions among them, and residing both in
and not in each of the three is a slippery endeavor. What Heidi Hartmann once referred to as the
unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism has developed into an uneasy ménage à trois. As
Patti Lather said of her own work during a recent visit to Madison, the task is to explore the tensions among the three, to use each technique and simultaneously problematize it, call into
question its assumptions by stepping into another approach and looking back from that
perspective onto the first. This itinerant stance and constant self-reflectiveness, while
bothersome, is both necessary and rewarding. Each tradition has its traps, and relying on a stable
vantage point, while invitingly comfortable, renders those traps invisible.
In the following sections I will try to express what general contradictions I see among the
three approaches, and how those tensions might be expressed more specifically in stories about
gender and technology. I should say right off that what I’m discussing are three more or less ideal
types. Few, if any, writers advocate one or another in its pure form; most are instead arrayed in a
continuous distribution about these three poles, borrowing from one or another in varying
amounts. While the practice of relying on hybridized conceptual frameworks is widespread, it
does nonetheless usually involve incorporating unresolved—and possibly unresolvable—tensions
into one’s work. I’m trying simply to make those tensions more explicit, not pigeonhole other
writers into one or another restrictive category so as to malign their work.
The three approaches are presented in the chronological order by which they have become
influential in the academy. Increasing nuance is, then, to be expected as we step through the
three, with each having the advantage of a later introduction than its predecessor. This should
not, however, be taken to mean that, for instance, poststructuralists are necessarily any more
sophisticated than Marxists. Marxism and Marxists have not stood still for the last twenty years.
The actual practitioners of each approach have, in general, tended to adopt some characteristics
of the later approaches as they developed, so my sketches of what distinguished each school of
thought as they entered the academy are not depictions of their contemporary practice.
Before surveying their differences, it’s important to note one characteristic all three share:
all see conflict as historically primary in some sense. That, in fact, is what attracts me to the
entire set, and makes them preferable (for my purposes)1 to other theories of society. But they
1
Saying a theory is preferable is not exactly a truth claim. While this is not the place for an extended discussion of
what theories are and what they do, I should at least acknowledge the epistemology I’m implicitly using. (For a full
exposition of an approach of this sort, see... [???]) Basically, I presume different theories reveal different aspects of
the phenomena under study, but that doesn’t make them all equally good. A theory is “useful,” it “works,” to the
extent it discloses dynamics that matter. What matters depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Theories are
“good” or “bad,” then, not on their own, but in relation to some project they may or may not assist. If one’s project is
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differ quite widely on which conflicts they see as salient, and how they understand those conflicts
to operate.
3.1 Marxism
Marxism comes in many varieties, as do feminism and poststructuralism, but all its
varieties tend to focus on economic forms of power and conflict. Even in the case of analyses
immersed in cultural phenomena (e.g., Paul Willis’ Learning to Labor), the cleavages in society
are along lines of economic class (different ways of making a living, or, in classical terms,
different relationships to the means of production) and the main outcome of conflict is the distribution of economic power. The immediate object of analysis may be the formation of cultures,
but the ultimate concern is still the effect of those cultures on the class structure.
The phenomena of interest tend to be tangible, external to the individual, and operative on
a large scale. The sweep of history tends to be seen in terms of definitive, almost apocalyptic,
victories and defeats between two sides locked in ancient combat. Any one person’s part is
straightforward and well-defined, with their loyalties wholly on one side or the other.
3.2 Feminism
Feminism, of course, places a good deal more emphasis than Marxism on divisions along
gender lines. While some varieties of feminism treat gender divisions as primary—in much the
way Marxism attributes primary explanatory power to class divisions—other versions present
gender-based oppression as one of several independent forms of oppression which interact in
complex ways. Across most varieties of feminism, there tends to be a greater focus on the
exercise of power in local settings, and on the connections between such situated events and
more global structures of oppression. Feminist analyses of rape would be an example. In one
sense, rape is an attack of one or several persons upon another. Yet it also expresses—and
reinforces—the more general dominion of masculine violence. Sexual assault is a prominent
concern for feminism, both because of feminism’s great regard for the import of personal
experiences in and of themselves, and its interest in what those experiences reveal about social
structure.
Feminism also has a broader sense than Marxism of what counts as violence;
psychological and linguistic attacks are given more weight in feminist thinking. Calling attention
to language that implies the inferiority or non-existence of certain groups, and deconstructing
images that denigrate women’s capabilities and objectify their bodies, are a crucial part of the
agenda.
Consistent with its relative emphasis on local phenomena, feminism has a more
elaborated view of the individual. Compared to Marxism’s fairly straightforward identification of
most persons with one or the other side of the grand class struggle, feminism seems to place
more stress on growth and change, acknowledging the mixture of dispositions that exist in a
person at any one time, and focusing on ways to move people, over time, to a better
to help equalize the distribution of power in society, theories that illuminate the workings of oppression are useful.
Theories which ignore, or downplay, the role of conflict and difference in history imply that what is good for the
most visible members of society is good for everyone (as all of us purportedly have interests that are primarily
shared), and thereby provide support—not necessarily intentional—for efforts to maintain that group’s position of
privilege. I prefer the three theories under discussion for such reasons.
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understanding of the workings of oppression. Rather than concentrate on an anticipated ultimate
victory of the oppressed over their oppressors, feminism presents liberation as an ongoing and
neverending process, a movement towards greater commitment and action that grows
incrementally across dispersed settings and is never finished.
3.3 Poststructuralism
Poststructuralism calls into question the stability of the very terms Marxism and feminism
depend on. Just what exactly it means to call someone a member of one group or another, what
counts as a “better” understanding of a situation, and on what basis such judgments are to be
made, are, in poststructuralism, no longer to be taken for granted. Any image of a vast movement
unified in pursuit of a single shared goal is branded as just that, an image, one that subsumes the
needs and understandings of more marginalized groups into a fictional unity dominated by the
relatively more privileged.
Beyond that, however, it’s difficult to say what the effects of these shifts are. Consider the
impact of poststructuralism within academic feminism. One view is that it’s a movement in
support of minority and Third World women, which facilitates their involvement by undermining
monolithic notions of “woman” in feminism. A contrary view would suggest it renders feminism
more closed, that it’s a defensive move which uses inaccessible language to re-establish an
exclusive hold on academic positions, in the face of modest prior gains by women of color.
I’m not prepared to enter this debate on either side, but if nothing else, poststructuralism
does serve as a reminder of the limits of our own understanding, as a bulwark against
oversimplification. And in that sense it shares something—oddly enough, given its antipathy for
modernism—with the old tradition of broad-minded skepticism. At its best, poststructuralism
offers not a release from the responsibility to act on our beliefs, but rather a reminder not to be
self-righteous or arrogant in doing so.
3.4 Stories about Gender and Technology
Now I’d like to show how these differences in basic orientation among the three schools
of thought would be expressed in the sorts of stories each would tell about gender and
technology. Again, these are ideal types, and actual analyses of gender and technology are likely
to draw on elements of each approach. But doing so does create tensions in the resulting stories
(including my own), and having some sense of what the distinct examples might look like may
help in identifying inconsistencies in the composites to follow.
A purely Marxist story about gender and technology would portray men behaving as a
unified economic class, acting to further their own material interests. As an example (drawing on
chapter 1 of Cynthia Cockburn’s Machinery of Dominance), we could explain male dominance
of technical know-how through men’s historical relationship to the means of production.
Cockburn suggests that while a sexual division of labor had long existed, the distinct gender roles
were not associated with a significant power differential until the transition from the stone age to
the bronze age, and the arrival of metal implements. Once metallurgy became identified as a
male job, men were, for the first time, in a position to make the tools for all jobs, even those
performed by women. This monopoly of tool-making expertise, maintained up to the present,
gave men control over how all jobs were done, a power they leveraged into a more general social
dominance.
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A Marxist story more specifically about gender and the technology of educational
computing might emphasize the fact that computers were first introduced into most schools by
(predominantly male) math teachers, and note that continued male control of computing
technology is facilitated by these same male teachers discouraging female students in a variety of
ways (see Ellen Spertus, Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?, chapters 1-2)
from pursuing scientific coursework and careers.
A story about gender and technology drawing on more exclusively feminist approaches
might emphasize the links between the subjective reality of everyday lived experience for
individual women and the status of women as a group, and recognize the ways women are drawn
into complicity with their own oppression and that fact that most developments are not readily
classified as simply either improving or worsening the situation of women, but have mixed
significance. As an example, we could look at analyses of the growing presence of domestic technologies throughout this century (for instance, Bose and Bereano, Kramarae, Leto, and Strasser).
Data on the amount of time women spend on housework is available from the 1920s to the
present, and shows basically no change: the average remains in the vicinity of 50 hours per week.
The overall pattern has been one of time savings in some areas being offset by the addition of
new tasks and the raising of standards for old tasks. In addition (here is where concern with
subjectivity and its relation to political power enters the picture), the wide use of several
appliances—the sewing machine; the automatic washer and dryer—has led to the cessation of
communal work sessions and increased isolation of women in their own homes, a hindrance to
the development of politically engaged collectivities. And these changes were not simply imposed on women by external powers. Among other factors, the shift was in part enabled by the
willingness or even eagerness of women to acquire these devices as they became available,
because of the actual advantages they do confer (in combination with their drawbacks).
An example of this sort of analysis regarding computing technology is Matthew
Weinstein’s study of advertisements in home computing magazines. The emphasis is on power
exercised in the realm of the symbolic: how are women and men represented in these
advertisements, how are they appealed to, and what is implied about their desires and fears? And
again, there is an understanding that this regime of representation is not simply imposed by
external powers, but is successful to the extent it elicits widespread participation.
Finally, a poststructuralist story about gender and technology would emphasize the
artificial nature, and permeability, of distinctions between “mechanical” and “natural,” “male”
and “female,” etc. The most well-known and influential such story is Donna Haraway’s “A
Manifesto for Cyborgs.” As Haraway ponders the progressive breakdown of various hallowed
distinctions, she sees a range of boundary-crossings happening, resulting not in one new joint
identity, but rather an ever-shifting array of provisional identities; what’s produced is not one
stable human-machine fusion, but a new range of possibilities, whose meaning is as yet up for
grabs. This newly created semiotic space might be colonized by the existing oppressive structures
of capitalism and patriarchy, but it also, she believes, presents opportunities for establishing
alternative structures. It is, she says, a time of “potent fusions and dangerous possibilities...but a
slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for
other forms of power and pleasure in technologically-mediated societies” (p. 71).
An example of a poststructuralist story about gender and specifically educational
technologies would be Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell’s account of a class they taught at
the University of British Columbia. They contrast their own “postmodern” approach with that of
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“critical” theorists in education by questioning the basis on which critical theorists claim to
identify in monolithic terms the ideological underpinnings of oppressive pedagogies and restructure educational environments so as to realize their own “liberatory” projects. In their own class,
which focused on the construction of lesbian identity, they presented materials illustrating the
multiple meanings “lesbian” can take on in relation to other social distinctions (age, ethnicity,
class, etc.), and asked students to explore some aspect of lesbian representation using any of a
wide range of technological media that were made available. They found that in many cases the
technology facilitated the postmodern subversion of structures based on previously sacrosanct
categories: the separation of student work into individually conducted projects; the relative
power of instructors and students; and the classification of knowledge into high-status and lowstatus, which was undermined through “mis/representation, mimicry, collage, montage, and
re/degendering.”
3.5 Coherence without being Unitary
Each of these approaches reveals something different about the relationship between
technology and gender. Drawing on several of them will mean maneuvering amid some potential
inconsistencies, but it also has its advantages. When a single explanatory framework is advanced,
it’s easy to get trapped into trying to prove that framework explains everything, and consequently
begin disregarding evidence to the contrary. Adopting multiple frameworks averts the inclination
to try to force one’s findings into conformity with a preconceived view.
Clearly this project is partly an inquiry into inquiry. Since it involves reflection on its own
methods, it must be expected to lead in not altogether predictable directions. My prior writing has
ranged widely across topics and methodologies, but has been consistent in its concern with
certain themes. Matters have been addressed insofar as they have borne on the potential for social
transformation, and especially the capacity Paulo Freire calls critical consciousness, C. Wright
Mills called the sociological imagination, and feminists have fostered with the slogan “the
personal is political”: the ability to connect personal experience with social structure, to link
biography and history.
Along with that ever-present concern, two additional factors will lend coherence to this
particular project. First is my primary question, as outlined above: what’s germane is that which
indicates what possibilities technology opens up or closes down regarding gender relations.
Second, my relying chiefly on the field of educational computing for examples will also provide
focus, though I am of course hoping my observations will have relevance for other applications
of technology, as well.
4. Tentative Chapter Outline
While this project is likely to evolve somewhat before it’s finished, I do have an initial
plan for how to accomplish my stated agenda, which I present here in the form of a provisional
chapter outline. The “doing” of each chapter, building on the work I’ve already completed in
each area, will involve continuing my critical appraisal of extant approaches to the theme of the
chapter, and examining what such analyses—added to whatever original observations I can
offer—reveal when applied to my overall topic.
As currently planned, Chapter 1 begins with some specific scenarios involving technology, and offers a variety of “stories” that could be or have been told about those situations,
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showing how each provides insights the others miss. A story about the introduction of computers
to a high school social studies class, for instance, might tell about “freeing” the teacher from the
tasks of presenting and testing basic information, and individualizing students’ rate of progress.
Another story about the same class might tell about implicit lessons that knowledge is a
quantifiable commodity students absorb in measurable chunks, rather than something created by
human action and recognized by social conventions. Yet other stories might tell about the use of
those same computers after school by a predominantly male group of students who create and
play games of violence, or by a female teacher who exchanges ideas via email with like-minded
colleagues in distant locales. Clearly these stories all lead in very different directions. I discuss
my own frustrations with most of the stories about technology that prevail in our field, and
indicate what I’d like to see addressed that rarely is. This chapter also must address a number of
conceptual issues, like how we should think about the relationship between technology and
society, and in what ways gender is a central concern. Key thinkers to engage on these topics
include Judy Wajcman, Joan Rothschild and Cynthia Cockburn.
Chapter 2 examines the power structures characterizing the environment in which educational computing occurs, how they shape the ends to which the technology is put. Specific
considerations include: the rhetoric of marketing, advertising, and corporate-influenced public
policy proposals, the spreading commodification of everything from information to students
themselves, and pressures on schools from various constituencies. What, for instance, is the
import of policy statements attributing a scarcity of good jobs to a purported Japanese superiority
in technically-oriented education, in a context of large shifts in the racial and gender composition
of the U.S. work force? Who gets blamed and what solutions are favored? Key thinkers here
include David Noble, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster.
Chapter 3 explores the cultural baggage computing technology inherits from its highly
masculinized context of development. Specific considerations include: Enlightenment rationality,
men’s and women’s historical relationships with technology, and military interest in technologies
of control. Also relevant here are how forms of social theory characterized by universalistic and
deterministic claims reinforce some of these factors. Key thinkers include Sandra Harding,
Donna Haraway, Susan Bordo, Brian Easlea, Les Levidow and Kevin Robins.
Chapter 4 looks at technology and the construction of identity. The status quo does not
result simply from top-down imposition. In contrast to most studies of “gender and technology,”
which emphasize the differential impact of technologies on women and on men—i.e., on people
whose gender identity is treated as a given—I ask how technology is used in the creation of
feminine and masculine gender identities. Utilizing notions of identity as an ongoing
construction, I ask what desires lead people to participate actively in the continual reestablishment of unequal power relations, and revisit items from previous chapters in this light. Key
thinkers include Stuart Hall, Teresa de Lauretis, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Edward Said,
Sally Hacker, and Minnie Bruce Pratt.
Chapter 5 presents some hopeful signs: new possibilities created by the presence of the
technologies, and the alternative and oppositional practices that result. Examples might include
constructivist pedagogies, anti-authoritarian uses of telecommunication networks, and videobased activism. I also consider the danger of these new possibilities being rapidly foreclosed.
Chapter 6 sketches an initial effort to tie these various phenomena together under the
rubric of increasing “internalization of control,” illustrating how information technologies
facilitate Foucauldian forms of social control (with specific gender characteristics), especially
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under the conditions of a post-Fordist economy. It concludes with an open-ended description of
what remains puzzling and uncertain about these matters.
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