What Is Feminist Philosophy of Technology? A Critical Overview and a Plea for a Feminist Technoscientific Utopia

Abstract

To this day, there has been little attention to feminism and gender issues in main- stream philosophy of technology, and vice versa: many feminists have focused on societal matters and relationships, without taking explicitly into account how technics (i.e. technologies and techniques) shape those societies and relationships. With the workshop and this volume, we want to create bridges between, on the one hand, philosophy of technology, and, on the other hand, thinking about gen- der and feminist thinking. More generally, we also aim to support critical thinking within philosophy of technology and thinking about technology that is sensitive to urgent societal issues. Since the beginning of the so-called second wave feminism (in the middle of the 20th century), there has been a growing awareness of the urgency of a criti- cal reflection about technology and science within feminist discourse. But feminist thinkers have not consistently interpreted technology and science as emancipa- tive and liberating for the feminist movement. At the same time, philosophers of technology have often neglected gender issues and feminist theory. Many femi- nists criticized the structures of dominance, marginalization and oppression inher- ent in numerous technologies. They claimed that technological development is mostly embedded in social, political, and economic systems that are patriarchally hierarchized. It is interesting to explore the implications of this thinking for tech- nology, for example for defining and ascribing responsibility in technics and