[STS-Africa] The Gender of Things - call for contributions

[Maria Rentetzi]

*Call for contributions to a collective volume *


*Title: The Gender of Things: How Epistemic and Technological Objects
Become Gendered*



*Topic: *

Do things have gender? What an unthinkable question especially to space
engineers who put astronauts on the moon; to artificial intelligence
researchers who construct humanoid robots to assist humanity in saving the
planet; to physicists who investigate nature inside a scientific
laboratory; to surgeons who struggle to save human lives in
state-of-the-art operating theaters. Yet, what seems “unthinkable” to
practitioners in science, technology and medicine, has been common
knowledge to scholars working in the humanities and the social sciences:
things could be gendered. This is a book about the processes of gendering
things. It is an interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between
gender and the material culture of technoscience, in other words, gender
and contradictory cultural, economic and social values and meanings
attributed to epistemic and technological objects.

Focusing especially on all those things that lie on laboratory benches,
engineers’ workshops and medical facilities, our goal is to expose the
practices that attribute gender to epistemic and technological objects. The
central questions in this collection of essays are not only “who can speak
of nature?” and “who can design?” but “who has been making these
determinations?” throughout history. How does a thing such as a spacesuit,
a humanoid-robot, a ‘Frankenstein’ measuring machine, or a surgical
instrument become a gendered object? As we peer into scientific
instruments, medical devices and technological artifacts, our concern is
not about the objects themselves. The spacesuits used in NASA’s 2019
project to allow an entirely female team of astronauts to go on a spacewalk
outside the International Space Station for the first time, become a means
to understand the legacy of sexism in the space program. As space equipment,
including spacesuits, has historically been designed with men in mind, in
its first attempt at an all-female spacewalk, NASA realized that there were
no suitable spacesuits for both women in the team. Sophia, the humanoid
robot to be named the United Nations Development Programme's first ever
Innovation Champion, comes with a gendered notion of how artificial
intelligence conceptualizes human-robot interactions. Several humanoid
robots imitate female gestures and facial expressions, speak with a female
voice, dress in skirts, and have a smiling face with makeup. A
‘Frankenstein’ measuring machine—a read off and calculation apparatus that
reduced bubble chamber film to machine-readable data —points to a deep
shift in gender roles within the physicists’ work place in the late 1950s:
“unskilled” women took up the “natural role” of scanning photographs and
recording data whereas male physicists interpreted the results. A knife in
a surgeon’s hand provides an indication of how the medical ergonomics favor
male surgeons and how surgical instruments are designed for male surgeons,
who until recently tended to be the majority in their field. After all, things
are powerful tokens of scientific and technological cultures, opening up a
window for understanding the gendering of technoscientific disciplines.

We welcome essays of 3000-3500 words on a single object from any historical
period that becomes the focal point for an analysis of the ways gender is
embedded in a material creation used in the sciences, technology and
medicine. The originality of the book resides in the fact that it addresses
material culture not in everyday life but in the “hard” sciences and in
newly emerging fields such as artificial intelligence to examine the
co-production of gender and technoscience.

*Deadlines*

Submission of abstracts: 14 May 2021; Submission of early drafts: 31 July
2021; Submission of final revisions: 10 September 2021

*Submission*

Please send your abstracts to the authors:  Aida Bosch (aida.bosch at fau.de)  and
Maria Rentetzi (maria.rentetzi at fau.de ) both at Friedrich-Alexander
University Erlangen-Nuremberg.




-- 





*Professor Dr. Maria Rentetzi*

Chair of Science, Technology and Gender Studies

ERC Consolidator Grantee

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Theology



Bismarckstraße 6, 91054 Erlangen, Germany

Phone: +49 9131 26980, Email: maria.rentetzi at fau.de

www.fau.de
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