This paper reports an investigation on how and why computer science in Malaysia is dominated by women. Inspired by recent critical interventions in gender and technology studies, the paper aims to ...open up more culturally situated analyses of the gendering of technology or the technology of gendering, with the Malaysian case exemplifying the core of the argument. The paper argues along four different strands of critical thought: (1) a critique of the analytical asymmetry in the process of co-production in gender and technology studies; (2) a critique of a western bias in gender and technology studies, advocating more context sensitivity and focus on the cultural embeddedness of gender and technology relations; (3) a critique that pays more attention to spatial practices and body politics in regard to race, class and gender in relation to technology; and (4) a critique of 'western' positional notions of gender configurations that opens up for more fluid constructions of gender identity, including the many crossovers between relational and positional definitions of femininity and masculinity.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume explores why, despite numerous programmes, women continue to constitute a minority in tech-driven research and innovation ...areas in the Nordic countries. Putting the spotlight on the lived experience of women, the authors make an invaluable contribution to global debates around the mechanisms that maintain gendered structures in Research and Innovation, from academia to biotechnology and IT.
This article draws on anthropological work among two groups of technical specialists, mechanics in Malaysia and engineers in Sweden. From a cross-cultural perspective, it focuses on and critically ...examines ways in which masculine bonds are mediated and communicated through interactions with machines, in particular, motorbikes and cars. In these different social settings, technologies can be understood as means of an embodied communication for forming homosocial bonds. These masculine practices continuously exclude women and perpetuate highly genderized societal spheres where men form communities based on passion for machines. Such passion involves an anthropomorphization of the man-machine relationship in which the machines are transformed into subjects in what might be termed a heterosexual, masculine, technical sociability and subjectivity.
In this article I investigate emancipatory spaces in masculinity studies with the guidance of Karen Barad's work, and in particular concepts such as diffraction and interference. For my purposes, ...Karen Barad's work opens up for understanding critical differences within regulated emotional spaces and stale relationalities of masculine gender configurations. Diffracted readings in masculinity studies could extend the symbolic space for acceptable forms of intimacy and possibly create emancipatory openings for hegemonic and dominant forms of lust communions. I argue that a sensual and conceptual key to alternative routes of masculine gendered subjectivities is intimacy and vulnerability. As such, vulnerability also connotes and produces a range of conceptual and embodied dyads and triads; empowered-disempowered; embodied-disembodied-ablebodied; homosocial-homoerotic-homosexual; potent-impotent; human-nonhuman; old-young, to mention a few. Vulnerability is also an onto-epistemological vantage point that hopefully and possibly could work our way around classical binaries and do a well-needed job as a form of emancipatory compass.
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