Spring 2001 - 2004
Virginia Tech & Appalachian State University

The 2004 Gender and Technology exhibit will be on view in the Living Learning Center, room 214 at Appalachian State University from March 15 - March 26, 9:00AM to 5:00PM.

The exhibit was a teaching-learning exercise for students in Gender & Technology, an undergraduate class in both the Humanities, Science, and Technology Program and the Women's Studies Program at Virginia Tech. As such it is an exhibit in progress. Each time the class is taught more items will be added to the exhibit.

The 2001 Gender and Technology exhibit was open to the public in the Williamsburg Room of Squires Student Center on the Virginia Tech campus March 26 - March 30. This site was created to be an online version of the exhibit. 

Feel free to explore the exhibit and learn more about it by using the links above.

The idea behind this exhibit is to raise questions about the mutual shaping of gender and technology:

• Why do we associate some technologies with men and others with women?

• Does technology reinforce gender divisions and inequality?

• Have women been left out of the historical and cultural analyses of technology?

How this exhibit came about:
This is a teaching-learning exercise for students in Gender & Technology, as an undergraduate class, which originated at Virginia Tech in both the Humanities, Science, and Technology Program and the Women's Studies Program. As such it is an exhibit in progress. Each time the class is taught more items will be added to the exhibit. You might notice that some interesting and important items are not in the exhibit at this time. Surely technologies such as cosmetic surgeries, household technologies, and agribusiness technologies of food--which future students will include--have had a profound impact on women's lives and the way gender is structured and lived out in our culture and across the world.

This exhibit project was inspired by two exhibits done in Europe: first, a group, including Prof. Nelly Oudshoorn, at the University of Twente in Amsterdam set up the exhibit "Dingen (h/v)" (which translates to "Things (m/f)," or "The Gender of Things"); and second, Prof. Ann Rudinow Sætnan and her colleagues at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim installed "Tingenes Kjønn."

Academic framework and contribution of the exhibit:
For the purposes of this exhibit, technology is defined as practical apparatuses, including small and large artifacts, pieces of hardware, and systems of hardware. Gender is defined as the set of cultural beliefs about how men and women are or should be different in appearance, personality, or biology. Feminist scholars understand gender as a political ideology that frames meanings for behaviors, bodies, and social systems. Gender varies throughout history and cultures. Experiences and interpretations of gender are structured by class, race, sexuality, age, religion, and other variables.

Though technology is often coded socially as masculine, technology not only includes big machines or what workers do on an assembly line of production, but also the electric stove, the typewriter, birth control pills, and the bra. Feminist scholars of technology have challenged male-centered definitions of technology, thereby highlighting technologies that women invented and/or use. Studying technologies can tell us much about women's lives as well as about how gender inequality is sustained and challenged. At the same time, studying gender can tell us much about the meanings, uses, and abuses of technology.

In 1980, Professor Langdon Winner wrote the essay, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” (Daedalus, 109: 121-36), in which he argues that technologies can be designed or arranged in such a way as to create a certain political order in a community. For instance, many overpasses of Long Island parkways were built with clearances too low to allow buses to enter the more affluent areas where there are public beaches and parks, revealing a social-class and racial bias on the part of planners who knew that mostly moneyed white people drove cars rather than used public transportation. Technologies can also require, or be strongly compatible with, certain relationships of power and authority—for instance, adopting the technology of the atom bomb requires that it be controlled by a centralized, hierarchical chain of command.

This exhibit shows that technology has a sexual politics. Students and other exhibit contributors consider the gender order that is enforced through certain technologies, and the relationships of power between men and women that certain technologies facilitate.