Reading Response (9/5)

I disagree with positivism as defined in liberal feminism. I don’t think there is a way to form experience and analyze it free from social conditions. Every experience is different based on what biases and what kind of framing takes place. Knowledge is not objective because we cannot decontextualize our experience, our thought, and our means of obtaining knowledge and giving it significance through application. Therefore, I think when it comes to technology development and design, the male experience is inherently different from the female’s. I understand that there are facts we accept universally to be true and irrefutable, but they exist in the space we’ve created. For example, something as basic as our understanding of numbers and language are something civilization just made up. This is, of course, a half-baked idea.

In this respect, I agree with socialist feminism in that it refuses positivism. I do believe that technology is a social product and is developed according to a culture’s values and beliefs. It’s ignorant to say that a white, middle class male’s experience and development of technology would be anything that resembles a black woman’s experience in a racist and sexist society. Essential feminism also brings the great point of saying that because men cannot conceive and give birth, they develop technology that seeks to dominate and exploit the natural world. The evidence is all around us as our Earth is suffering the abuse we have put it through. Interestingly, instead of admitting technology’s faults and valuing sustainability, our patriarchal society decides to invest in colonizing Mars! I wonder what technology a matriarchal society would have designed and believe that it would have been better with coexisting with our natural world instead of seeking to dominate and subdue it. I think Knut Sorenson brings the good point that women bring “caring values” to the science and technology field such as “rationale of responsibility”. With the defense of “out of sight, out of mind” thinking that backs pollution, animal cruelty, economic inequity, etc., our technological world needs the rationale of responsibility.

In terms of sexual identity, I think as a whole society has failed to address this “issue” (and I use the word issue sardonically). I feel there is a need for people to constantly be labeling and defining themselves as well as other as a shortcut to understand sexual identity as a black and white topic. However, I think terms that box us in as having attraction to only one gender or both is constricting. Why can’t we experience attraction freely based on a partner’s personality and individual characteristics instead of strictly being attracted to erogenous zones and body parts? Why does a history of homosexual/heterosexual tendencies mean we cannot possibly be attracted to another gender? This phenomenon is not universal: men in Ancient Greece and Melanesia engaged in gay sex acts, but were not considered gay in the slightest. I think our obsession with normalizing everyone and policing their bodies values being what is considered socially normal instead of natural.

Social constructionism is a new idea to me, but I agree with it. I think that although we have urges that are biological, the way we interpret them and give them meaning is purely social. For instance, a young man in Ancient Greece performing fellatio is not gay, but in the United States, it is starkly defined as a gay act. In this way, the same sexual act can be socially construed in very different ways. Because the social defines how we experience arousal and how we act on it, it influences how we shape it. However, I may be a moderate social constructionist since I don’t believe that without society, we would never acquire sexual drive. Sure, society shapes our sexual identities and somewhat creates it, but I don’t believe that it creates a feeling that is not there to begin with.