The struggles of feminists and their achievements have changed the way we as a society think about women and gender. But what of the future? It tends to be a reflex to look backwards at today’s social problems in order to understand feminist thought and gender perceptions, but this does not help our understanding of how feminism and gender identity is changing right now and in the near future.  Many postmodern and poststructuralist writers, however, are moving beyond the traditional definitions of womanhood. We must not underestimate the impact of technology in how we think about gender and feminism. From the impact of the Pill to in-vitro fertilization, technology has redefined what it means to be a woman in our society. Tomorrow, technologies on the horizon will lead us to many new debates on feminism and gender.

What is Cyborg Feminism?

            Donna Haraway, who taught at John Hopkins University, invented the term when she wrote “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century^[1]” in 1985. This article, which attempted to bridge the gap of the disparate fields of socialism and feminism, laid the intellectual framework for “cyborg feminism.” While it is easy to dismiss a philosophy with such a fanciful name, cyborg feminism dismisses the poring over of history to find the moment that gender equality began and the idea of rolling back the clock to a mother image grounded in nature. Gill Kirkup ^[2] notes, “There is no Garden of Eden, and gods and goddesses are dead. The solution [...] is to embrace technoscience for its ability to redraw all category boundaries between human beings and the rest [...]” Haraway’s view is that the boundaries which divide our society are breaking down, such as the dualism between animal/human organisms and machines. This is already happening, with in-vitro fertilization, implantable contraception devices, and gender reassignment surgery. However, as much as Haraway’s literary device of the cyborg is supposed to be ahistorical, women have long used technology to redefine gender roles: for example, the struggle for women’s literacy in the 1500s (Huiza). The cyborg is an important counterpoint to the backward-looking conception of woman as a “goddess,” a concept that Haraway rejects unequivocally.

“Hard” science and the Female Perspective

            There seems to be a dichotomy in the sciences. Few would say that the impact of feminism has not been felt in the “soft” sciences of humanities and the social sciences. However, it has had very little impact on what we call the “hard” sciences, or physical sciences.  Is this simply a consequence of the emphasis of science on “value-neutral, progressive discovery of ‘universal and objective truths’ about nature and matter [...]“? (Lykke) Or could the few points of intersection with “hard” science and feminist theory be evidence of a tacit bias inherent in our notions of the search for “pure” knowledge? This dichotomy itself, between sciences like feminism that deal with the “human” versus disciplines like physics, which are centered on the “non-human,” is rigidly enforced by both sides. The confluences of these two types of knowledge are often contradictory and unsettling, like in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which is a fusion of the human and non-human. Applying feminist critical thought to the “hard” sciences is equally shocking due to the suggestion, as Fox Keller states, “that our ‘laws of nature’ are more than simple expressions of the results of objective inquiry or of political and social pressures; they must also be read for their personal — and by tradition, masculine — content.^[3]” Society needs to be able to integrate both sides of the sciences to be able to construct a viable model of female identity inside an increasingly technological world.

Feminist Approaches to Science and Technology

            There are two main feminist critical approaches to science. The first, “feminist empiricism,” directs criticism at individual scientists who use research inappropriately inside the framework of the scientific method. The second, so-called “Feminist standpoint” criticisms stem from the belief that the scientific establishment is a type of social group that exercises tremendous power and must be judged in terms of the actions of their particular social location^[4].

As an example, one can look at two feminist criticisms of the first large in-vitro fertilization (IVF) study published in Britain. The first, by Stanworth in 1987, typifies a “feminist empiricist” approach. The article is utilitarian, concerning itself with the uses of IVF without considering the social aspects of the treatment. Also, the source for the material is drawn only from interviews with infertile heterosexual women, tainting the conclusions drawn from this analysis. It also generalizes the experience of this group of women who are using IVF into the experience of all women. The writers, therefore, concluded that IVF is an unqualified success and a wholly positive force. This highlights the limits of the feminist empiricist view. In tending to look positively on “science-as-usual,” it can miss a whole swath of sociological implications that are present when analyzing research. The upswing to this view is that due to its myopia about the larger philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge raised earlier, its suggestions can identify clear misuses of science due to adherence to the principles of the scientific method.

Another group of researchers critiqued the data in the study with a “feminist standpoint” approach (Klein, 1989). These case studies considered both women who underwent traditional fertility treatments and IVF, which revealed women who felt resentment at how they were treated. From these interviews, she came to the conclusion that IVF was not created with women’s needs and interests in mind, and is inherently patriarchal. Another conclusion she reached was that of the high failure rates of both treatments, which the women she interviewed felt was not disclosed to them or to the public. She draws parallels between the societal stigma of infertility and the treatments’ side effects and large chance of failure, so that the woman is made to feel the one at fault for infertility rather than the treatment.

Despite the negative impacts of these types of technologies, it is a mistake to view technology as a unidirectional process (something created by men which effects women). For example, an unintended consequence of the sidewalks and accessible entrances created by the Americans with Disabilities Act was that women now could push baby carriages around cities. “It is important not to underestimate women’s capacity to subvert the intended purposes of technology and turn it to their collective advantage.^[5]” But is there something to the feminine experience separate from sexual organs and gender roles? What would a “female” machine be like?

Feminism and Artificial Intelligence

            If we concede that science is not entirely a dispassionate search for hidden secrets of the universe, but a concentrated effort funded by governments and multinational corporations that cannot be separated from its cultural context, then there is much work to do to incorporate the narratives of feminism into the search for knowledge. But what, exactly, is knowledge separated from cultural context? Researchers have spent years programming computers in an attempt to create machines capable of artificial intelligence (AI), but could researchers be led astray by a masculine emphasis on propositional knowledge  (knowing that) vs. feminine knowledge (knowing how)?^[6] This idea of a type of knowledge that is disconnected from symbolic meaning may be foreign, but we encounter it every day. How would we program a machine to interpret the complex symbolic language of a mother’s love for her infant? In a scientific context, this “unwritten” knowledge has precedent as well.  Alison Adam speaks of the building of TEA-lasers in the 1970s, when laser technology was in its infancy. Once the discovery was made, no amount of reading scientific papers could convey the correct way to build one. Experienced laser physicists were required to go to the laboratories where the new lasers had been constructed and build one alongside the scientists there in order to create one that would actually function. The implicit knowledge of the scientists who created the working laser could not be expressed in words; it could only be expressed through action.

Many times the critique of science and technology as value-neutral enterprises is set aside due to the belief that the only impediment to equality is getting more women to work in the sciences. There are more complex issues at stake: the foremost being the way that versions of masculinity become inscribed on artificial systems. However, even if we were to replace the kind of “white college professor” bias with a “white female college professor” bias, that would still leave out many voices in contemporary feminism. Even the language we used to discuss or encode ideas into an AI system might be fraught with unintended gender bias. In French feminism, there a large emphasis on the subtle connotations of noun and pronoun gender which are untranslatable into English.^[7]

Feminine Knowledge in Artificial Systems

            The questions raised by a feminist approach to knowledge are especially pronounced when discussing their practical application in two long-range AI projects. The first is Cyc, a ten-year project devoted to creating a machine that could understand an encyclopedia (hence the name). However, the problem inherent in these types of systems is that it is extremely difficult for them to generalize about information they aren’t programmed with. Systems of this type also have a difficulty synthesizing past actions into a meaningful whole (like the difficulty in understanding an entire conversation from just hearing the last few things said). In addition, since most forms of AI are limited to text-based interaction, the same gender bias as the researchers is likely to creep in. As Harry Collins suggests, giving the artificial organism some type of “body” to inhabit in order to provide it with the same types of sensory inputs that humans use to construct our “common sense” might alleviate these types of limits. If this were to happen, perhaps machines would begin to learn a type of “feminine” knowledge through behaviors not expressible in language.

There is also the question of what AI researchers call the “view from nowhere,” which is how the AI system sees itself. So, should you ask a question like “Are you a Feminist?” Cyc must be programmed with an answer. Undoubtedly, we would have to choose whether we wanted the machine to be Christian or Jewish, male or female, Capitalist or Marxist, which would obviously mirror the sentiments of those creating the system. However, to delve even deeper into the notion of the “view from nowhere,” which theories about our civilization would be deemed “appropriate” for an AI to believe in? It’s difficult to imagine a technology consortium producing a self-aware computer that identifies as a marxist feminist. This speaks to the problems of science as a cultural institution: some knowledge has a “higher” value than another, and what does not have “value” is hidden or omitted.

In another famous AI system named Soar, developed at Carnegie Mellon University, the emphasis is not on creating an encyclopedic database of facts for the AI to base its responses on, but on the representation of knowledge through problem-solving. Soar attempts to emulate the roots of cognition by moving away from an emphasis on knowledge of many facts to an emphasis on solving logic puzzles. This also reveals a bias: the types of puzzles Soar was built to solve were the types of problems that the researchers themselves felt they did well. This leads us to the very likely conclusion that the entire field of AI has been based around “the behavior of a few, technically educated, young, male, probably middle-class, probably white college students working on a set of rather unnatural tasks in a US university in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” (Adam) If this is irrelevant, there is certainly no mention of it in the research published. It is painfully obvious that the “view from nowhere” that these researchers are attempting to create is one of wealthy, educated people in the 1960s.

Future Feminism

            The image of the cyborg presents a liberating view of the feminist of the future, using technology to augment and expand her definition of womanhood. Feminist thought must intersect with the sciences if we are to ever have an informed discussion about the true nature of knowledge, both feminine and masculine. We can choose to evaluate what scientific knowledge presents either through the lens of “science as usual” or a more radical view that questions the intentions behind each invention. Through looking at research to create “other” minds through AI, feminist critical analysis shows many of the inherent cultural biases that permeate the sciences, often dooming certain lines of research to failure. Science and technology hold the promise of a future that is better for women if we take the time to critically analyze the male-as-norm predilection in the sciences and adjust our biases accordingly.

Additional works cited: 1^[8]2^[9]3^[10]

1. ^[1] Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pgs. 149-181. ↩
2. ^[2] Kirkup, Gill. Introduction. in The Gendered Cyborg, a Reader. (New York; Routledge, 2000), pgs. 4-10. ↩
3. ^[3] Keller, E. Fox. Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, Conn. and London; Yale University Press, 1985) ↩
4. ^[4] Steinberg, Deborah Lynn. “Feminist Approaches to Science, Medicine and Technology.” in The Gendered Cyborg, a Reader. (New York; Routledge, 2000), pgs. 194-203 ↩
5. ^[5] Wajcman, Judy. Feminism Confronts Technology. (Cambridge; Polity Press, 1991) ↩
6. ^[6] Adam, Alison. Artificial Knowing: Gender and the thinking machine. (London: Routledge, 1998). ↩
7. ^[7] Sellers, Susan. Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France. (London; Macmillan Education, 1991) pg. xiii ↩
8. ^[8] Lykke, Nina. “Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist confrontations with science,” in The Gendered Cyborg, a Reader (New York; Routledge, 2000), pgs. 74-87. ↩
9. ^[9] Huiza, Claudia. Women and Literature. M. Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History, 2005, Vol. 3, p1147 ↩
10. ^[10] Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 1996) ↩