Technology/Posthumanism

If the feminist, gendered body is more than corporeal matter bound by skin, then technology can be seen as, like language, one means of extending what we think of as the body. Like language, technology can be thought as an augmentation or supplement that is both outside the body and inside the body&s;s core identity (what gives the body capacity, efficaciousness, and self-familiarity). As the meeting-ground between the body and capital, technology is disembodied subjectivity. Though the technological modernization of the home was supposed to reduce women&s;s housework and give them time for other options, it actually only serves to increase domestic labor. Feminist theory has also been concerned with how our bodily technologies from the assembly line to the computer chip and AI have socialized our identity, making us more interdependent than ever but also more reliant on a large system of exploitation. Technology also extends human impact beyond the scope of the human itself, decentering human perspectives, as demonstrated by feminist post-humanist philosophies. Writers engaged in this topic include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Shulamith Firestone, Jennifer Rhee, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, Anne Balsamo, Rosi Braidotti, N. Katherine Hayles, Wendy Chun, and Donna Haraway.