The Natural Woman and the Technological (Wo)man?
On representations of difference and inferiority
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2024
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Student Paper
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yes
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Abstract
In this essay, I discuss how representations of difference and inferiority—along vectors of gender, race, and social class—have been culturally constructed to advance social and political interests of specific groups. Firstly, I exemplify how attempts to naturalize gender, race, and class culturally constructed and socially ordered woman, non-white, and poor as inferior. One of many and often contradictory ways to do so was by representing specific groups of individuals as closer to nature. I want to show, with these examples, how relational and hierarchical organizations of difference were produced with natural and medical science in the eighteenth- and nineteenth century. Secondly, I build upon an understanding of science and history as neither good nor bad nor neutral to argue for a non-binary, multi-dimensional analysis of myths of inferiority. Thirdly, I insist with Mary Poovey (1986) that representations are arenas for a negotiation of meanings as they inevitably hold both dominant ideologies and resisting opposition. It is with this proposition that I, finally, return to the imaginary of “Artificial Intelligence for Sustainability.” I conclude with an effort to provide—together with its apparent assertions of control and technological determinism—imminent notions of resistance and uncertainty.
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Examiner : Valdameri, Elena
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ETH Zurich
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03814 - Fischer-Tiné, Harald / Fischer-Tiné, Harald