Login
       
  • Women’s Hopes and Fears: Utopian Selves and Technological Crunch

Suterwalla, Shehnaz, 2015, Conference or Workshop, Women’s Hopes and Fears: Utopian Selves and Technological Crunch at Design History Society Conference, San Francisco, US, 11 Sep 2015.

Abstract or Description:

The design of technology, the internet and digital life in how we live now has proved fertile ground for technofeminist and cyberfeminist debates over the last twenty years. While women’s identities have been reconfigured with the digital, the politics of experience and representation have also evolved to expose unsettling gender power relations as digital artefacts and people co-evolve. In this way the design and materiality of technology has revealed its darker sides. Despite the backdrop of the imagined utopias that formed the cybernetic and cyborg rhetoric of the 1960s, digital life for women now includes dystopic elements of discrimination, exclusion, objectification. This paper pits these dystopic realties against digital life’s utopianism. With a renewed emphasis on materiality and embodiment; it presents a conceptual and methodological discussion of ways of incorporating the body and emotional and sensorial practices into digital debates, and in this way it develops too a discussion on how we might live.

Subjects: Other > Historical and Philosophical studies > V300 History by topic > V370 History of Design
School or Centre: School of Arts & Humanities
Funders: RCA and Research and Knowledge Development Fund
Date Deposited: 16 Dec 2016 16:38
Last Modified: 09 Nov 2018 15:47
URI: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/id/eprint/2535
Edit Item (login required) Edit Item (login required)