The machine is a woman: an analysis of how technology is sexed and gendered in selected South African advertisements

Abstract

In most feminist readings, including those of Mary Daly ( 1990) and Hilary Rose ( 1994), there is a tendency to homogenise technology or to provide somewhat generalised accounts of its reception. In such accounts, one technology becomes a synecdoche of technologies in general. Furthermore, they construct technology as inevitably phallic, masculine and, for that reason, as deadly and westernised per se. Accordingly, it is assumed that technology tends to exclude women' not only from participating in its development but also from using it. If, working with this model, one uses the critical category of gender to assess the relationship between 'women' and 'technology', the outcome is inv aria bly going to be somewhat simplistic and predictable. It will be argued that women's relationship to technologies is informed by gender biases that are demeaning. Moreover, it will be assumed that women actually feel themselves degraded by such gender biased imagery. Obviously, this is not necessarily true, and it does not accurately reflect all women's daily experiences with technologies.