Gender in innovative techno fantasies

Cathrine Hasse

pp. 263-281

in: Theresa Schilhab, Frederik Stjernfelt, Terrence W. Deacon (eds), The symbolic species evolved, Berlin, Springer, 2012

Abstract

Human beings are a symbolic species with a special capacity for fantasy. It has been argued by Terrence Deacon that the prefrontal cortex has developed alongside with language and tool-making and that this part of the brain is also connected with making plans (Deacon, 1997). This could mean that human agents have developed a particular capacity for creating their habitats according to their fantasies about how they would like to live in the future. However, this general argument does not allow for a deeper understanding of difference in human fantasies and how these differences might relate to gendered experiences. Human fantasies about future developments might differ with gendered human experiences. In feminist studies it has been a recurring theme whether we can argue for a gendered status of epistemic agency. In this article I shall inspect the claim of gendered epistemologies from the angle of gendered connectionism in relation to robotics and physics. The argument I want to make is that there might be no detectable difference in how female and male researchers envision scientific innovation, but there are differences in feminist and masculine techno fantasies and this might influence how we plan our future with technological tools.