| Abstract: |
The relationship between gender and technology has been explored for several
decades. Consistently, the field of technology has been described as being
permeated by masculine discourses, which find expression in the cultural
tendency to treat technological work as an almost exclusively masculine
domain. In this paper I treat technology and gender as mutually constitutive,
and illustrate this assumption with a case in which gender was re-constructed
through the use of computers in physics education. Inspired by the ANT
methodology, the study aimed at scrutinized the black box of technology and
gender construction. The findings support the initial claim that the
construction of technology plays a crucial part in the construction of gender.
The same findings further indicate that, under certain circumstances, an
attentive and gender-sensitive use of new technology can contribute to changes
in the construction of gender. |