Postcolonial and feminist philosophies of science and technology: convergences and dissonances

Feminist and postcolonial studies of science and technology should be overtly in coalition with each other. After all, they claim accountability to overlapping groups of peoples. Women constitute half of the colonized and ex-colonized; a majority of the world's women were colonized or are subject to contemporary neocolonialism. Moreover, the discourses of colonialism and androcentrism are deeply locked into each other. The colonized have been conceptualized as not fully as masculine as Western men, while women are conceptualized as on the periphery of, or even outside, the social orders of interest to androcentric researchers and scholars. Thus each needs the success of the other kind of STS for its own successes. Yet these two fields of STS largely take different kinds of social relations to be the relevant ones, different kinds of sciences to be important, and they propose different model agents to transform science and technology policies and practices in intellectually and politically progressive ways. Fortunately, promising exceptions to these charges are underway. Moreover, feminist and postcolonial STS provide distinctive resources to remedy the epistemological underdevelopment shared in significant respects by much of ‘mainstream’ STS and the familiar Enlightenment ideals it criticizes.