Gender, Sex and Tech! An Intersectional Feminist Guide

This book is a collection of 14 essays and one introductory and one conclusions chapter, written by scholars cutting across different institutions in Canada, and engages with diverse dimensions of gender, sex and technology.Exploring interdisciplinary, feminist, intersectional and decolonising methods and approaches, the chapters in the 300-plus page book are divided into five themes of "Disrupt", "Connect", "Surveillance", "Bodies" and "Reclaim".The book emanated from working on developing a course on the same theme and was written primarily as a resource for teachers, students and research scholars and, therefore, refers to itself as a guide.What allows it to be a real guide is the fact that each chapter is accompanied by sections on "Questions for Discussion", "Invitations to go Deeper", "Read More" and "Listen More, Watch More", in addition to References.These sections also follow the same theoretical backdrop as the essays, and encourage readers to explore questions about their experiences vis-à-vis their identities and interactions with technologies both in their personal and professional lives, and also both as individuals and members of a community.The book is indeed a resource for teachers, researchers and students, especially in North America and perhaps also the rest of the Western world.In addition, it is also an important read for others interested in exploring and understanding the relationships between technologies, identities and commerce, especially in the context of growing corporate control of technologies, on one hand, and deepening technological penetration in our daily lives, on the other.The book does not reject technology, in fact, it is very aware of the fact that intellectual exploration of this kind is also dependent on technology.Rather, it attempts to raise questions around the use and application of technology by connecting it with the issues of intersectionality and gender, and, therefore, with the issues of power, control, hierarchies and identities while attempting to go beyond binaries of various kinds.The first section, "Disrupt", has three essays, centering around the use of technological devices as a solution to women's problems and questioning the 'myth' that these necessarily improve their lives and give them greater control over their own lives.Lisa Smith, in her essay, analyses the use of birth control pills, baby bottles and bikes, especially in view of how these are advertised as saviours of women's freedom, and argues that "technologies serve and feed into power relations, which reproduce inequity in often violent and oppressive ways".While arriving at this conclusion, the essay recognises the complexity of discussing technology using the intersectional feminist concepts and the next essay, by Lauren Friesen and Ana Brito, takes this argument forward as they analyse menstruation technologies using the same lens.The essay explores the dimensions of shame and taboo that are deeply associated with menstruation in different cultures, and how menstruation technology solidifies menstruation as a distinctly feminine issue, and, therefore, disregards the experiences of trans and non-binary individuals.It also recognises that some signs of change are visible in terms of making these technologies more inclusive to reflect gender diversity but claims that these are not enough.each chapter.In that, it tries to follow the feminist tradition of co-creating knowledge and has potential for succeeding in that attempt!