Obreja, Monica | Sveden

Monica Obreja is a PhD student at the Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. She has an undergraduate degree in political science and sociology from the National School of Political Science and Public Administration in Bucharest. She received an MA degree in Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest. Monica’s PhD project is interrogating the ontology, epistemology and ethics of the feminine in relation to technology. Given the strong essentialist overtone that femininity/the feminine has had in feminist theories, her interest is to build an alternative interpretation of the feminine that would as such offer new understandings of the relation women have with technology. Her research draws specifically on feminist sexual difference theories and feminist science and technology studies.  

Project at IAS-STS: What do we mean when we say ‘gender and technology’? Reflections on subjects, objects and relations

My research at IAS-STS will consist in a critical evaluation of the concepts ‘gender’, ‘woman/women’ and the ‘feminine’ at work in a particular feminist corpus of research on gender/women and/in technology. I am mainly interested in one theoretical perspective called the ‘gender-technology co-construction’ and its assumptions about gender and technology. This paradigm insists that the meanings of both gender and technology are constructed thus flexible and, consequently, rejects any claim about inherent properties of both gender and technology. For instance, according to such an approach, there is nothing natural and inevitable about women’s lack of technical skills and knowledge, there is nothing inherently masculine about technology and so on. Also, gender and technology are co-constructed in a symmetrical way. This further means that technology is influenced in the meanings it takes by gender identities, symbols, and structures, and, equally important, that gender is also mediated in the understanding and experience one has of it by technological artifacts and processes.

My point of argument is that such a theoretical perspective on gender and technology makes use of a conventional feminist distinction between sex and gender and consequently does not pay attention to the fact that men and women are constituted in a dissymmetrical way via their being positioned differently as embodied subjects. I want to suggest a different approach to interpreting women’s relation to technology, one that makes use of the feminist category of ‘sexual difference’ rather than that of the ‘sex/gender’ distinction. I will argue that the rejection of ‘sexual difference’ as essentialist, thus unsuitable for imagining social change is unfounded and counterproductive. 

Selected publications

Monica Obreja (forthcoming) ‘From Women and Technology to Gender and Technology. And Back. (A Note on Methodology)’. in Anne-Sophie Godfroy-Genin (ed): Women in Engineering and Technology Research. Proceedings of the PROMETEA international conference, October 26-27 2008. Zürich: Lit Verlag.

Monica Obreja, 2009, "There is a 'mass' of women missing from ICT. Let’s bring it in!", Proceedings of the 5th European Symposium on Gender & ICT. Digital Cultures: Participation - Empowerment – Diversity, University of Bremen, Germany, March 5-7 2009; Published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Germany License. http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/soteg/gict2009/proceedings/GICT2009_Obreja.pdf