Essentialism & Constructivism

Processed Lives : Gender and Technology in Everyday Life by Jennifer Terry (Editor), Melodie Calvert (Editor)

Processed Lives focuses on technology's interaction with the social concept of gender. Much of the book deals with the technology of cyberspace--not surprising, given the subtitle's pointed reference to everyday life, which for most people concerned with cyber matters means something to do with the Internet.

For example, the editors chose Nina Wakeford's essay on feminist networking and interaction on the World Wide Web, as well as excerpts from videos produced by teenage girls in a gender and technology workshop. Although the emphasis is on online interactions, all forms of technology are fair game. Judith Halberstam's insights into the effects of public bathrooms on gender views will certainly raise eyebrows as it raises questions.

Other essays take on embryonic fertilization, surveillance systems, UFOs and "the new technologies of race." A group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization does some home transplant surgery between G.I. Joe and Barbie that defies easy description.

This collection isn't limited to traditional verbal discussions. Included are visual works by several artists, including Ericka Beckman's images from the film Hiatus and Joyan Saunder's and Liss Platt's excerpts from the experimental videotape Brains on Toast--a satirical examination of theories on gender and sexuality. Don't expect a comfortable resolution at the end, either, but it's long past time for people to be asking the essential question in this book: who actually benefits from technology, and why?

From Essentialism to Constructivism: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads

by Andrew Feenberg

...The new picture emerging from social studies of science and technology gives us excellent reasons for believing that rationality is a dimension of social life more similar than different from other cultural phenomena. Nevertheless, it is implausible to dismiss it as merely a Western myth and to flatten all the distinctions which so obviously differentiate modern from premodern societies. There is something distinctive about modern societies captured in notions such as modernization, rationalization, and reification. Without such concepts, derived ultimately from Marx and Weber, we can make no sense of the historical process of the last few hundred years. Yet these are "totalizing" concepts that seem to lead back to a deterministic view we are supposed to have transcended from our new culturalist perspective. Is there no way out of this dilemma? Must we choose between universal rationality and cultural variety? Or more accurately, can we choose between these two dialectically correlated concepts that are each unthinkable without the other?...

Constructivism

This page of resources from the University of Colorado at Denver's School of Education lists of articles by various scholars.

Essays on constructivism and education

This list of articles focuses especially on the relationship between constructivism and pedagogy.

Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism

By Elizabeth Grosz

Excerpt:

Feminist theory is necessarily implicated in a series of complex negotiations between a number of tense and antagonistic forces that are often unrecognized and unelaborated. It is a self-conscious reaction on the one hand to the overwhelming masculinity of privileged and historically dominant knowledges, acting as a kind of counterweight to the imbalances resulting from the male monopoly of the production and reception of knowledges. On the other hand, it is also a response to the broad political aims and objectives of feminist struggles. Feminist theory is thus bound to two kinds of goals, two commitments or undertakings that exist only in an uneasy and problematic relationship. This tension means that feminists have had to tread a fine line either between intellectual rigor (as it has been defined in male terms) and political commitment (as feminists see it)--that is, between the risks posed by patriarchal recuperation and those of a conceptual sloppiness inadequate to the long-term needs of feminist struggles--or between acceptance in male terms and commitment to women's terms...

Queer By Choice

A radical web community which introduces queer theory concepts and an unapologetic celebration of CHOOSING to be queer to a primarily non-academic audience.