Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies

This volume explores urgent questions surrounding the bidirectional relationship between feminist philosophy and emerging technologies. It underlines the exigency of feminist philosophical reflections on the design, use, and understanding of emerging technologies and at the same time accentuates how emerging technologies can uniquely impact the shape of future feminist critique and intervention. While feminist philosophers have attended to problems posed by a few specific technologies that emerged in the previous century—especially reproductive technologies—broader philosophical questions concerning the challenges various new technologies present to feminism have yet to receive the sustained, critical attention they deserve. Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies responds to this problem. It is divided into two sections. Section 1 provides theoretical considerations about the links between feminist philosophy and philosophy of technology (broadly construed) by developing–against the background of emerging technologies–methodological approaches and guidance for bringing those two fields of philosophical research together. Section 2 is dedicated to analyses of specific emerging technologies and user trends, their relation to extant structures of oppression, and to bringing to the fore various ways in which a feminist philosophy of technology can impact the design of current and future technologies. Feminist Philosophy and Emerging Technologies is an excellent resource for scholars and advanced students working in feminist philosophy, philosophy of technology, ethics, political philosophy, feminist theory, gender and cultural studies, and science and technology studies.