I wrote this piece for a graduate school course on “Revolutionary Technologies” @ Cornell Tech.
“Feminism has unmasked maleness as a form of power that is both omnipotent and nonexistent, an unreal thing with very real consequences.”
Catharine MacKinnon’s piece “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State” is a biting critique of Marxism. She says:
“According to the persuasion of the Marxist, women become a caste, a stratum, a cultural group, a division in civil society, a secondary contradiction, or a nonantagonistic contradiction; women’s liberation becomes a precondition, a measure of society’s general emancipation, part of the superstructure, or an important aspect of the class struggle.”
This quote captures much of what MacKinnon’s aims to convey– women are ‘othered’ in society, exist only as an object for male pleasure, succeed only on male terms, and in the process lose their own identities, because the oppressive male power structure obstructs a woman’s ability to be truly liberated. After all, “Man fucks woman; subject verb object.” But, MacKinnon says, all hope is not lost. Her theory of social change is what she calls “consciousness raising,” the process through which the impact of male dominance is discovered and analyzed by women– their explicit collective experience and perspective. They are well positioned to grasp the reality of their collective condition from inside the perspective of that experience itself.
MacKinnon’s description of women as a “caste” called to mind author Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents” , which posits that “racism” is actually an insufficient term to describe the systemic oppression of Black people in America, and that what America really has is a “caste system.” Though typically what comes to mind when the word caste is mentioned is the Indian system of rigid social group division, Wilkerson extends the connotation and definition to refer to the largely invisible underlying infrastructure that upholds, strengthens, and undergirds the inequality and injustice that Black people experience in America. This is not a direct parallel to MacKinnon’s words — after all, the injustice a white woman experiences in America, I’d argue, is several orders of magnitude lower than what a Black man, a Black woman, or a Black trans man or woman would experience in the US. Yet, her description of a caste system as an “artificial construction” and an “embedded ranking” of human value that is defined by the dominance and superiority of one group over another, does echo MacKinnon’s analysis.
In recent years, consciousness raising has taken shape online through the #MeToo movement. The power of the hashtag, which became viral through the power of social networks, was embodied in women sharing stories of their individual perspectives and experiences with sexism, harassment, sexualization, objectification, or rape, to which women responded with their own experiences, followed by the hashtag “#MeToo.” Global solidarity of women has been given a form, and a public spotlight has been starting to grow in luminosity to uncover male dominance and power structures. What began with a collective awareness has in some cases resulted in concrete consequences — most famously, the fall and conviction of former film producer (and rapist) Harvey Weinstein. The response of some men in power to the #MeToo movement has been anger, defensiveness, and refusal to admit fault, while others have responded with confusion and a genuine desire to learn, grow, and change. Regardless, the global male power structure persists, and its foundation holds strong.
Suchman’s “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production” is a discussion about how to reframe problematic technology design practices. Her reflection centers around networks, and the importance of cutting across organizational boundaries that separate designers, users, and other stakeholders in order to engage all collaborators in the design and production of all types of technology. She challenges the idea that there are discrete phases in a “system life cycle,” and says there are rather “complex, densely structured courses of articulation work without clearly distinguishable boundaries between.” The breakdown of one of the problem areas — the “view from nowhere,” in which designers lose track of the social infrastructure that underlies all technology production and create something far removed from what a user may find valuable — and “detached intimacy,” a faux-user-centered design approach that is still at some level removed from a true user — characterize much of scientific and technological development today. Suchman says:
“Within prevailing discourses anonymous and unlocatable designers, with a license afforded by their professional training, problematise the world in such a way as to make themselves indispensable to it and then discuss their obligation to intervene, in order to deliver technological solutions to equally decontextualized and consequently unlocatable users”
Her characterization of powerful designers positioning themselves as “indispensable” is particularly relevant to today’s world of Big Tech. Take, for example, Twitter. The platform has grown to play a vital role in breaking news and journalism, and in the Trump administration, became a major method of policy dissemination and the perpetuation of straight up lies. Twitter, instead of immediately banning Trump from the network for intentionally spreading misinformation or making misleading and harmful claims that in many cases actually incited violence, stated that their role did not entail an obligation to intervene, but rather was to maintain an open community where information was readily available, especially from world leaders and government entities. This changed, of course, after the January 6th failed insurrection / attack on the US Capitol, when pressure reached a boiling point. It seemed, however, that CEO Dorsey, at least in a public reflection, felt that the ban was an existential failure of Twitter’s obligation to uphold public discourse.
Would Trump have been able to continue as long as he had on Twitter were he a woman? Perhaps this question is not even applicable, given the US has demonstrated a staunch unwillingness to even elect someone who is not male to the highest office in the land. Something tells me that if Hillary Clinton had been elected in 2016, and demonstrated any sliver of what could be called emotional instability, the public backlash would have been overwhelming. How far, then, can consciousness raising take the female collective caste to subvert and dismantle the patriarchy?
