This list comes to us courtesy of Anna Lauren Hoffman (annaeveryday.com and @annaeveryday), an assistant professor at the UW iSchool. As she notes “the list was produced for a large 100-level course (120+ students) on Gender & Information Technology that we run out of the iSchool here at UW. This my first quarter teaching the course and I’ve completely redesigned it from past iterations. The redesign involved a re-thinking of how assignments work – instead of a set schedule of assignments, I’m allowing students to put together a slate of assignments from a kind of a la carte menu. One of the assignment options is a book report on a scholarly book chosen from a set list. This is that list!
The list reflects the broad, but selective survey of issues approach I am taking with the course – from histories of computing to the construction of bodies through info/sci/tech to contemporary issues in online communication/platforms. Since it’s primarily freshmen and sophomores, I just want to them to walk away with a sense of the wide range of ways gender serves as an organizing category for – and a product of – information, science, and technology.”
Gender, Information, Science, & Technology: A Very Interdisciplinary and Wildly Incomplete Reading List
by Anna Lauren Hoffman
Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender: Women’s Changing Participation in Computing (MIT Press, 2012).
Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015).
Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Know-How (Northeastern University Press, 1988).
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (Basic Books, 1985).
Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017).
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (Basic Books, 2000).
Mary L. Gray, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press, 2009).
Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Cornell University Press, 1991).
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing(MIT Press, 2017).
Kylie Jarrett, Feminism, Labor, and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (Routledge, 2016).
Nancy Lublin, Pandora’s Box: Feminism Confronts Reproductive Technology (Rowman & Little field, 1998).
Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of the Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale University Press, 2015).
Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2012).
Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press, 2018).
Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam University Press, 2004).
Sadie Plant, Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (Doubleday, 1997).
Lana F. Rakow, Gender on the Line: Women, the Telephone, and Community Life (University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in 19th Century England (UC Press, 1993).
Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Harvard University Press, 2001).
Leslie Regan Shade, Gender and Community in the Social Construction of the Internet (Peter Lang, 2002).
Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law (South End Press, 2011).
Sandy Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (MIT Press, 1995).
Chikako Takeshita, The Global Biopolitics of the IUD: How Science Constructs Contraceptive Users and Women’s Bodies (MIT Press, 2011).
Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press, 2005).
Julie A. Wilson & Emily Chivers Yochim, Mothering Through Precarity: Women’s Work and Digital Media (Duke University Press, 2017).
Elizabeth Wissinger, This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour (NYU Press, 2015).