User:Zuhui/👀/Misplaced Concretism and Concrete Situations: Feminism, Method, and Information Technology

Introduction: The "turkey baster disaster" and the realpolitik

What was important about it for our purposes here, however, was a marked shift in the community from essentialist, “biologically” driven explana- tions to more complex, contradictory, heterogeneous ways of thinking about experi- ence and situations. “Men” became modified by “our sons”; “mutants” were newly domesticated and intimate. And from this experience and many others, the vocabulary of essentialism was deeply scrutinized and abandoned (by many). Among other things, we took the misplaced concretism of sex and re-situated it within the concrete experi- ence of gender and relationships.

I want to take us from low-tech turkey basters to high-tech computers via this exam- ple, because I think it says something important about feminism, method, and tech- nology. One simplistic way of reading these events (and others of the late 1970s and early 1980s) is that the blunt reality of life experience interfered with an idealistic, ideo- logical kind of talk—a form of realpolitik that was also a co-optation.

I hold that it is the all at once-ness that is at the core of feminist survival, and as a consequence at the core of our relationship to science and technology. The power to hold multiple, contradictory views in a moral collective is necessary in shaping the divergence between Big Brother and a positive, cyborg-inhabited multiverse.