When Are Choices Not a Choice?

Reviews the book, Women, Gender, and Technology edited by Mary Frank Fox, Deborah G. Johnson, and Sue V. Rosser (see record 2006-13008-000). This book is the first of a series of edited volumes focusing on the broad interface between technology and gender. Both the series and this volume address varied issues regarding the development, production, and use of technology. As Deborah G. Johnson explains in the introduction to this volume, technology is viewed as a system with social meaning, and gender relations are seen within this context. This conceptual framework allows for a rich and multifaceted discussion of the relation between gender expectations and a technological world, although the articles in this volume vary in how deeply they explore the subject matter. In the book's first chapter, Sue V. Rosser provides an overview of feminist theories, with a brief discussion of how each theory might construe technology issues. Going beyond the usual liberal, socialist, and essentialist theories, she also includes other theories--from psychoanalytic to cyberfeminism and postcolonial feminist. While this framework could be useful to other authors thinking about where their conceptions about technology fit within feminist theory, no author in this volume used it. This volume is an interesting collection of articles that could be very useful for a course on gender and technology. While the chapters vary in the extent to which they fulfill the introduction's stated intention to view gender and technology in the fabric of social meaning and power disparities, they do provide a broad view of how the creation, production, use, and impact of technology interacts with gender. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)