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The foregrounding of the two paradigms, 'women' and technology, creates a much needed discursive forum in contemporary feminist criticism. The medium of performance is the artist's body. It operated in recent performances by Barbara Campbell, Jill Orr, Michelle Andringa and Jill Scott as a discursive medium, contextualising these two paradigms. The relationship of technology to the body critically engages Michel Foucault's concept of surveillance, while the relationship of women to the body engages concepts of gender construction, biologism and gender division. What, specifically, is women's relationship to technology, the body and social surveillance?
The popular media stereotypes that are immediately called to mind when freely associating women and technology are ones of the helpless female and the passive female—unable to change the tyre on her own car, or to deliver her own baby, let alone program a computer, engineer a skyscraper, or pilot a jet-fighter. Women who fill such roles are defined negatively in terms of their gender deviation (as masculinised bitches and so on). Women are seen to have no natural propensity for technology. They are mystified by it, needing male authority to provide, to explain, and to protect. The popular exception to this media stereotype is in the area of domestic appliances which are provided, invented and serviced by a masculine technocracy but undoubtedly mastered by the female 'kitchen whizz' or 'wonder mum'. The technical-female is permitted authority in the private (powerless and apolitical) realm, adopting the passive role of consumer. Thus women are characterised as powerless in relation to technology through the gender-constructed aspects of the feminine, such as passivity and irrationality, and through the gender divisions of labour in the public and private spheres.
The corollary... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline