Why feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology should engage with each other: on subjectification/subjectivity

Abstract

Feminist technoscience and feminist phenomenology have seldom been brought into dialogue with each other, despite them sharing concerns with subjectivity and normativity, and despite both of them moving away from sharp subject-object distinctions. This is unfortunate. This article argues that, while differences between these strands need to be acknowledged, such differences should be put to productive use. The article discusses a case of school bullying, and suggests that bringing these analytic perspectives together enables and sharpens examinations of the role of subjectification and subject positions for subjectivity in the phenomenological sense; affectivity within material-discursive entanglements and constellations of humans and things, and as connecting the body, things and the world in specific ways; and normativity as enacted, lived and embedded in perception.

Augmented Cognition: Life as we don't know it

“…It is a crucial aspect of our efforts to enhance our embodied capabilities and improve our ability to experience, navigate, adapt, and survive in our local environments. AI provides us with a tool to break free from the natural limitations imposed by our socioculturally situated bodies and reinforces the idea that the body is not fixed and embodied categories of identity are not set in stone but rather projected through technology (Pitts, 2005;Brown, 2019;Henne, 2020;Zeiler, 2020;Steele, 2021).…”

The performativity of surveys: Teenagers’ meaning‐making of the 'Health Behavior in School‐aged Children Survey' in Sweden

“…Such work shows how specific subject positions co-emerge with/in advertisements for drugs and in health care practices, as when certain ways of being or becoming 'a healthy subject' or ways of holding 'healthy relationships' are prescribed through them (Johnson & Åsberg, 2017, pp. 94-95;Lindén, 2017; for a discussion, see Zeiler, 2020). For our analysis, this perspective means that surveys as knowledge production practices can help prescribe particular ways of understanding oneself and one's well-being along with objects.…”

“…This, we suggest, sheds light on the challenges of teenage subjectivity and accountable agency when filling in the survey. Subjectivity, from within the phenomenological reasoning that we take inspiration from, is not only formed in relationships with others, but is a relation to others and the world (for a discussion of this, see Zeiler, 2020) and interviewees' ways of managing the survey can be understood as affirming relational selfhood through acts of demarcation. They acknowledge the central role of others for them, as selves, while managing the wishes of certain others-the people behind the questionnaire and/or classmates-who want to know more than the interviewees are willing to disclose, and they want to protect themselves while protecting others who are important to them.…”

Opportunistic cognitive screening in Sweden: What the tests mean and do for patients and healthcare professionals

“…The article combines a phenomenologically-oriented focus on subjectivity and sense-making with a focus that is inspired by science and technology studies (hereafter referred to as STS) on what the tests become within the specific context in which they are used, as narrated by the occupational therapists, doctors and patients we have interviewed. These perspectives have rarely been combined (see, however, Zeiler, 2020;Hoel and Carrusi, 2015), and doing so allows for a combined focus on performativity and subjectivity.…”