“Whose Emancipatory Politics?” Toward a Postcolonial Technological Subject

With Donna Haraway, a new age of the feminist imaginary was born. This imaginary evocatively constructs new feminist subjectivities that are an amalgam of species, sensibilities and ambiguities. Despite the liberating potential of these imagined cyborgs devoid of normativity, the material digital cultures, and technological cultures, that enabled a social movement to this imagined cyborg was/is at a significantly different place in time without subjectivities. Writing on the “Metaphor and Materiality” of technofeminisms, Judy Wacjman opines, “Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics” (101).

This paper intends to extend the possibilities of feminist imaginaries for theorisations of technology by first looking at this gap between imagined and material subjectivities. I ask “Whose emancipatory politics?” to point out that despite their insistence on fragmentations of identity and forms of totalisation, western feminist imaginaries of technology do not convey or derive from an inclusive politics of representation or location. Drawing from feminist historiography and transnational feminist frameworks, I insist on the radical potential of feminist imaginaries that are written and rewritten through transnational endeavours and consideration of “nested differences”. The second part of the paper derives from the first – building on the importance of transnational feminist imaginaries – and asks how? How can western feminist imaginaries expand their potential by transgressing their postmodern notions of subjectivity and agency without abandoning them? Here I introduce the “postcolonial technological subject” as a representational figure for a transnational feminist politics of technology by drawing guidelines for transnational feminist theories of technology. My guidelines are informed by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s conception of transnational feminism, visions for solidarity such as Black Cyberfeminism, Data Feminism and The Xenofeminist Manifesto.