judy wajcman feminism confronts technology

Internetarchivebookdrive Edition 2nd printing. The discussion sheds light on the intersection of gender and technology in an East Asian context where neoliberal pseudo-feminism is evidently on the rise.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 20:23:09.490213 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1149315 City University Park, PA Donor Instead, it supports an underlying gendered logic not only by reinforcing existing standards of beauty but also in creating a niche job market that restricts female professionals' career development. Despite this feminist veneer, beauty app development poses no challenge to the status quo in Chinese society. The research findings reveal that Chinese high-tech professionals often perceive the development of beauty apps as providing female users with a sense of empowerment and facilitating the inclusion of female professionals in the high-tech industry. I conducted semi-structured interviews with ten professionals, six women and four men, who previously worked at a leading Chinese high-tech company and participated in the development of a pioneer, popular beauty app-Beaut圜am (Meiyan Xiangji). Pursuing twin-aims, the article combines a theoretical reconsideration of digital labour with an analytical discussion of the literature on tech workers to provide a more relational account of work and class in digital capitalism.ĭrawing on a techno-feminist approach, this article foregrounds the socio-technological process of beauty app development in China's high-tech industry. By bringing tech workers into the debate, I point to the cultural, technological and organisational relations between high and low-paid digital labourers. In a second step, I demonstrate the heuristic surplus of this theoretical broadening through a discussion of the empirical literature on tech workers. Thus, this article first proposes a broadening of the digital labour concept to encompass all work entangled with the digital economy. I argue that this analytical oversight can be attributed to a narrow con-ceptualisation of digital labour. So far, though, most research has focused on highly precarious labourers, neglecting the growing ranks of affluent 'tech workers'. The digital labour debate has produced manifold insights into new forms of work emerging within digital capitalism.

Judy wajcman feminism confronts technology