Creatures of Prometheus: Gender and the Politics of Technology

Do human beings become creatures of the technology they create? Is gender an artifact of the work performed by such manufactured things? Drawing on a broad variety of literary and philosophical sources, including Homer's Iliad, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, accounts of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, and recent scholarship in feminist, postmodern, and political theory, this impressive book offers strikingly original ways for readers to think about technology, gender identity, culture, the environment, politics, and the ways women and men struggle to make sense of the gifts of Prometheus. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political theory, environmental thought, and gender, cultural, and literary studies.

About the Author :
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn is Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Review :
Kaufman-Osborn has offered a lively and provocative reading of pragmatism in light of everyday example and ordinary life, bringing philosophy to bear on questions of the body, sex, sexual difference, and some of the more urgent matters in modernity. His is a wonderfully readable book, witty, astute, insightful, and erudite. An unsettling and original book, one that thoroughly reorients the reader's relationship to artifacts by confronting the Descartes in each of us…The book is important and readable, and it should find its way onto the shelves of anyone concerned with technology and human agency, sexual difference, poststructural and postmodern theory.” Kaufman-Osborn has managed to take postmodernism to another turn, making it turn back upon itself by showing it to be itself its own discursive (artifactual) creation. Offers a stimulating and persuasive reorientation to entrenched patterns of thinking and feeling about agents and artifacts. This is an exciting and timely new work of major significance for political theory, feminist theory, and ecological theory. . . . a varied and enjoyable collection. . . . For anyone who is unfamiliar with the theory and practice of the environmental justice movement, this collection offers a stimulating introduction to the territory. Tim Kaufman-Osborn has shown that political theory, from ancient to contemporary, is an exciting and relevant approach to questions about gender and technology. The book will be important for feminist and queer theorists hoping to be conversant with what is likely to be a key set of issues in the 21st century. Kaufman-Osborn constantly shows the reader how well-read he is in his book. He explores human relations to artisanal facts (and vice versa) throughout literature, philosophy, history of technology, and gender. A richly textured work that engages thoughtfully with texts fromThe Iliad toFrankenstein, to the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes". The book's critical responses to recent debates in the body, agency, and experience are important contribution to feminist theory.