Feminism, Technology and the Fallacy of Liberation in Woman on the Edge of Time: A Heideggerian and Miesian Critique
Feminism, Technology and the Fallacy of Liberation in Woman on the Edge of Time
Keywords:
Standing Reserve, Enframing, Neutrality, Exploitation, alienation, LiberationAbstract
Martin Heidegger rejects the idea of neutrality of technology and highlights how hi tech technologies cause ontological shift by changing mode of human engagement with the world. He points out that technology radically alters and reconstructs the meanings of social and other phenomenon and removes the contexts of things through which they were understood in the past. This study challenges Piercy’s techno euphoric feminist utopia in science fiction and focuses on consequences of such techno enthusiasm in the form of enframing, exploitation, objectification and commodification of humans as a standing reserve. Heideggerian and Maria Mies’ notions deconstruct the illusions regarding technology in the novel Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy as a feminist sci-fi writer who consider technology a source of women liberation and emancipation in her techno utopic work. A deconstructive study of Piercy’s selected novel also reveals confusions related to parenthood as an expression of social potential, mother identity, individual freedom, gender equality and subject position of humans in the universe.
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