Bridging Analysis and Action

Abstract

This article calls for recognition of ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in technical and professional communication (TPC)—even social justice work that is not explicitly feminist. The authors distill some areas of feminist TPC scholarship that are relevant to future social justice work: (a) epistemological contributions, ways of knowing and methods for discovering them and (b) reclamations of dominant topics, groundwork laid by feminist research on technology and science. They close with nine recommendations to inspire scholars with specific ways to use feminist methodologies and theories to enhance social justice scholarship.

Keywords

feminisms social justice social action critical analysis epistemology

The field of technical and professional communication (TPC) is taking a social justice turn in which the focus of critical work expands beyond analysis to incorporate—even privilege—action (Bowdon, Pompos, & Turner, 2013; Rose & Walton, 2015). Social justice work in TPC involves “advocating for under-resourced and marginalized people” with “the primary objective of social justice causes [being] change” (Walton & Jones, 2013, pp. 31–32). Social justice extends the field’s long-standing humanist perspective (Miller, 1979) and body of critical, cultural TPC scholarship (e.g., Blyler & Thralls, 1993; Scott, Longo, & Wills, 2006). Feminist perspectives on TPC have also laid groundwork for social justice scholarship and action. Critically, analytical scholarship, such as feminist work, is important for chipping away at myths of neutrality to reveal how human values (often associated with capitalistic, masculine, heteronormative, ableist, or white perspectives) and agendas (often inequitable) shape research (Hunsinger, 2006), pedagogy (Herndl, 1993), and technical documents (Katz, 1992). Building on the assertion that neutrality is a myth, critical work explores and reveals our own positioning. For example, arguing that research should be not only political and activist but also personal, “critical researchers feel they must in a self-conscious way attempt to understand and to articulate the values and interests they as researchers bring to their tasks” (Blyler, 1998, p. 38). Similarly, social justice research often stems from personal experience and passion, therefore making the personal political.

This essential connection of the personal and political is central to feminist research perspectives. After all, “most feminist views and perspectives are not simply ideas, or ideologies, but rooted in the very real lives, struggles, and experiences of women” (Brooks & Hesse-Biber, 2007, p. 3). This root nourishes political goals of feminist research, which include spotlighting how underrepresented women’s experiences are, especially in positivist research, and illustrating how their experiences diverge from dominant research findings (p. 7). Indeed, feminist research is praxis as activism. These same sentiments inform social justice research. Feminist scholarship has blazed a critical and activist trail for the burgeoning wave of social justice work in our field, and although current trends in social justice might not be solely focused on women’s issues, feminist scholarship provides a framework for understanding how critical research has previously been undertaken and the foundation that such research lays for further study.

Indeed, a few scholars have acknowledged the relevance of feminist theoretical perspectives, or feminisms, to social justice work in our field (e.g., Crabtree & Sapp, 2005; Frost, 2016; Jones, 2016; Jones, Savage, & Yu, 2014; Muñoz, 2014). Alongside these scholars, we call for the recognition of ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in TPC—even work that does not explicitly identify as feminist. We agree that action is needed to redress inequities, but we also see a potential danger in the field’s shift toward critical action if that shift is not carefully informed by critical analysis. Indeed, TPC scholars are beginning to recognize the need for critical frameworks in social justice work (Colton & Holmes, 2018); analysis and action are each necessary but insufficient alone. In moving past analysis to action, our field risks discounting or missing important analytical work that can inform action. Therefore, we write this piece to distill some critical analysis that can inform critical action, including action that is not explicitly feminist. We write particularly for newcomers to TPC who might have instrumentalist expectations of what constitutes the field, for TPC scholars committed to social justice whose work could be enriched by the field’s feminist scholarship, and for skeptics of social justice work as legitimate TPC who might be unaware of the rich heritage of critical scholarship extended by the social justice turn in our field. Acknowledging that the boundaries of feminist work and social justice work are blurry, we believe that all three of those audiences can benefit from this distillation of the foundations that feminist scholarship lays for social justice research and that social justice scholars can benefit from recognizing past feminist work as a complementary line of inquiry in TPC. We begin with a brief history introducing various feminisms and relating them to TPC. This historical overview frames the next two major sections, which identify contributions of feminist TPC scholarship that are relevant to future social justice work: (a) epistemological contributions, ways of knowing and methods for discovering them, and (b) reclamations of dominant topics, groundwork laid by feminist research on technology and science. Taking stock (Blakeslee, 2009) of where we have been in terms of social justice is a valuable way of determining what has been done, understanding gaps in scholarship, and finding future problems to be addressed. Therefore, we close by posing specific recommendations for using feminist theories to inform further social justice work.

Historical Overview of Feminisms and Their Connections to TPC

Feminisms address oppression and marginalization in various ways. An important distinction within feminist thought and gender studies is the one between sex and gender. Gender is a person’s learned and performed identity that occurs through social construction whereas sex is a person’s biological identity. As Tong (2009) explained, “patriarchal society convinces itself its cultural constructions are somehow ‘natural’ and therefore that people’s ‘normality’ depends on their ability to display whatever gender identities and behaviors are culturally linked with their biological sex” (p. 51). Separating these two terms, then, is central to the feminist project of liberation.

There are many types of feminisms, and they have been broadly organized into a series of chronological waves.¹ Early liberal feminisms, beginning in the 18th century, stressed autonomy and equal rights for women (e.g., suffragists). Liberal feminisms have been critiqued for focusing on the privilege of white women and for asking women to become like men. The feminisms of the 1960s, known as the second wave, are often labeled as radical and include practicing consciousness raising, insisting that the personal is political, and protecting women’s sexual and reproductive rights. Consciousness raising and radical feminisms in TPC recognize women’s contributions to the field, highlight women as practitioners and users, and interrogate technologies in relation to women’s bodies (Durack, 1997; Gurak & Bayer, 1994; Koerber, 2006). Moreover, redefinitions of TPC include women (Lay, 2004). In what ways can we expand definitions of TPC to go further in including race, class, sexual identity, and other identity factors?

Marxist and socialist feminisms—which have forms of theory and activism in the 19th and 20th centuries, as they stem from the work of Marx and Engels (2002)—focus on labor and structure. Critiques of how work coincides with femininity and its constructions bolster Marxist feminist research in TPC. Also undertaken in TPC are ecofeminist critiques, which grew out of the second-wave feminist movement (see Griffin, 1978). Ecofeminism recognizes that women are symbolically tied to nature, and feminist TPC scholars have recognized “metaphors of domination and penetration” and an “androcentric bias of science and engineering” (Sauer, 1994, p. 309). This recognition has prompted research about how marginalized and oppressed groups are characterized through metaphors that weaken their power or their ability to claim their own identities (see Ross, 1994).

The essentialist idea that women are caring is part of care-focused feminism, founded by Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (1988), among others. This feminism suggests that an ethic of care may be more prominent in some women’s lives than an ethic of justice, and, of course, the two ethics are not mutually exclusive. TPC scholarship relates to this care focus in that it generally recognizes that the “user is of central focus” (Lancaster, 2006, p. 212), and, as Petersen (2016) has suggested, empathetic user design is care that is focused on the user with the goals of identification, personal connection, and positivity. Foundational to such empathetic user design is lived experience as authority.

Critiques emerge when feminisms address only white, middle-class, and cisgender women’s problems. Multicultural, global, and postcolonial feminisms, considered part of a third wave that began around the 1990s, attempt to correct this exclusivity by focusing on diversity and difference. To address oppression, this focus on plurality is central, and white ways of thinking that assume that white is normal and that all women are alike must be rejected. In TPC, we have a rich history of intercultural communication research and practice (Ding & Savage, 2013; Hunsinger, 2006), and we are beginning to engage in global social justice concerns. But an attention to women in international contexts (specifically in non-Western countries) has not yet materialized in the scholarship of TPC (Petersen, 2017). There is a gap in which feminist scholars and social justice scholars can work together on global issues.

Postmodern and third-wave feminisms have emerged over the past two decades. These feminisms are interested in diversity and plurality, recognizing multiracial and multiethnic issues and sexual differences. Snyder (2008) noted that third-wave feminists embrace “multivocality over synthesis and action over theoretical justification” (p. 175) and that in such feminisms, “there is no one way to be a woman” (p. 185). Continued feminist activism in the past decade is being called the “fourth wave” (Baumgardner, 2011). As feminisms continue to develop and evolve, TPC should examine, document, and integrate fourth-wave strategies of activism (e.g., social media visibility) into social justice work.

Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., the work of Erin Frost, Kristen Moore, Dawn Opel, and Emily January Petersen), there has been a marked decline in TPC feminist research since the 1990s surge. This “relative absence in the past decade and a half—as though feminisms in technical communication were a completed project—is worrisome” (Frost, 2016, p. 6). Women continue to face gendered challenges that TPC scholars and teachers are well positioned to address, such as by using feminist mentorship approaches to instigate small changes in order to shift sexist, exclusionary aspects of the professional culture in engineering (Sullivan & Moore, 2013) and by spotlighting the professional expertise of women bloggers whose legitimacy as professional communicators has gone unacknowledged (Petersen, 2014). Indeed, the stubborn myth of scientific objectivism that prompted the call for a new and revolutionary affiliation between technical communication and feminist theory (Lay, 2004, p. 429) continues to underlie injustice today (Frost, 2016, p. 4).

In calling for an affiliation of TPC with feminisms, Lay (2004) identified six common characteristics of feminist theories: celebration of difference, social change, acknowledgment of backgrounds and values, inclusion of women’s experiences, study of gaps and silences, and new sources of knowledge (p. 429). All of these characteristics work toward the feminist goal to recognize and validate women’s experiences as subjects of study, and these characteristics also apply to social justice, which extends the focus to include other marginalized groups. We present here the first of two major areas of TPC feminist scholarship that we see as having particular promise for informing broader social justice work: epistemological contributions and reclamations of dominant topics.

Epistemology: Ways of Knowing and Methods for Acknowledging Them

Feminist scholarship has a long tradition of identifying marginalized, overlooked, and delegitimized ways of knowing. When this knowledge remains marginalized, it creates gaps and silences that can be recognized through feminist research methodologies.

New Sources of Knowledge: Recognizing Overlooked Expertise

Feminist theory conveys new sources of knowledge, one of Lay’s (2004) six common characteristics of feminist theory, when asserting that those who are marginalized have legitimate expertise and that knowledge does not stem only from traditionally recognized experts. The notion that there are new and untapped sources of knowledge drives two articles that provide a big-picture view of feminism as represented in TPC scholarship from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. The common themes that emerge across this feminist scholarship continue to be relevant to social justice work today. The first of these articles (Thompson, 1999) identified themes of feminist research by analyzing almost a decade of content (1989–1997) in five technical communication journals. The analysis showed that such articles were mostly contained within special issues and that several journals failed to address women’s issues much, if at all. In identifying themes across content, Thompson concluded that feminist researchers were interested in many of the same issues discussed by Lay:

The common themes in these articles were predictably about inclusion of women in technical communication—through eliminating sexist language, providing equal opportunity in the workplace, valuing gender differences, recovering historical contributions by and about women, and critiquing commonly accepted concepts and terms. (p. 155)

This pattern of themes indicated that the field had answered Lay’s call for blending feminist theory with technical communication and for studying how feminist theory’s tenets influence the field.

The second article analyzed some 50 articles on women and feminism in the field, exploring the study of gender differences and tracing the history of TPC articles on gender (Smith & Thompson, 2002). Four major themes—framed by Smith and Thompson as knowledge claims—emerged across this body of scholarship: “sexist language and equal opportunity, gender differences, recovery of women’s contributions to technical communication, and critiques of representations of women and of representations that exclude women” (p. 444). These themes apply to research problems from a social justice perspective. Scholars should address issues of language—whether sexist, racist, ableist, or otherwise oppressive—and look for ways that research can address social inequalities. Cross-cultural differences should also be taken into account, and such differences might represent strengths among various communities. Doing so would offer the field opportunities to learn about new perspectives and ways of engaging in communication.

Additionally, recovering the contributions to TPC of marginalized groups as new sources of knowledge is a long-term project that should be ongoing. Women’s contributions have been recognized over the past two decades because of this focus, and feminist scholars continue to uncover the ways in which women have historically participated in the field (Hallenbeck, 2012; Malone, 2010, 2013). This focus of feminist research is a type of activism, a way of bringing in different voices and perspectives in order to add richness and complexity to our history and fuller perspectives to continuing scholarship. As Henning and Bemer (2016) recognized, technical communicators have power, particularly in “the ability to do, the capacity to direct, and the strength to be influential in a particular context” (p. 317). Social justice scholars must prioritize the recovery of contributions of other underrepresented groups in order to influence what is legitimized and direct our attention to new sources of knowledge. The contributions of this knowledge will likely paint an even broader picture of the reach and influence of TPC.

Gaps and Silences

Feminist research “reveals what is missing within other discourses and theories” by considering “the identity of the missing and the potential nature of study had the missing been included” (Lay, 2004, p. 431). Many female scholars have answered Gurak and Bayer’s (1994) call to recognize female technologists and technical writers, producing work that includes women’s experiences and studies gaps and silences, a response to Lay’s call. Indeed, many silences are not just empty spaces devoid of communication but function to defer and even deploy power (Glenn, 2004). In social justice scholarship, gaps and silences are important sites of study to investigate who is left out of discourse and decision making, how silence functions as a power strategy, and which groups might need recognition for work already accomplished.

One example of this sort of work from a feminist perspective explores the contributions of Hildegard von Bingen as an early female writer of medical texts, thus, a technical writer, in the 1100s (Rauch, 2012). Although the technical writing field has modern origins and definitions dating from the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, Rauch successfully argued for von Bingen’s inclusion by establishing female and technological agency and by legitimizing a feminist approach to medieval technical communication. A close reading of von Bingen’s texts reveals this legitimacy when coupled with an explicit rejection of assumptions that men and women have the same experiences and that women are inferior to men in using and creating technology. Concluding that female agency has been hierarchical and oppressive and that those ideas must be changed, Rauch’s scholarship attempts to dismantle pervasive and wrongheaded ideas of gender roles in technical writing and technology. Tracing agency is equally useful in understanding the contributions marginalized groups have made to the field and the ways in which users from minority groups might enact agency and therefore deserve consideration and recognition beyond patriarchal, hierarchical, white-dominated structures and systems.

The problem of a limited understanding of difference—and the knowledge gaps this limitation creates—becomes clear in the analysis of a mine disaster report juxtaposed with interviews of the wives of the deceased men (Sauer, 1993). This feminist analysis created space in which to hear the voices of those usually silenced. The article frames feminist interpretation as iconoclastic, employing von Morstein’s term “agreement-addiction—socially constructed discourse that does not challenge or threaten the status quo” (cited in Sauer, 1993, p. 65). In identifying agreement addiction, feminist perspectives can explore performative truth and ethics missing from dominant messages: “A feminist analysis reveals how the conventions of public discourse privilege the rational objective voice and exclude expression of the human suffering of the miners” (p. 68).

The analysis of women’s narratives enabled this significant knowledge gap to be recognized. Women identified danger in the mines based on how tired their husbands were or how much coal dust was in the washing machine, but these warnings were not heeded and disaster struck. Their testimonies afterward were not considered important either: “The women’s testimonies reveal a keen awareness that ‘they are not experts,’ but they have a clear agenda and motivation for solving problems in the nation’s mines” (Sauer, 1993, p. 74). Although the women’s domestic knowledge and use of domestic technology could have been warnings of impending mine disaster, women’s voices were ignored, even after the disaster. What other voices are being ignored in TPC contexts? In what ways does this recognition of delegitimized expertise increase our understanding, and how can a wider range of expertise add to a social justice critique of any inequitable artifact or situation?

So, as Sauer (1993) asked, “if the women’s voices make such sense, why are they not heard?” (p. 75). We can similarly ask, if nonexpert or marginalized voices make sense, why are they ignored? And how are they ignored: What are the rhetorical moves that can silence people? If these voices do not make sense, who is making that claim and why? And who gets to set the agenda for logic, determining what counts as making sense? Social justice work seeks to uncover, to shine light on, underrecognized expertise and to explicitly draw attention to its legitimacy (Walton, 2016). One need not be a TPC scholar or practitioner to possess knowledge useful for the field (Crabtree & Sapp, 2005, p. 20). Recognizing the value of delegitimized expertise is an example of what feminist scholar Wylie (2004) called inversion thesis:

Those who are subject to structures of domination that systematically marginalize and oppress them may, in fact, be epistemically privileged in some crucial respects. They may know different things, or know some things better than those who are comparatively privileged (socially, politically), by virtue of what they typically experience and how they understand their experience. (p. 339)

One way to understand and recognize knowledge from experience is through gender. From a social justice perspective, we can include class, race and ethnicity, locale, culture, ability, size, and other identity markers. People occupying positions of lesser privilege have knowledge that often goes untapped, but “by virtue of their gender identity, women (or those who critically interrogate [any] identity) have distinctive forms of knowledge that should be valorized” (Wylie, 2004, p. 341). Work can and should be done that explicitly addresses what Jones, Moore, and Walton (2016) termed the “3Ps”: positionality, privilege, and power. Positionality recognizes that identity markers are not essential but rather are historical, relational, and dynamic and particular. Researchers also must take into account unearned advantages (i.e., privilege) and the various positions of greater and lesser privilege that people occupy largely based upon factors such as race, size, and gender. Furthermore, “a position of privilege means not just having power but having more power than certain other groups of people have” (pp. 220–221). Thus, explicit consideration of power (and the other Ps) is key for research designed to explore gaps and silences created by overlooking or delegitimizing the knowledge of certain groups.

In the example of women’s knowledge of impending mine disaster, there are several reasons why the so-called nonexperts are ignored based on positionality, privilege, and power. First, the women had learned agreement addiction, “a code that intentionally or unintentionally operates to maintain power structures within mining communities” (Sauer, 1993, p. 76). Second, the women lacked legitimized kinds of expertise and were therefore “excluded from the salient and silent power structures that control discourse” (p. 76). Their expertise in the workplace of the home with domestic technologies was not recognized as relevant. Third, the mining community’s discourse conventions maintained existing power structures, which the women and other community members have internalized (p. 77). As this example shows, feminist perspectives equip researchers to analyze the symbols, formats, and processes that silence the human element in “objective” scientific discourse, not merely to alter power relationships but to improve people’s lives and safety. In this sense, feminism forces us to acknowledge the moral and ethical power of language as well as its political power. Through these understandings of women’s suppressed voices, we can argue that a social justice perspective allows us to analyze the symbols, formats, and processes that silence important voices within TPC and discourses affecting the field. After all, “an effective approach…needs to understand ideology, power, economics, knowledge, politics, law, and ethics” (Agboka, 2013, p. 29). Using feminist theory as a foundation, social justice work can acknowledge moral and ethical dilemmas and the power inherent in existing structures and systems in order to uncover injustices and work to correct them.

Research Methodologies

Various methods, such as interviews or participant observation, might be used to service a range of research methodologies (i.e., the broader philosophy or overarching research goal; Spinuzzi, 2003, p. 7). In arguing for new methodologies that “answer the call of social justice, which hinges on reflexivity, liberation, and empowerment,” Agboka (2014, p. 298) suggested decolonial approaches as appropriate for answering this call. We would add feminist approaches as well. Researchers focused on social justice must engage humbly with participants, actively partnering in research design and even critically questioning their own positioning as insiders to various communities (p. 299). Such astute suggestions echo the goals of feminist research methodologies, which emerge from “ongoing political negotiation within and among various groups of women who theorize from the standpoint of their experiences of gender, race, class, and other oppression” (Hirschmann, 2004, p. 320).

We find feminist standpoint theory to be one of the clearest ways of melding feminist thought with social justice research and action. Two epistemological premises of feminist standpoint theory are “that knowledge is situated and perspectival and that there are multiple standpoints from which knowledge is produced” (Hekman, 2004, p. 226). Emerging from these premises is the valuing of self-definition and self-validation as ways of knowing that are essential for both feminist standpoint and social justice approaches to research (Collins, 2004): “Defining and valuing one’s consciousness of one’s own self-defined standpoint in the face of images that foster a self-definition as the objectified ‘other’ is an important way of resisting the dehumanization essential to systems of domination” (p. 108). Feminist research can allow women to do this work of identification and resistance and to answer questions about their experiences (Collins, 2004, p. 120). Of course, identification and resistance also apply to research focused on race and class.

One methodological approach relevant to both social justice and feminist perspectives is to resolve dichotomous thinking by resisting making comparisons across settings of oppression and across affected cultures and communities (Narayan, 2004, p. 216). It is more accurate, comprehensive, and respectful to delve into the complexities of a given setting rather than try to compare the incommensurable (Narayan, 2004, p. 216).

Research methodologies should also leave room to find what is missing. We previously suggested that filling gaps and silences are an essential goal of feminist research. One way to find these gaps is by using research methods designed to recognize them. For example, feminist content analysis is a way of generating themes from textual data, allowing themes to emerge based on close readings, coding, and memoing. Leavy (2007) suggested that “many feminist researchers perform textual analysis from a deconstruction perspective in which a text is analyzed to see not only what is there but also what is missing, silenced, or absent” (p. 228). In an analysis of TPC textbooks and journals, White, Rumsey, and Amidon (2016) uncovered that these materials failed to interrogate dangerous and inaccurate perspectives of workplace neutrality, especially related to gender. They noted, “We were surprised and dismayed not at what we found in textbooks and professional journals, but what we didn’t find” (p. 29). Their research highlights a concern in the field that demands more action informed by critical analysis.

TPC scholars can engage in such feminist critical analysis by either adapting traditional approaches to data collection and analysis or creating new ones (Lay, 2002). As Royster and Kirsch (2012) discussed, “feminist research is characterized by distinctive methodologies that although they draw on work being done in other fields come together in ours in synergistic ways” (p. xi). Apparent feminism, for example, is an interdisciplinary methodology that draws from the work of early TPC feminisms as well as queer theory, cultural theory, and anthropology (Frost, 2016). Directly connecting feminisms and social justice, this methodology, Frost suggested, “can help us think about the diversity of potential audiences, what productive or efficient work is, and how to do our work in socially just ways” (p. 11). Widely used methods such as interviews, oral histories, and ethnographies can be reappropriated for feminist methodologies to reflect common features of feminist research, which include taking a feminist perspective, using many research methods, criticizing nonfeminist scholarship, using feminist theory, reaching across disciplines, identifying social change, representing human diversity, acknowledging one’s personal traits and effects on the research, connecting with those researched, and establishing or defining special relationships with readers (Lay, 2002, pp. 166–167). All of these approaches can and should be useful for social justice scholars.

Reclamations of Dominant Topics: Science and Technology

The second major thread in feminist scholarship that we see as especially relevant to informing the critical action of social justice involves reclaiming dominant, classic topics of science and technology. This thread extends and clarifies the first one by illustrating how feminist scholars have uncovered ways of knowing through feminist methods that enable them to explore gaps and silences in order to identify and legitimize women’s scientific and technological expertise.

Historical Scholarship

Overcoming stereotypes and culturally entrenched, constraining historical roles is a feminist goal well suited to science and technology scholarship. After all, sociotechnical systems are neither natural nor neutral: They “can be designed to either reinforce oppressive or inequitable roles, or to change these roles and the social structures that reinforce them” (Gurak & Bayer, 1994, p. 262). Historical research, or the work of recovery, is one way of spotlighting how such systems are designed. Power structures are often best recognized and critiqued in retrospect, and scholars have conducted myriad studies of this kind in order to enrich our historical traditions, learn from the past, and recognize the forgotten. Feminist historiography is one methodology for recognizing our history and therefore defining it as valuable. This recurring methodology is composed of “historical studies of women’s technical communication…[that] contribute to the recovery of women’s technical communicative practices” (Skinner, 2012, p. 308).

Feminist historiographies in our field include studies of the English Renaissance (Tebeaux, 1998; Tebeaux & Lay, 1992), 19th-century female bicyclists (Hallenbeck, 2012), domestic and sewing machine manuals (Durack, 1998; Lippincott, 1997), women’s public rhetoric (Petit, 2001; Thieme, 2010), female scientists (Shirk, 1997), and trailblazing women (Malone 2010, 2013). Investigations that illuminate women’s contributions to TPC are essential for legitimizing feminist approaches to TPC and identifying the important ways that women’s contributions have shaped and changed the field (E. A. Flynn, 1997, p. 314). Acknowledging the absence of women in the accepted history of science, J. F. Flynn (1997) challenged “claims to ‘universal’ knowledge based upon limited and gendered evidence” (p. 327). Such claims that exclude groups based on class and race must also be examined through social justice perspectives.

An example of this perspective is Durack’s (1998) analysis of sewing machine manuals, which identified how technical communicators had reinforced masculine and feminine social structures, highlighting how those manuals shaped the technology and might have affected its users. This analysis raises questions regarding whether the authors of sewing machine manuals acknowledged women’s authority and “sought to bridge gaps between their knowledge about sewing and men’s knowledge of machines” (p. 181). Their textual strategies indicated that these authors faced some persuasive and audience-oriented tasks: establishing a sewing machine as necessary and “laborsaving,” overcoming prejudice about women’s mechanical abilities, framing the machine as acceptable for use at home rather than just at the factory, and redefining women’s authority in the context of sewing. But the manuals often ignored the emotional rewards women gained from sewing, dictated the terms and conditions of use, and reinforced hierarchies about masculine and feminine behaviors and technological expertise (p. 193). Thus, the masculine language and ideology surrounding technological creation and consumption overshadowed the users.

These findings raise questions relevant to social justice work at large: In what ways do white, heterosexual, cisgender ideologies overshadow our users? How can social justice scholarship correct this? And as Royster and Kirsch (2012) put it, how can we “make the familiar strange and the strange familiar in order to call forward” (p. 19) the practices and contributions of marginalized groups? Recognizing that a problematic ideology is transmitted through the user manual in Durack’s particular study, we can see that the opposite could potentially be true as well: That is, TPC could be used to transmit a feminist ideology that would help to address and change such stereotypes. It is clear that the use of feminist theories in TPC has done important work and continues to be necessary. We can examine historical documents through a social justice lens to understand the existing assumptions we make about certain groups or situations that might benefit from informed change. We can also better interrogate and critique social structures that reinforce inequality from a historical perspective. Through social justice scholarship, we can support practitioners and scholarly colleagues who are members of marginalized groups, identify stakeholders and nonexperts whose expertise can provide a rich focus of study, and expand existing scholarship on diversity.

Feminist Critiques of Technology

Technology is a site of tension, resistance, and unacknowledged female accomplishment. Much feminist scholarship in TPC uses this site of tension to engage in technological critique that examines, questions, highlights, and dismantles notions of technology from feminist perspectives. Contending that male perspectives have dominated science and technology, Gurak and Bayer (1994) called for the inclusion of women’s technological contributions and explorations of why women have not been recognized for their achievements. One factor that contributes to the delegitimization of women’s contributions to and uses of technology is a masculine bias perpetuated in traditional, exclusionary definitions of workplace and professionalism (Durack, 1997; Petersen, 2014). Many instances of women’s inventions have been misattributed to men. Legitimizing women’s historical contributions requires dispelling notions that women did not contribute to technology and that women’s work is not technological (Durack, 1997, p. 253). One way to dispel such notions is by illustrating that men’s and women’s experiences with technology are different and that the traditional definition of technological might contribute to this view (Durack, 1997). Thus, a key goal of feminist scholars conducting historical work is to legitimize women’s experiences by advocating definitions of technology that include women and their workplaces.

Another feminist goal relevant to technology studies is combating the myth that technological momentum is natural, unstoppable, neutral, and unquestionably desirable. Technological momentum is often justified by progress, even if it excludes, dominates, or oppresses. In critiquing technological determinism, scholars pushback against the idea that technology drives history, culture, and development and that humans are controlled by this progression of technology (Williams, 1994). Thus, a key strategy for combating this idea is to spotlight the power, class, and gender issues surrounding technology that are often forgotten or dismissed, pointing out that “technology produces historical contradictions” (p. 221). We might think of history as a technology-driven process, but socioeconomic factors and the way we define such factors are important too (p. 221). Williams opposed technological determinism because it separates humans from the spiritual and the natural and because machines and technology have largely been created by and for men as a way to control. Women are excluded, so technological determinism represents a masculine bias and perspective: “Male elites, in their prideful effort to deny the feminine role in bearing and sustaining life, have deliberately created life-denying technological systems” (p. 232). A key site of feminist inquiry has been the intersection of technologies and biologies—especially women’s bodies (e.g., see Frost, 2016; Koerber, 2013). Broadening our focus beyond women specifically, we might examine how life-denying systems have affected marginalized peoples globally, expanding such a critique to include race, class, and sexuality.

Particularly relevant to the TPC field is the role of documentation in legitimizing technological achievements and the expertise of marginalized people. As Haraway (2004) argued, “histories of science may be powerfully told as histories of the technologies. These technologies are ways of life, social order practices of visualization. Technologies are skilled practices” (p. 91). The inequitable ways of life and social orders constituted by technologies are a problem for women and other marginalized groups in any field, but TPC is concerned with how technology creates and influences communicative efforts. One way of achieving recognition in technological endeavors is through TPC documentation. For example, an analysis of report writing in North Carolina Canning Clubs from 1912 to 1916 concludes that documentation is vital to “the politics of recognition” (Haller, 1997, p. 283). Although these reports reentrenched existing divisions of labor based on gender, the reports also legitimized the home and garden as workplaces, capable of production and not only consumption (p. 289). Thus, this documentation helped women to transform what it meant to work and legitimized their use of domestic technologies (p. 291). Examining technological invention and use reveals that technological fields are highly gender biased—even employing masculinized and sexist language, without considering how women fit into that community of practice.

One strategy for resisting this bias is to make gender visible using feminist critiques (Gurak & Bayer, 1994, p. 258). The perspectives, goals, and methodologies of feminist critiques of technology are useful for engaging broader social justice concerns. For example, we should see women as technologists because “underrepresentation is a major source of gender bias in technology” (p. 260). Similarly, we must see underrepresented groups as technologists and recognize their achievements. The field must promote perspectives that “reflect a larger history of technological design and use by people of color and that in turn rupture widely held theoretical and political assumptions and racial stereotypes about technological expertise” (Haas, 2012, p. 288).

A second strategy is to legitimize women’s technologies, such as household technologies or reproductive technology, through analyses that recognize these technologies as worthy of study. One way to build on these kinds of feminist critiques is to seek out technologies of the Global South, for example, in our examinations through a social justice perspective (see Ding, Li, & Haigler, 2016; Mukherjee & Williams, 2016; Opel & Stevenson, 2016). A third approach is studying how technology affects women in the workplace in order to “challenge the popular belief that technologies are designed and chosen from value-neutral positions” (Gurak & Bayer, 1994, p. 262). From a social justice perspective, we might examine the ways in which technologies are used in settings other than intended ones (i.e., creative misuses) and how marginalized groups enact their agency to engage with technology in many contexts. And a fourth approach is to analyze the relationship of the human body to technology, noting that some studies focus on how technology can urge a “reexamination of gender roles” or that technologies can “democratize communication because they make social cues such as status, gender, and rank less visible” (p. 263). Examinations of technology and the body are also applicable to considerations of race, class, ability, and other identity markers in determining just how value neutral a technology might be in practice and in context. As Agboka (2013) discovered in examining sexuopharmaceuticals imported from China to Ghana, many cross-cultural factors go unconsidered, resulting in confusion and a lack of communication.

Science and Language

Feminist scholars in many fields have long recognized problematic uses of language and ways that power is transmitted and maintained through language (Elshtain, 1982; Lakoff, 2004). But as Rude (2008) pointed out, language is also useful for shifting norms and pushing back against unjust power distribution: “Language is a means of policy negotiation and of social transformation” (p. 267). Often a necessary precursor to transformation is work that highlights problematic, exclusionary language. For example, feminists recognize the androcentric nature of domination metaphors in the official lexicon of science and engineering: “The language [that] engineers and scientists use to describe their world reflects clearly sexual metaphors: male and female sockets, male and female couplings, mine shafts that penetrate the earth, virgin timber, the big bang, studs, and screws” (Sauer, 1994, p. 309). These terms construct the “ecriture masculine of science and technology” (p. 312), which illuminates the need for improved technical communication. Sauer’s scrutiny of scientific language extends to broader social justice issues, particularly considerations of biology, identity, and terminology related to marginalized groups. In considering, for example, people of various gender identities, ethnicities, and abilities, we should not unreflectively select terms coined by dominant groups; rather, we should make sure that any terms used to identify and characterize marginalized communities are selected by communities themselves.

Considerations of science and language can also affect relations between communities, especially when ecological issues are involved. Ross (1994) explored these tensions in her analysis of water supply contamination and the ensuing conflict between the Mohawk community and the Environmental Protection Agency. This work highlights the need for technical communicators to “be aware of current practices in environmental, safety, and health communication [and] also of movements to reform those practices” (p. 325). Particularly relevant to this awareness is ecofeminism, among other feminist perspectives. There is often a scientific, or positivist, bias in government decision making that excludes worldviews that focus on the environment or the spiritual. Ross referenced the Mohawks’ earth origin story (a pregnant woman in need, which the animals help) in order to symbolize their perspective. She advocated for using ecofeminism to facilitate communication between communities, such as the Mohawks and government agencies, about technological and environmental issues. Ecofeminism reminds us that the

exploitation of women is rooted in the same logic as exploitation of nature in patriarchal systems in which domination is the fundamental relationship. In this view, the adult male as subject wins autonomy by objectifying and differentiating himself from females and the natural world. (p. 330)

Ecofeminist scholarship attempting to remediate environmental problems, then, seeks balance not force (p. 339). Such ecofeminist perspectives clearly apply to social justice issues, especially within the language-oriented field of TPC.

Recommendations

Feminist scholarship lays a broad foundation for continued research from the perspectives of epistemology and reclamations of dominant topics. The intersections of feminist and social justice work are clear, and scholars should be using feminist methods and theories to enhance social justice scholarship. Tables 1 and 2 present recommendations for how to build on the foundations of feminisms in social justice work and recognize ways in which feminisms have, do, and can inform social justice work in TPC—even social justice work that does not explicitly identify as feminist. The first column of the tables recommends a specific way to extend either feminist epistemology (see Table 1) or feminist reclamations of dominant topics (see Table 2) into social justice work. (These recommendations can, however, apply to both categories of feminist work; e.g., the final recommendation in Table 1 is relevant to both categories.) The second column gives an example of what it might look like to enact this recommendation, drawn from current scholarship. The final column explains how that scholarship demonstrates the recommendations we give. In this way, we leave readers—particularly those located at the intersections of social justice and TPC—with actionable ideas for how feminisms can inform social justice work, including that which is not explicitly feminist.

Table 1.

Recommendations for Extending Epistemological Work in Feminism Into Social Justice Work.

Recommendation	Example From Current Scholarship	Explanation of How This Scholarship Demonstrates Recommendation
Recognize that the common characteristics of feminist theory are intrinsically tied to the aims of social justice work.	Frost (2016) introduces apparent feminist methodology, which recognizes diversity in resolving oppressive situations and “seeks to recognize and make apparent the urgent and sometimes hidden exigencies for feminist critique…[and] invites participation from allies who do not explicitly identify as feminist but do work that complements feminist goals” (p. 5).	Frost explicitly ties feminist activism to other kinds of activism, calling for immediate responses to contemporary social injustices intersectionally. Those involved in feminist critiques and activism need the support of social justice activists and vice versa, given that our agendas, while not exactly the same, certainly intersect.
Apply feminist research methods alongside decolonial methods, such as by using multiple research methods, criticizing nonsocial justice scholarship, using feminist theory and other theories of domination, reaching across disciplines, identifying social change, representing human diversity, acknowledging one’s personal traits and effects on the research, connecting with those researched, and establishing or defining special relationships with readers (Lay, 2002, pp. 166–167).	Jones (2016) defines social justice within TPC and suggests that previous approaches to humanism and diversity can aid scholars in integrating social justice research into TPC.	Jones specifically focuses on feminist and decolonial approaches as a way of defining and performing social justice scholarship in TPC. She describes feminist approaches as tools that “are useful to technical communicators because they allow researchers to examine a research question from a variety of entry points” (p. 352).
Encourage the groups we engage with to keep reports of work and to publicize their successes and concerns because such reporting is an essential part of recognition (Haller, 1997, p. 283).	The Women in Technical Communication (n.d.) group uses social media (Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Storify, etc.) to document meetings, facilitate discussions, and offer mentoring, cultivating an environment that encourages and celebrates professional accomplishments. The group “provides a space for women to address issues that affect their lives and builds mentoring programs/infrastructures to respond to these varied needs” (n.p.).	The women who participate in this network document their experiences through social media using the hashtag #womenin TC. Also, the ATTW 2016 workshop focused on recognizing and documenting often-invisible work performed by women for academic service.
Recognize that exploitation is rooted in systems of domination. As Ross (1994) argued, “technical communication in…remediation efforts should be an instrument of balance rather than of force” (p. 339). Further, acknowledge difference, embrace it, and interrogate it for disenfranchisement and underlying power structures.	Muñoz (2014) uses his own experiences with pedagogy and marginalization to propose a redefinition of technical communication practice through U.S. Third World Feminist theorists in order to highlight agency.	Muñoz uses ideas of U.S. Third World Feminism to redefine technical communication as agential. His underlying goal is to make a difference in the world. He contends that an important part of this work is using technical communication to bridge differences.
Acknowledge that activism and engagement with social justice research, which might at first be difficult to maneuver because of difference, can cause feelings of discomfort. Then move past this discomfort in order to make progress across cultural lines and enrich TPC’s understandings from a global perspective.	Hidalgo and Sackey’s (2015) special issue on race, rhetoric, and the state addresses state-sanctioned violence directed toward people of color. The pieces in the issue are intentionally daring, direct, and confrontational. They contend that social inequality is engineered and that rhetoric in action in these circumstances calls for story and invention. Such rhetoric can help to dismantle systems of domination.	This special issue demonstrates and explicitly legitimates a variety of ways that people of color are telling their stories about experiences with racism and violence. It reveals that, although speaking out about systematic racism can be difficult, it is important to share our truths and recognize the truths of others when they speak up.

Note. TPC = technical and professional communication.

Table 2.

Recommendations for Extending Feminist Reclamations of Dominant Topics Into Social Justice Work.

Recommendation	Example From Current Scholarship	Explanation of How This Scholarship Demonstrates Recommendation
Interrogate claims of universal knowledge based on one group of people or one characteristic. Claims that exclude groups based on gender, class, and race must be examined from social justice perspectives. Work to recognize all sources of knowledge by addressing language issues, whether sexist, racist, or classist. Look for unrecognized sources of knowledge across cultural lines.	Del Hierro (2014) posits that privileged rhetorics (white, male) dominate public discourse and marginalize certain communities, particularly women, people of color, and those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. Del Hierro instead centers on hip-hop rhetoric as embodied, everyday, nonlinear texts that focus on “making do”.	This research inverts notions of what rhetorics are and identifies a source of rhetorical knowledge and creation occurring within vibrant and influential, yet marginalized, communities. It crosses cultural and privileged boundaries to recognize rhetoric at resistant and sociopolitical levels.
Examine how technology, especially life-denying systems, has affected groups of marginalized peoples globally and expand feminist critiques to include race and class.	Koerber (2013) identifies and examines the shift in rhetoric surrounding the feeding of infants. That is, she identifies the coordinated and scientific effort amidst a “historical tendency to devalue and denigrate these uniquely female capabilities of the female body” (p. 2).	Koerber focuses on ways in which technology and rhetoric have affected discourses surrounding the female body during maternity and extends that conversation to other health concerns affecting women. She contributes to the important work of tracing technologies and scientific discourses, especially around the female body. But new scholarship must extend this work across cultures and continents.
Challenge the domination of white, Western, heterosexual, male, and cisgender perspectives. Consider indigenous and non-Western technologies, examine how technologies might be used in settings other than those intended, investigate how underrepresented groups engage with technology in many contexts, and challenge value-neutral assumptions about technology and the body.	Haas (2008) recognizes the technologies used by Native Americans to record cultural memories and experiences as precursors to Western hypertextual technologies. She explains the wampum bead and its uses “as a sign that technology has been used to record hundreds of years of alliances within tribes, between tribes, and between the tribal governments and colonial government” (p. 78).	Although white, Western technologies are often hailed as the first or most innovative, Haas turns this notion on its head, recognizing indigenous technologies that have been around for much longer—technologies that are complex, admirable, and invented within American Indian cultural frames.
Recover the contributions of marginalized groups. Uncover historical silences, in the tradition of feminist historiography, by collecting and analyzing the work of marginalized groups as a body of social justice historiography. Examine historical documents through a social justice lens in order to identify marginalized groups whose work may provide rich sites of study and end historical silence.	Petersen and Moeller (2016) examine fragmented documentation from the IBM archives to construct a different narrative of women’s experiences at work historically from the narrative presented on the company’s Web site. They recognize that women’s mundane and everyday interactions with systems of domination are often forgotten when history is retold in order to favor the narratives of organizations.	The fragments of any organization or culture are key to gaining a fuller perspective of the historical context and narrative. These authors focused on fragmented documentation from archives on women’s experiences; such a methodology can be extended to looking at other marginalized groups’ experiences.

Looking ahead to future research, we call for additional gender and sexuality studies in TPC, including queer studies and masculinity studies, that can shed light on social justice issues. Despite a growing body of scholarship in queer rhetorics (see Cox & Faris, 2015), TPC remains almost entirely unexamined from a queer theory perspective. With queer theory’s “goal of transforming society” (para. 11) and historical connections to activism and feminism, its promise for informing the work of social justice is undeniable. Regarding masculinity studies, sociology has spearheaded the effort to study men and masculinities (Greig, Kimmel, & Lang, 2000; Kimmel, 1987, 1993) from a gendered lens. But to our knowledge, no one has yet used a masculinist lens or addressed “masculine” concerns in TPC. Gender and social justice research should include men because they too experience and suffer from systems of domination. So in addition to recommending ways to inform social justice work with goals and strategies drawn from feminism, we call for future research introducing frameworks or methodologies for applying masculinist and queer theories to TPC research.

Conclusion

Our article answers Frost’s (2016) call to inform social justice action with feminist perspectives: “We must pay attention to the powerful ways that critical and cultural scholarship such as apparent feminism can help us to reshape our world and the ways we move through it” (p. 5). She recognized the foundational work of critical scholarship as a means to action and argued that an apparent feminist methodology—which allows practitioners and scholars to intervene “in situations in which technical documentation unfairly and uncritically engages in oppression while feigning objectivity” (p. 4)—is needed because of a decline in feminist work in technical communication. Not only are feminist and social justice work complementary, and not only are they necessary, but they must include critical action.

Research and documentation is about making tacit knowledge explicit (Rude, 2009, p. 191); however, what good does such knowledge do if it is not acted upon and no changes result? The turn toward social justice in TPC is a turn toward critical action. We acknowledge that critical analysis alone is navel-gazing and self-congratulatory. But critical action uninformed by an important body of critical analysis is similarly lacking. Thus, our contribution to the social justice conversation is to synthesize feminist praxis in TPC to inform and enrich the broader critical action of social justice.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Note

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