[1] Feminist technoscience studies continue to develop new theories on how politics of gender and other identity markers are interconnected to resulting processes of technical change, and power relations of the globalized, material world.
[3] Feminist technoscience focuses less on intrapersonal relationships between men and women, and more on broader issues concerning knowledge production and how bodies manifest and are acknowledged in societies.
[4] Feminist technoscience studies are inspired by social constructionist approaches to gender, sex, intersectionalities, and science, technology and society (STS).
The roles of harvesters, or caretakers of the domestic economy taken up by these women lead Wajcman to conclude they would have created tools such as the sickle and the pestle, making them the first technologists.
[6]: 16 As a result, "male machines" replaced the "female fabrics" as identifiers of modern technology when engineering was considered a masculine profession.
[6]: 16 Due to political movements of the 1960s and early 70s, science and technology were considered as industrial, governmental, and/or militaristic based practices, which were associated with masculinity, thus resulting in a lack of feminist discourse.
[6]: 16 Examples of masculine-coded technologies under these categories included ARPANET, a precursor to the internet developed by the United States Department of Defence, and the Manhattan Project.
[6] During the early states of second-wave feminism, campaigns for improved birth control and abortion rights were at the forefront in challenging the consolidation of male dominated sciences and technologies at the expense of women's health.
Feminist scholars reanalyzed the Scientific Revolution, and stated that the resulting science was based on the masculine ideology of exploiting the Earth and control.
[10] Through a fluctuating process achieved in daily social interaction, gender identity is acted and constructed through relational behaviours – it is a fluid concept.
The differences between female and male needs were asserted by feminist movements, drawing attention to the exclusion of women being served by current technologies.
[16] Birth control pills themselves also succeeded in perpetrating and creating this universality – shaped by moral considerations of the natural body, the length of the menstrual cycle was able to be engineered.
These advances in biotechnology are serving to develop life as a commodity and deepen monetary inequality - a link made by feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway.
[18] Genetic engineering also brings about questions in eugenics, leading early radical feminist analysis to declare and attempt to reclaim motherhood as a foundation of female identity.
Haraway in particular raises the question of whether modifying and expending a live commodity like OncoMouse is ethical if it leads to the development of a cure for breast cancer.
[6]: 91 The reconfiguring of life in biotechnologies and genetic engineering allow for a precedence to be set, leading to capitalist cultural consequences.