TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER, COUNTERTECHNOLOGIES OF THE COMMON: BETWEEN DEVICES OF POWER AND FEMINIST FABRICATIONS

Abstract

In this article, we seek to understand gender as a social and political technology that fabricates subjects, regulates modes of existence, and structures inequality. Drawing on Teresa de Lauretis’s formulation of technologies of gender (1987; 1994) and approximating it to Foucauldian notions of governmentality, we examine how patriarchy, coloniality, and neoliberalism produce bodies, narratives, and regimes of visibility. We argue that gender is neither an essence nor a stable identity, but rather the effect of dispositifs that traverse materialities and symbolisms, modulating both the field of the possible and the horizon of the thinkable. On a transnational scale, we analyze how neoliberalism reconfigures gender as a source of labor and as a governable subjectivity by capturing feminist discourses, precarizing lives, and reorganizing economies of care. We then reflect on digital infrastructures as contemporary technologies of gender-algorithms, platforms, and recommendation systems that operate as devices of power, intensifying stereotypes, epistemicides, and violence while simultaneously opening cracks for insurgent technopolitical practices. Finally, we discuss law as a technology of gender, mobilizing feminist and abolitionist critiques to show how legal systems fabricate subjects and hierarchies, even as their margins host counter-technologies of care, community-based justice, and reinventions of the common. We conclude that if gender is produced by technologies of power, it can also be reconfigured through technologies of emancipation that reposition care, solidarity, and intersectional justice as ethical-political foundations for possible futures.