Invention as Feminist Practice?

Chugging along on exams, I've recently finished reviewing/rereading Donna Haraway's classic "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" and (finally!!) reading Susan Delagrange's Technologies of Wonder, both of which are reminding me of how the arguments I'm hoping to make about invention in my simmering, potential dissertation are potentially arguments for (or related to) a feminist practice.

In writing through the "ironic" metaphor of cyborgs, Haraway finds ways to argue for hybridity and a "heteroglossia": in other words, Haraway argues for a (feminist) social and material politics that goes beyond dualisms and essentialist identities to rather make room for new affinities. We can construct coalitions of difference, she argues—which, like cyborgs, are about contradiction and "the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true" (580).

So, cyborgian-feminist constructions are about the generative possibilities of difference. We can find inventive possibilities in counterintuitive and strange couplings.

What's most tugging at my attention in Delagrange's book—which works through a delightfully kaleidoscopic range of discussions on everything from the place of the visual in scholarly inquiry and writing to the opportunities and constriaints of new media or print; from theorizing technology as a network of social-material practices to revitalizing the canon of arrangement as a material, visual, and tactile rhetorical practice of invention—is her discussion of techne. She sees techne bridging the rhetorical and practical: it is a reflective and inventional practice that resists the theory/practice binary and is motivated and enabled by a force of wonder.

In discussing the methodology and epistemology behind her book, Delagrange reminds us that she is advocating for a feminist practice. Quoting Atwill, Delagrange discusses techne "as a relational practice" informed by fluid networks of "experience, motives, practices, and cultural understandings" (36). Techne is something that is emergent, contextually determined; it is a reflective, flexible, and embodied practice. And more fluid practices create new possibilities.

Delagrange also talks about  dichotomies as problematic, not because it's wrong to make binary distinctions, but because of the impulse to choose just one term/thing ("or" instead of "and then"), and the inevitable hierarchies that follow the privileging of one term/thing. So, perhaps the thing to do is use a fluid and strategic praxis like techne in order to see others/difference differently.