Critical Theory: Just Say Nay!
I am writing with a mechanical pencil
I am sitting in an institution
I am hiding somewhere in my brain I miss myself
(Written by Tica while in an otherwise all-male electrician's trades course, Images, 1991)

Critical accounts of equity provide a model of gender as ideologically and materially produced sets of differences which are manifested across groups within the social relations and practices particular to specific institutional settings, such as schools - differences that ought properly to be considered dynamically in relation to other key sites of both difference and oppression such as race and class. The goal is to figure out how to identify and characterize existing inequities, or oppressions, and how to radically intervene in the existing web of social relations and institutional practices in order to produce transformative and libratory changes in otherwise inequitable or "hegemonic" contexts of work.

A significant body of critical research on educational technologies has accumulated over the past decade documenting systematic inequities in both access to, and utilization of, technology by members of marginalized groups. These critical discourses focus at the first level on technology as material commodity unequally distributed and hence only differentially accessible, and at a second level on how those in power adapt and channel innovation in order to retain control over emerging forms of knowledge (11). It is not clear how the authors of these critical texts construe the pervasive phenomenon of girls' and women's "resistances to new technologies" or their "technophobia" in a pedagogical context within which women (and female students) might represented as endowed with agency and voice in relation to uses of culturally significant machines - tools both new and old. Critical theory accounts typically paint a gloomy picture, then, in which expectations of what female students and teachers do with new technologies are minimized and pathologized.

However, the critical tale's tragic predictions of inevitable reproduction of educational inequities have been revealed in recent years as a species of mechanistic determinism, construing female (and other minority) subjects as the unwitting dupes of an inexorable hegemonic process (12). Contestation and resistance by both teacher and students are proposed by "post-critical" stories of the pedagogic "possibilities" capable of transforming traditionally reproductive education into anew, postmodern pluralism. The leveling of all traditions, even the previously sacrosanct, holds out the promise of a new educational equity, within which educational technology, because of its unique capacities for blurring male/female or human! machine binaries, plays a central role.

Postmodernism: Cyborgs Have More Fun!
This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the super-savers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (Haraway 1991, p.181)

Postmodernist accounts of technology and opportunities for "agency amongst the oppressed" are located in ironic, "enfant terrible," or "bad attitude" models for the reconsideration of received notions of "equity." In these accounts, "being any gender is a drag"; carnival and a dis/continuous shifting amongst and between identities is the order of the day. The problem is construed as the need to dissolve the impasse created by conceptual dualisms, such as male/female gender models, natural/artificial ontological systems, or for/against intellectual frameworks, for thinking about educational technologies. As Donna Haraway put it, "It's about being in the belly of the monster and looking for another story to tell" (13). The goal is to figure out how to conceptualize/ materialize new and "politically articulate" (14) relations with/in technologies. This goal is reached by reflecting critically on, and making fundamental changes in, conceptualizations about both the discursive categories of "gender," "technology," "difference," and related practices.

One of post modernism's main contributions to theories of difference has been the deconstruction of essentialist theorizing as fundamentally raced, heterosexist, classed, and probably politically unproductive in an ongoing struggle for equity, voice, and empowerment (15). Such essentialist approaches can be found in traditional and critical theorizing, such as in constructionist accounts of gender in terms of "women's ways of knowing" (Belenky et al.). Haraway's cyborg "women " in contrast embody fractured identities that are contested on multiple sites of oppression including age, race, sexual orientation, etc.