Final Thoughts
Do we really need a true sex? With a persistence that borders on stubbornness, modern Western societies have answered in the affirmative. They have obstinately brought into play this question of a "true sex" in an order of things where one might have imagined that all that counted was the reality of the body and the intensity of its pleasures. (Foucault, p. vii)

It has frequently been asserted that technology is "always already" gendered, and that its gender is masculine (17). That being so, the practical strategies for effecting "gender equity" have, hitherto, involved adjustments directed at a re-genderment of the relation of female students and technology, whether that be: a resocialization of girls and women (the modernist/positivist view) in terms of their attitudes towards that technology; a pluralist reorganization of pedagogy and curriculum for girls and women in accordance with "women's way's" (the constructivist paradigm); or repudiation of that technology as pre-gendered (and raced and classed) and therefore inherently undermining goals of women's empowerment (the critical account). Each approach to technology and gender leaves the gender of technology intact, and operates in different ways on the regenderment of women.

Postmodern theorizing brings about for, on this account, "gender" is de-gendered altogether, as dichotomies are exploded, practices are disrupted, roles and rules reversed, positions and directions inverted. Accordingly, technologies assume novel forms and functions with/in reconfigured sets of social relations and practices. In place of a mythologized "gender identity," there is a fluid and changing set of "gender effects" (see Butler, 1990) based upon a politics of location; a politics which, moreover, refuses to ignore the always intersecting differences of ethnicity, class, and material conditions in its acknowledgment of the realities of gendered positionality.

Postmodernism offers, too, a correspondingly novel blueprint for change: construing the skills, hitherto the usual preserve of males, as themselves only apparently gendered; in fact, merely contingent effects of the privileged positionality of males in institutionally produced relations to technology. Postmodern pedagogies, then, would recognize the tactical insufficiencies of contending approaches to intervention, based as they are on preservationist strategies equating technology with masculinity. A pedagogy of salvage and recycling might accordingly appropriate traditional skills, simultaneously abandoning traditional (gendered) meanings, functions and uses of those skills in a species of mimicry of (thus far usually masculine) competences. Because of its self-conscious playing with positions, thence its parodying of the fixity of position, such a pedagogy is at last capable of truly disrupting hegemonic relations between learners and technology.

Conclusion? "I've never heard such garbage!"
Technological competence is the most prominent arena for the creation, surveillance and enforcement of female deficit, but is by no means the only one. In her ground breaking work on the psychological and physical violence experienced by her research subjects - a group of immigrant women enrolled in adult basic literacy course-Kathleen Rockhill laid bare the way in which literacy comes to be for these adult female students, both "threat and desire." However much these women may long for an education, their desires must be tempered by a clear recognition of the threat such education creates for their male partners, and therefore, physically, materially, for them.

What many female students have to accept and find a way to live with, is the everyday fact that the prohibition of female competence will be, one way or another, inscribed on their own bodies. Jennifer Horsman's study of 23 Nova Scotian women enrolled in adult basic education/literacy courses documents the vast array of threats and punishments which undermined these women's competence in the first place, and which continues to hold them hostage, as they dare to hope for "something in my mind besides the everyday." Young women who challenge the gender order in the computer lab are met with jeers, intimidation, undermining, and physical abuse, which successions of educational researchers have somehow managed to transform into a specifically "female trouble": computer-anxiety. But for too many generations of girls and women, what has been ill - understood is that learning - learning to use a computer, for example - is often the least difficulty they have to face.