Page - 13 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

the complexity of the relationship among these spheres while incrementing their specific relevance. As far as techonoscience plays an essential part within contemporary neo-liberalist order, which functions as a form of governance which is primarily a-political, with important effects on the redefinition of the collective as predominantly societal, this intervention could therefore become relevant in that techonoscience itself can differently produce (and be produced by) materialities, discourses, significances, ways of thinking, agencies, practices and interventions with regard to these different pertinences. As a result, also the relationship to otherness (both human and non human), might importantly change when approached with reference to these different locations, in ways that, ultimately, but most significantly to me, can differently resonate in a feminist perspective. This proposition should be properly explored with regard to the various feminist onto- epistemologies, that starting from the same period, around the early 1980s, have engaged a different characterization of the relationship between science and technology, ranging from earlier feminist epistemologies (Harding 1986; Alcoff 1993; Tanesini 1999) to feminist science studies (Mayberry, Subramaniam & Weasel 2001), and to more recent fields, including feminist technoscience studies (Asberg & Lykke 2010), feminist new materialism, post-human studies, and lately, animal studies and environmental humanities (Asberg & Braidotti 2018). Moreover, it would require in depth and accurate speculation, with specific insights into the study fields I have mentioned, therefore demanding an effort at thinking and discussing far more exceeding the one I am going to spend in this writing. The only excuse for not doing it in this paper, is that I have started to work on this idea in the past few months within my PhD research project. The first part of it explores different dimensions of this enunciation in relation to a reflection upon 'contemporaneity' and 'contemporary human condition', considered as a large horizon of reasoning but specifically interconnected to neo-liberalist order. This paper neither goes into this wider inquiry, nor it delves into the mentioned feminist onto- epistemological research fields, while it focuses on a much more limited area, that is Italian feminist elaborations on science and technology, from mid-1980s to the end of the 1990s1. Although circumscribed in time and space, I believe these elaborations are, nevertheless, worthy of attention because they offer examples that cast some light upon my speculative proposal. More specifically, they help to reflect upon the relationship between science- technology and feminism, with regard to one of the above mentioned spheres of pertinence: the political one. Furthermore, they contribute to concurrently think about a problem addressed in the section “Gender, Technology, Environment” of the STS Annual Conference, namely the tendency in feminist theorizing on science and technology “to keep the subject/object of analysis at distance”, therefore strengthening a gap between fascination with technoscience and on-the-ground engagement. 1 In 2007 I begun to work at a research project promoted by the Italian Women and Science Association, aimed to explore, structure, analyse chronologies of events and elaborations about feminism and science in Italy. A large part of these events and elaborations partly originated in the late 1970s and later, between the mid-1980s and the end of the 1990s, flowed into the Coordinamento Nazionale “Donne di Scienza” (National Coordination of “Women of Science”). After having re-constructed events and elaborations in the years 1978-1986 (Allegrini 2013), since 2016 I am working on the period 1986-1998 (Allegrini 2018, forthcoming). 13