Women and Feminism in Technical Communication—An Update

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to determine the current status of scholarship published in five major technical communication journals about women and feminism and to identify changes in focus that may have occurred over the last five years. We begin with a discussion of the frequency of publication for articles whose titles have keywords relating to women and feminism. After identifying 21 articles, we consider the thematic patterns in the narrowed corpus. We conclude that scholarly publication about women and feminism in technical communication has moved from a moderate or radical concern for inclusion to a postmodern concern for critique of visual, verbal, and mechanical “technologies,” which previously were not considered political.