A Manifesto for the Broken Machine

This article reveals how conservative and alt-right understandings of technology are inextricably tied to how these ideologies conceptualize gender, race, and other forms of social difference. Feminists, the gender nonconforming, queer, nonwhite, and the rest of the non-abiding are cast off as broken technologies that need to be replaced and discarded. Using a techno-feminist approach, this article argues that rather than seek justice through inclusion or improvements in representation, there is a feminist politics up for grabs in this patriarchal formulation of feminists as broken machines. The piece offers a manifesto for the “Broken Machine,” revealing how power operates with a machinelike quality and can therefore offer feminism the possibility to refuse via the disruptive logics of broken technologies.