Introduction

This book arose out of an online "Container Technologies Workshop" held in March 2021, but its origins go back further. In June 2018, Marie-Luise Angerer and Noam Gramlich had convened a workshop in Potsdam on "Feminist speculations with strange bedfellows," whose presentations formed the basis of their collection Feministisches Spekulieren: Genealogien, Narrationen, Zeitlichkeiten (Angerer and Gramlich 2020) that included Gramlich's original translation of Ursula Le Guin's The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. This short essay, which reimagines both the history of technology and writing science fiction as centered around bags rather than weapons, had in the meantime been reprinted, with a new introduction provided by Donna Haraway (Le Guin 2019). The idea was to continue exploring carrier bag theory at a symposium that Zoë Sofoulis would address in Potsdam in 2020. But like so many events planned for that year, this was cancelled due to travel restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. An online "Container Technologies Workshop" was subsequently held via Zoom over three days in March 2021, where contributors presented draft versions of the chapters found below. The overarching theme was for everyone to make some reference to the essay "Container Technologies" (Chapter 1), originally published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia (Sofia 2000). Participants invited to the 2021 work-shop by Marie-Luise Angerer and Zoë Soloulis included some of Marie Luise's current postgraduates, some of Zoë's former postgraduates (now in senior academic positions), and other people whose work was salient to the topic. As Zoë outlines in her retrospective (Chapter 2), Ingrid Richardson, Meredith Jones, and Dinesh Wadiwel were integral to the project's pre-history in the mid-2000s, which included a research institute seminar and a national conference panel.