Is there a difference in academic writing styles between engineering and women's studies?
CS and WS are each concerned with a different kinds of questions, and the language their respective practitioners use simply reflects this difference.

This is familiar to me, given that I've been on both sides of the divide (English Lit as an undergrad minor, cognitive science for my PhD). I got a glimpse of why it exists many years ago when I was in a course with a bunch of Lit Crit majors and we were discussing a certain poem by a certain contemporary poet. The Lit Crit people where pointing at a specific part of the poem and going "Is this an allegory for his lost love? Is this a metaphor for the senselessness of  war?", and so on. Then, in a youthful display of naivety, I said "hey, the guy who wrote this poem is still alive, why don't we try to get in contact with him and ask him what he means?". The lecturer leading the discussion looked at me very sternly and said "that is not the point".

That was very illuminating, I think. I'm sure that the poet in question had something specific in mind when he wrote the poem (and we'll never know what it was because he's dead by now), but the Lit Crit guys don't care about that. The intended meaning of the poem is irrelevant to them, what they care about is the meaning(s) that others might extract from the poem. In the same way, in the passages you quoted, the author doesn't care about the android in and of itself, but rather about how others feel about the existence and characteristics of the android, and how these feelings affect other feelings and beliefs we might have about related issues. That is what allows him/her to make judgments about fashion and other things.

In comparison, people in the sciences care about "objective truth" (for lack of a better term), not about how other people feel about stuff. If I write in a paper "stimulus A caused neurological response B (p &lt; 0.01)", asking about the Marxist/feminist/whatever interpretation of this finding is about as pointless as trying to get to the "objective truth" underlying a piece of poetry.