The Gender of Things

The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that explores the power relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward question: How does a thing-such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot, or a surgical instrument-become a gendered object?

The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that explores the power relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward question: How does a thing-such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot, or a surgical instrument-become a gendered object?

These 14 short chapters cover an original selection of "things": from cosmeceuticals to early motor scooters, from Scrum boards to border walls, and from robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining how significance has been attached to specific things and how things were designed and produced, the chapters reveal how the concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the material world of science and technology. With insights from science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, the history of ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our material creations not only bear knowledge about our world.

The Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as gender studies.

The Intorduction and Chapter 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Autorentext

Maria Rentetzi is Professor of Science, Technology, and Gender Studies at FAU Erlangen- Nurnberg, and an affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, Germany.

Klappentext

The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that explores the power relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward question: How does a thing-such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot, or a surgical instrument-become a gendered object? These 14 short chapters cover an original selection of "things": from cosmeceuticals to early motor scooters, from Scrum boards to border walls, and from robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining how significance has been attached to specific things and how things were designed and produced, the chapters reveal how the concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the material world of science and technology. With insights from science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, the history of ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our material creations not only bear knowledge about our world. The Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as gender studies.

Zusammenfassung

The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that explores the power relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward question: How does a thingsuch as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot, or a surgical instrumentbecome a gendered object?

These 14 short chapters cover an original selection of things: from cosmeceuticals to early motor scooters, from Scrum boards to border walls, and from robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining how significance has been attached to specific things and how things were designed and produced, the chapters reveal how the concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the material world of science and technology. With insights from science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, the history of ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our material creations not only bear knowledge about our world.

The Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as gender studies.

The Intorduction and Chapter 4 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Inhalt

Introduction: Gendering Things

Maria Rentetzi

Part 1: Things in/as Laboratories

Sealing Wax and String

Donald L. Opitz

Butter: Fat Lions and Dairy Girls

Anna Frasca-Rath

Gendered Images of Chromosomes

María Jesús Santesmases

Godofredo and Françoise Travel Around the World: Phantoms, Radioiodine Uptake Tests, and the IAEA's Standardization Projects

Maria Rentetzi

The Tell-Tale Heart: Multiple Ontologies of the First Human Donor Heart

Annerose Böhrer and Larissa Pfaller

Colourful Minilabs: Cosmeceuticals at the Interface of Gender, Technology, and Knowledge Transfers

Milton Fernando Gonzalez Rodriguez

Part 2: Things as Artefacts

Gendered Mobility: Early Motor Scooting around 1920

Heike Weber

A Make-up Kit from the National Air and Space Museum

Eleanor S. Armstrong

The Fan: Gendered Bodily Communication at the Intersection of Salon Semiotics, Fashion, Political Campaigning, and Menopause Relief

Annette Keilhauer

Gendering the Boundary Object: "Sophia the Robot" as Cyborg-Woman, Fashionista, Citizen, and Imagination

Roger A. Søraa and Nienke Bruijning

Animating Machines, Alienating Women: Siri and Alexa as Affective Linguistic Labourers

Siri Lamoureaux and Alexa Hagerty

Part 3: Things as Sites of Power

Dangerous Erections: Gender, Race, and the Engineering of Trump's Border Wall

Amy E. Slaton

Paternity and Pedigree: How Academic Genealogical Databases Become Gendered

Rebecca M. Herzig

Is the Scrum Board Feminine?

Stefan Sauer and Amelie Tihlarik