Horowitz, Roger, and Arwen Mohun, eds

Horowitz, Roger, and Arwen Mohun, eds. His and Hers: Gender, Consumption, and Technology. Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Roger Horowitz and Arwen Mohun, "Introduction"

In their introduction, Horowitz and Mohun situate their analysis of gender and technology within the context of developing consumption as both a material and cultural process. They argue that technology was fundamental to the development of modern consumer culture, and that this process was also gendered. They use a model of consumers which positions them as active agents, a model of production which sometimes has contradictory processes and effects, and agents of mediation between producers and consumers who translated between the two. In the course of producing goods, "firms and their translators tried to understand, appropriate, and alter popular conceptions of leisure, pleasure, and utility."(p.3)

Steven Lubar, "Men/Women/Production/Consumption"

Lubar begins by asserting that both the relations of production and consumption are gendered, and moreover these relations are part of an active process of meaning-making by both culture and economics, and considers the resulting implications for an analysis of gender, markets, and machines.

Lubar divides his article into three parts: the history of consumption and production, and their concomitant gendering; the role of gender in the way technology has been (mis)defined; and new areas for further work.

First, Lubar provides an overview of the history of production and consumption, and its relations to gender. He argues that in the late nineteenth century, the proliferation of industrialization and the rise of the (feminine) middle class as a consumer group (as well as the [masculine] working class as producers) resulted in a new era of advertising and consumption. Women of the middle class were cast as the primary household consumers, in households that ostensibly no longer produced. This served both to shore up visions of masculinity as productive and socially useful, and to situate women within a sphere of frivolity from which they could not operate as politically viable entities. Men's sphere shifted to a newly invented public sphere, and relations of class shaped visions of masculinities, of which Lubar identifies three: the genteel patrician of the old school, the artisan-craftsman, and the aggressive entrepreneur (see also Berner and Mellström). The latter two masculine norms were expressed through technology; and men began to conceive of themselves in terms of machines, both in positive and negative ways. With the advent of increasing industrialization in the twentieth century, technology threatened to "emasculate" male workers with deskilling, replacement by women and children, and the producer culture being overwhelmed by consumer culture. However, as Wajcman remarks, masculinity is a flexible category, and so new sites of masculinity emerged: the inventor, then the engineer.

Masculinity, industrialization, and technology thus mutually constituted one another. Lubar notes that few studies have been done which investigate the link between masculinity and technology (see Millar, Massey, Berner and Mellstrom, Salminen-Karlsson), relative to studies of consumption and femininity. In addition, historical definitions of technology "have tended to conflate cultural hierarchy and technical skill."(p.19) In other words, "we have fallen for a culturally defined idea of skilled technology and assumed that it was somehow innate."(p.19)

Lubar thus concludes by examining the ways in which neat borders of production, consumption, masculine, and feminine are subverted through actual practices of use, and that discourses of gender shift according to cultural and economic need. Creators had in mind one use for their inventions, and in doing so embedded assumptions into their artefacts, but the process of use often resulted in quite contrary phenomenon. In addition, women were often used as mediators of technology; translators who brought together producers and consumers.

James Williams, "Getting Housewives the Electric Message: Gender and Energy Marketing in the Early Twentieth Century"

Williams' central thesis in this article is that gender affected how domestic electric power was marketed; gendered misconceptions about domestic labour by male promoters and designers resulted in a variety of failed attempts to interpellate a number of electric items. However, once the industry realized that no amount of scientific management principles would work unless they incorporated the needs of housewives into their creations, they were much more successful.

Electricity in the early twentieth century was linked to progress and cultural modernity. As such, its promotion was largely a male preserve. Yet the home was a female sphere, and thus attempts to place electricity within the home had to combine both notions of progress and efficiency as well as domestic comfort. Although technological skill was generally regarded as the bastion of men, promoters of domestic technology were at great pains to show that domestic technology required little skill (or, if it did require skill, these skills were not valued as real technical expertise). They assumed that although women did not possess technical proficiency, they were "compliant, pliable, and willing to learn to use any new domestic appliance."(p.103) Yet it was not until they began to incorporate women into their design and marketing that electric companies enjoyed any degree of success with their products. For men, efficiency and mastery were key, while for women, ease of use and choice were more important. Thus, the contradictory development of this technology indicates the ambivalence and frequent disjuncture between gender and technological design and use.

Louis Carlat, "'A Cleanser for the Mind': Marketing Radio Receivers for the American Home, 1922-1932"

In this article, Carlat details the shift in ideologies of radio technology from a solitary male preserve to a communal domestic activity and item. He writes: "The transition from male toy to a component of domestic space required recasting radio hardware as a feminine object, and listening as a feminine activity."(p.116)

Initially, the radio was something that allowed technical mastery for men who enjoyed tinkering. Its often complicated use provided a challenge, and it allowed users to "extend human hearing, conquer distance, and 'listen in' on unseen cities."(p.116) Later, simpler models were promoted "for their putative ability to maintain the boundaries between domestic and outside spaces."(p.116) To achieve this shift, "consumers had to be created"(p.120) through a process of marketing and transformation of cultural ideologies about appropriate household items (in their appropriate spaces) and the gender of users. Both factions had to be addressed: male purchasers of the technology, and female users, since "[i]f radio was to please the middle-class housewife and assist her in bringing culture to the home, it would first have to be sold to her husband."

In addition to creating a shift in ideology around technical items and gendered use, the development of radio signified progress and the modern age. As a result, advertisers played on both nostalgia for a golden age of social safety and domesticity, as well as "the insights of great inventors brought to fruition under American capitalism."(p.129) Carlat concludes by noting that the issues raised by entertainment technologies (and here I would include the personal computer, which moved from a toy of nerds, located in labs and basements, to a family tool located in a communal space) continue to inform social anxieties about the role of technology, "tensions between the sexes, between generations, and between subcultures…"(p.132)