Women Make the World: Global Technologies and Gender
CHUM 330
Spring 2017 not offered
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Women are only recently appearing as actors in global histories of technology, yet they have long been inventors and creative innovators in a wide range of fields from domestic textile production and technologies for household maintenance to industrial manufacture. Initially, scholars located women in relation to specifically gendered objects such as reproductive technologies like the birth control pill and tools for "women's work" such as the washing machine. Yet, women have also made "masculine" technological work such as engineering and computer programming their own. Few individual women are credited for their inventions, and one of our challenges will be to locate women's creative production of technological tools and processes in diverse societies from the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia. What constitutes women's technology, even women's work, is an unstable category that we will unpack in this class. Moving beyond the domestic space and the family, women's technological work contended with new and emerging state projects related to the economy and politics. Women found their technological identities entangled with discourses of state building and, increasingly, after the end of the Cold War, with narratives about international development. These histories of the state overlapped with the domestic, and, over the course of the semester, we will engage with women's global technological stories in relation to big questions about the family, sexuality, and gender and labor. In turn, these same histories will allow us to unpack the ways in which women have engaged with state and international discourses on the economy and development. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA CHUM |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: None |
Major Readings:
Judy Wajcman, FEMINISM CONFRONTS TECHNOLOGY (1991), Linda Layne et al., FEMINIST TECHNOLOGY (2010) selections, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, MORE WORK FOR MOTHER (1985) selections; Judith Byfield THE BLUEST HANDS: A SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY OF WOMEN DYERS IN ABEOKUTE (NIGERIA), 1890-1940 (2002); Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, COLD WAR KITCHEN (2009) selections, Francesca Bray, TECHNOLOGY AND GENDER: FABRICS OF POWER IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA (1997) selections; Additional readings TBA
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Examinations and Assignments:
1 Class Presentation; 1 Short Paper; Final Paper; Regular Forum Posts |
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