Ruth Oldenziel. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945. (Amsterdam/Ann Arbor: Amsterdam University Press/Chicago University Press, 1999).
The book studies the historical shaping of the modern technological world as male through positions of social inclusion and exclusion. Definition of the male (in the US) as having control over the technological world, but also through exclusion and silencing of women.
p. 10: "The public association between technological and manliness grew when male middle-class attention increasingly focused its gaze on the muscular bodies of working-class men and valorized middle-class athletes, but disempowered the bodies of Native Americans, African Americans, and women."
p. 11: "Engineers as... new models of white manliness". Mentions that if women appear in this domain, they are represented as belonging to some other domain: "our contemporary mythologies often produce women as goddesses whose lives are essentially off-stage, who appear to come from nowhere (p. 12) and whose plots are engineered elsewhere."
p. 12: mentions engineers as a new social force that rapidly expanded in American society and became a driving force of its development.
p. 26: "Well into the twentieth century, inentive genius was not necessarily understood to be machine-bound. Inventions included the entire gamut that ran from fabrics, language, arts, and mythology to mechanical devices." It was in the course of the 20th century that non-mechanistic interpretations of inventions were replaced with mechanistic ones.
Starting on p. 100, gives an excellent analysis of how in autobiographies engineers appropriate the labour of the subordinates (workers). Typical for their narratives is "erasure of workers or.. self-conscious identificaion with command, control , and whiteness" (p. 102).
p. 188: (speaking of the later half of the 20th century): "After a century-long contest over their meanings, patents and machinery occupied center stage and stood at the heart of sexual and racial differentiation and class distinctions. Engineers were cast as its sole bearers at the expense of workers, African-Americans, and women."
The book studies the historical shaping of the modern technological world as male through positions of social inclusion and exclusion. Definition of the male (in the US) as having control over the technological world, but also through exclusion and silencing of women.
p. 10: "The public association between technological and manliness grew when male middle-class attention increasingly focused its gaze on the muscular bodies of working-class men and valorized middle-class athletes, but disempowered the bodies of Native Americans, African Americans, and women."
p. 11: "Engineers as... new models of white manliness". Mentions that if women appear in this domain, they are represented as belonging to some other domain: "our contemporary mythologies often produce women as goddesses whose lives are essentially off-stage, who appear to come from nowhere (p. 12) and whose plots are engineered elsewhere."
p. 12: mentions engineers as a new social force that rapidly expanded in American society and became a driving force of its development.
p. 26: "Well into the twentieth century, inentive genius was not necessarily understood to be machine-bound. Inventions included the entire gamut that ran from fabrics, language, arts, and mythology to mechanical devices." It was in the course of the 20th century that non-mechanistic interpretations of inventions were replaced with mechanistic ones.
Starting on p. 100, gives an excellent analysis of how in autobiographies engineers appropriate the labour of the subordinates (workers). Typical for their narratives is "erasure of workers or.. self-conscious identificaion with command, control , and whiteness" (p. 102).
p. 188: (speaking of the later half of the 20th century): "After a century-long contest over their meanings, patents and machinery occupied center stage and stood at the heart of sexual and racial differentiation and class distinctions. Engineers were cast as its sole bearers at the expense of workers, African-Americans, and women."
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