All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Boys and ray guns. Girls and microwaves. Despite many changes in ’90s cultural life, "serious" technology is still somehow a boy thing, while the tedious stuff is left for girls. In Japan, for example, this process has played itself out with digital technology. To the average middle-aged salaryman, computers look rather like typewriters and hence are demeaning things best left to the secretaries. Result? A generation of smart, techie, twentysomething women whose skill sets are ignored by their Luddite bosses.
These kinds of boy/girl divisions are the subject of Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert’s Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, a collection of theoretical essays about what happens when our mixed-up attitudes toward machines collide with our even more confused attitudes about sex roles. For the book’s contributors, this confusion pervades every aspect of our culture. In your local Toys "R" Us, for example, the Barbie Liberation Organization is secretly swapping the voiceboxes of Barbies and G.I. Joes. "Dead men tell no lies," growls post-op Barbie, while Joe, in a high-pitched voice, suggests, "Let’s go shopping." More and more, new technologies are making hints, jokes, and suggestions about gender.
If the connection between integrated circuits and sex roles seems less than obvious, then some of the analysis in this book may leave you cold. Most of the writers are veterans of the cultural studies scene, and on the whole they are far more at home with the subtleties of French theory than the technologies they analyze; some authors frankly admit they are technological outsiders. Still, despite evoking geeky twinges of annoyance when a so-called expert seems not to understand, say, nonlinear dynamics, this book is an interesting read. Those tempted to think of their machines as neutral bystanders in the gender wars will find plenty to change their minds.
Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, edited by Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert: US$18.95. Routledge: (800) 354 9706, or on the Web.
This article originally appeared in the September issue of Wired magazine.
