824383
9780803988118
This innovative book demonstrates the making of gender and technology as comparable social processes, one helping shape the other. The authors take as an example the microwave oven, a recent innovation in domestic technology that neatly encapsulates the technology//gender relation. In the microwave, masculine engineering encounters an age old woman's technology: cooking. The authors show how the microwave begins as a state-of-the-art masculine technology, is translated in the retail trade into a 'family' commodity, one of a range of domestic white goods, and eventually settles into the kitchen alongside other humble feminine appliances; unlike the old cooker, however, the microwave retains just a whiff of aftershave. The auCockburn, Cynthia is the author of 'Gender and Technology in the Making' with ISBN 9780803988118 and ISBN 0803988117.
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