Publisher's Synopsis
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 authors show how technology relations contribute to the disadvantage of women. This book breaks new ground by building theory out of meticulous observation of lived relations - both comic and painful - between real men and women and the machines they make and sell, buy and use.
