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The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that
explores the power relationship between gender and the material
culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward
question: How does a thing—such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot,
or a surgical instrument—become a gendered object? These 14 short
essays cover an original selection of "things": from cosmeceuticals
to early motor scooters, from scrum boards to border walls, from
robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining
how significance has been attached to specific things and how
things were designed and produced, the essays reveal how the
concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the
material world of science and technology. With insights from
science and technology studies, anthropology, the history of
ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and
medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and
feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our
material creations not only bear knowledge about our world. The
Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and
graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as Gender
Studies.
The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that
explores the power relationship between gender and the material
culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward
question: How does a thing—such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot,
or a surgical instrument—become a gendered object? These 14 short
essays cover an original selection of "things": from cosmeceuticals
to early motor scooters, from scrum boards to border walls, from
robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining
how significance has been attached to specific things and how
things were designed and produced, the essays reveal how the
concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the
material world of science and technology. With insights from
science and technology studies, anthropology, the history of
ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and
medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and
feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our
material creations not only bear knowledge about our world. The
Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and
graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as Gender
Studies.
The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898
eventually led to a craze for radium products in the 1920s until
their widespread use proved lethal for consumers, patients, and
medical practitioners alike. Radium infiltrated American culture,
Maria Rentetzi reveals, not only because of its potential to treat
cancer but because it was transformed from a scientific object into
a familiar, desirable commodity. She explores how Standard Chemical
Company in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania - the first successful
commercial producer of radium in the United States - aggressively
promoted the benefits of radium therapy and its curative properties
as part of a lucrative business strategy. Over-the-counter
products, from fertilizers to paints and cosmetics to tonics and
suppositories, inspired the same level of trust in consumers as a
revolutionary pharmaceutical. The radium industry in the United
States marketed commodities like Liquid Sunshine and Elixir of
Youth at a time when using this new chemical element in the
laboratory, in the hospital, in private clinics, and in commercial
settings remained largely free of regulation. Rentetzi shows us how
marketing campaigns targeted individually to men and women affected
not only how they consumed these products of science but also how
that science was understood and how it contributed to the formation
of ideas about gender. Seduced by Radium ultimately reveals how
innovative advertising techniques and seductive, state-of-the-art
packaging made radium a routine part of American life, shaping
scientific knowledge about it and the identities of those who
consumed it.
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