Gender Circuits

Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age

Eve Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134756582
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The new edition of Gender Circuits explores the impact of new technologies on the gendered lives of individuals through substantive sociological analysis and in-depth case studies. Examining the complex intersections between gender ideologies, social scripts, information and biomedical technologies, and embodied identities, this book explores whether and how new technologies are reshaping what it means to be a gendered person in contemporary society.

1
A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY AND GENDER

Just a few minutes into the movie Kinky Boots, Lola curses her biggest obstacle as a drag queen. Holding up her boot to display its freshly broken heel, she laments: “Like most things in life, it cannot stand the weight of a man.”¹ With this remark, Lola pinpoints a key barrier in her ability to successfully dress as a woman. Lola’s problem (and that of her real-life compatriots) is the construction of women’s shoes: they are not built to support most male bodies. High-heeled shoes are not typically constructed to accommodate the average male’s heft, foot size, or gait. All high-heeled shoes, particularly extremely thin “stiletto” heels, require technical acumen in their design because the structure of the shoe focuses immense pressure on a very small area; a petite woman in stilettos can exert 20 times the pressure of a 6,000 pound elephant under her heel.² It was only in the 1930s that the manufacture of stiletto heels became possible at all, when the specialized design of inserting thin metal tubes into the heel structure of shoes was developed. The standard construction of heels can withstand only a certain amount of pressure, and more often than not male bodies exceed these limits. This structural problem, combined with norms for high-heel shoe size and width, makes finding and wearing high-heeled shoes very difficult for those born into male bodies.

In Kinky Boots, the based-on-real-life story of a rural British shoe factory struggling to survive in a global market, owner Charlie Price recognizes his niche market—after being literally hit over the head with the problem: shoes for “drag queens” (aka men who perform dressed as women). He works with Lola to design shoes that will allow male bodies to successfully function in women’s high-heeled shoes. As fanciful as the film is, the problems it centers around are genuine. A 2006 New York Times article inspired by the film featured interviews with a number of drag queens, trans* women and shoe designers regarding the real-life challenges posed by lack of footwear for male bodies.³ What the interviewees make clear is that, without footwear that fits their feet, male-bodied individuals struggle to perform femininity as drag queens, or embody it as trans* women. High-heeled shoes are one of the few items of clothing that remain strictly gendered in this age of increasingly androgynous fashion; if one is to portray normative femininity—regardless of birth sex—one must have access to the appropriate footwear. The solution to this shoe problem is the creation of new approaches to, methods for, and products targeted at male-bodied individuals who want to successfully produce normative femininity. In other words, successfully “dressing the part”—a key component of embodying gender—requires the development of new technologies. What is true for shoes is true more broadly with respect to gender; what defines it, how gender is manifested in the body, and what social scripts are available to individuals are often shaped by technology.

Building on our understanding of social scripts as culturally specific blueprints for behavior that shape social and individual expectations and productions of gender, this chapter examines how technologies prevalent at different historical moments have been used to make sense of gendered bodies, to police gender ideologies and scripts, and to create or inhibit space for diversifying gender norms and defying expectations. Investigating how the histories of gender and technological innovation fit together suggests that how people understand, conform to and contest embodied gender changes from era to era as technologies advance. People use the technologies available to them at any given time to produce both normative and nonconforming gender, and in turn, the resulting gender scripts, bodies, and identities shape technological development.

NORMATIVE GENDER

Individual gender expression that is in line with dominant social scripts for masculine men or for feminine women. Another way to refer to this is gender conformity.

NON-NORMATIVE GENDER

Individual gender expression that conflicts with dominant social scripts for masculine men or for feminine women. Another way to refer to this is gender nonconformity.

For example, twenty-first century women can employ plastic surgery to create more curvaceous bodies while nineteenth century women used corsets and girdles, and these new technologies allow women to embody socially scripted feminine qualities while enjoying an increased range of physical motion; technologies have allowed scripts for what a feminine body is capable of to change. Over time, as technological innovation transforms ways of knowing and shaping bodies and identities, social knowledge of and scripts for gender change as well.⁴

A Sociological Approach to Analyzing Gender and Technology

Making sense of technological innovation and its relationship to bodies and identities is no easy feat. Exploring how gender identities and bodies are transformed within the context of changes in dominant paradigms, social scripts, and through technological intervention requires new analytical tools that can recognize the complex and layered nature of social life. Instead of existing in one-directional relationship to each other, as if technologies change social scripts but social scripts do not affect technological innovation (or vice versa), dominant ideologies, scripts, technologies, and gendered bodies and identities appear to be mutually constitutive, each component interacting dynamically with the others. High-heeled shoes would not have been developed for people born into male bodies without new technologies and shifts in dominant gender scripts; in turn, these new technologies led to new social scripts and norms for gendered bodies. That is, all of these components are engaged in a complex interplay with one another, each shaping and being shaped by the other constituent parts. To understand how new technologies reshape the lives of individuals we can draw on a sociological analysis that examines all of these social forces in interaction.

SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

An analytical approach that takes into account individual, interactional, and structural/institutional dynamics within a particular social context.

Social forces are not directly observable, but rather something that individuals experience in the process of interacting in society; dominant social scripts, transmitted through interaction with socializing agents like parents, teachers, peers, and media, disappear under the guise of everyday interaction. Because of this, it is difficult to see how gender ideologies and social scripts have shaped each of us as individuals; our own embodied gender feels—and is— very real. The impact of new technologies on our bodies and identities is rendered invisible by the mundane nature of social life. It is only when we turn our analytical attention to these social structures and mechanisms for change that we can truly understand the complex forces that shape our gendered lives.

There are five aspects of social life that we will focus on throughout this book: paradigms, scripts, technologies, bodies, and identities. These aspects of social life are intricately interconnected and, we will see, mutually constitutive. A sociological analysis that accounts for this complexity, and makes sense of how new technologies are transforming gendered lives, looks at individuals’ embodied experiences (individual level), the impact of social interactions in subcultures, groups, and communities on the choices people make (interactional level), and on how social norms and institutions (such as medicine or education) guide and structure our ability to manifest gender in our bodies and identities as we so choose (structural level).

This approach is not a conceptual theory or empirical model but rather a way of taking into account a broad range of social forces. This allows us to make sense of how social and individual changes are intertwined, and reveals how different gender paradigms and social scripts are both shaped by the actions of individuals and are constitutive of them. Ultimately, our sociological analysis charts a path toward answering whether and how information and biomedical technologies can have real-life effects on bodies and identities as well as on society at large.

Feminist scholar Bernice Hausman suggests that technologies of the time shape what and who people think they can be, both physically and ideologically. Hausman’s research traces how the development of medical technologies in plastic surgery and endocrinology (the science and medicine of hormones) led to the development of contemporary trans-sexual identities. The social changes brought about by technological innovation expanded existing scripts and created new ones for embodied genders. This is not to say that gender nonconforming individuals, i.e. males who identify as women, or females who live as men, exist only as a modern phenomenon, but rather that the creation of a pathologized medical identity, “transsexual,” is new.

These and other similar changes are the product of ideological and theoretical innovation (e.g., the idea that sex is different from gender) as well as tangible technologies (such as the example of shoes for drag queens), all of which allow individuals and society as a whole to imagine and manifest new ways of existing in the world. Technology interacts with dominant ideologies, scripts, and embodied identities to produce an array of socially legible gendered identities and bodies, from which individuals construct their lives. As Hausman summarizes: “The development of new technologies (especially those where contact with the body is most intimate, such as medical technologies) also effects the production of new subjectivities [aka identities].”⁵

Neither technological innovation nor changes in gender identity are modern phenomena, even though people often assume they are products of contemporary social, political, economic, and scientific changes. In fact, both have very long histories. Throughout history, gender scripts, ideologies, bodies, and identities have been shaped by the technologies of the time.

Making Sense of Technology

While technology is often defined in terms of machines, its linguistic origins, meaning “the expression of a craft,” suggest its scholarly use to refer to anything that people develop to manipulate the natural environment. Technology is a complex amalgam of objects, knowledge, activities, and processes, all of which manipulate our material environment. Anthropologists trace technology back to the point when early humans harnessed the power of fire.⁶ From this distant innovation to the development of the most recent supercomputer, technological development has been an integral part of the lives of human beings.

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION

The leading transnational institution in charge of encouraging and monitoring technological innovation is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. UNESCO defines technological innovation as the development of “know-how and creative process that may utilize tools, resources, and systems to solve problems, to enhance control over the natural and man-made [sic] environment to alter the human condition.”⁷

Technology does more than alter our material world, however, as these changes give rise to changes in the behavior of individuals and even entire cultures.⁸ Our very bodies and identities have been shaped by technology in profound and dramatic ways. The advent of clothing included the development of sewing, the harvesting of plants and animal skins for cloth, and the creation of methods and processes for production. Further evolution of these processes and the changing designs of the clothes themse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Preview: Gendered Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age
• Chapter 1 A Social History of Technology and Gender
• Chapter 2 Information Technologies and Gendered Identity Work
• Chapter 3 New Biomedical Technologies, New Scripts, New Genders
• Review: Sociological Analyses of Gender and Technology
• References
• Index