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Gender and Television
January 28, 2008, 6:55 pm
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Again, from the Lang book
During the 1990s, a flurry of work on women and television was published. What most of these books have in common is a preoccupation with analyzing the multifaceted role of women as audiences in various televisual experiences, with many utilizing an ethnographic approach to contemporary situations. For example, researchers have examined the responses of women to soap operas, talk shows, and sit-coms.
A review of Lynn Spigel’s Make Room for TV and Lynn Spigel and Denise Mann, ed., Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer was published in Postmodern Culture, 1993, and can be found here .
Cecilia Tichi also wrote about the introduction of the television into the domestic environment, and talked about the ‘electronic hearth’:
As the electronic hearth, television is emphatically joined to American history. The discourses of corporate advertisers, media interests, and consensus journalists all evoke in the very term—hearth—the traditionalism of the past. Therefore, television can be claimed as the newest embodiment of values that go deep into the national culture as that culture is historically represented, say, to school students and to an adult public assumed to be middle class in outlook and material means” (Tichi 1991, 46).
See Tichi, Cecilia. 1991. Electronic hearth: Creating an American television culture. NY: Oxford University Press.
Some of the books published in the early 1990s included: (more…)
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Gender and the Telephone
January 28, 2008, 6:49 pm
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Filed under: Uncategorized
The impact of the telephone on women, and their role as both consumers and producers had, until the mid-1980s, received little consideration from the academic community…
Excerpt from Gender and Community in the Social Construction of the Internet by Moi (Peter Lang, 2002).
EMPLOYMENT STUDIES
Brenda Maddox recognized the importance of examining the role gender played both in women’s use of the telephone, particularly as a site of women’s labour. In “Women and the Switchboard,” she focused on the employment opportunities created for women by the telephone, and the ghettoization of this job as a female occupation. Maddox pointed out how in North America and Europe women were recruited to be operators for the new telephone systems because it was felt that they had the necessary patient temperament, dexterity, and willingness to work for cheap wages that this occupation necessitated.
See: Maddox, Brenda. 1977. Women and the switchboard. In The social impact of the telephone, ed. Ithiel de Sola Pool. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 262–280.
See also: Hacker, Sally. 1979. Sex stratification and organizational change: A longitudinal study of AT&T. Social Problems 26:539–57.
And, Rakow, Lana. 1988b. Women and the telephone: The gendering of a communications technology. In Technology and women’s voices: Keeping in touch, ed. Cheris Kramarae. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 207–228.
The Domestic as a Site of Research
January 28, 2008, 6:26 pm
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domestic_jan31.pdf
PP hand-outs for January 31
Domestic Surveillance Technologies
January 28, 2008, 6:06 pm
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Filed under: Uncategorized
Make nanny cam your babysitter! An Internet connection allows you to observe your kids when you are at office, or away from home. A multiple camera system with tilting and zoom features that can be manipulated remotely gives the kind of visual control you always wished you had when away. The audio recording system is another great feature for small babies and kids. Nanny cam is not a substitute for a real babysitter, as emergency events require immediate human intervention.
Motorola’s Home Monitoring and Control System provides ‘do-it-yourself’ home monitoring. Check out a few of the Flash examples of how home monitoring has comforted four households. For Maria, the marketing director, the “wired camera snaps a picture of everyone who comes in or out…” so Maria can know when her daughters have arrived home safely.
New trend: Surveilling Kids on Mobiles
If I Can Do It, So Can You…
January 28, 2008, 5:57 pm
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Says Barbara K!
Barbara K markets a line of power tools for women. She was a former NYC general contractor and IBM’s first female contractor.
Says Barbara K: “Working in the construction business taught me that most tools can be challenging for a woman to use. So I designed my own to better fit a woman’s size and strength. My tools weigh a little less and the grips are sized to better fit a woman’s hand. I’ve also built in extra features to make them better suited for women, like patented spring-loaded handles on my pliers and built-in thumb rests on my screwdrivers. But just because my tools are lightweight, doesn’t mean they’re light duty. My screwdrivers and hammers, for example, have induction-heated tips and faces for extra hardness. And all my tools are stylish and guaranteed forever!”
Domestic Technologies as Time Savers?
January 28, 2008, 5:53 pm
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Since Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s pioneering book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1985) there have been a series of studies on the gendered division of household labor:
Statistics Canada studies. Here’s an overview by Katherine Marshall in Perspectives on Labor and Income (July 2006).
The proportion of those doing some housework daily, be it making sandwiches for lunch, vacuuming, or taking out the garbage, increased from 72% in 1986 to 79% in 2005. However, this increase is entirely attributable to men, whose participation rose from 54% to 69%, while women’s remained steady at around 90%. Changes in the daily participation rate for core housework (meal preparation, meal clean-up, indoor cleaning, and laundry) are the most noticeable—40% to 59% for men, and 88% to 85% for women.
Even though the proportion of people doing housework of some kind has increased, the amount of time spent at it has decreased (from an average of 2.7 hours per day in 1986 to 2.5 hours per day in 2005).
All of the decrease comes from core housework. Labour-saving devices such as dishwashers, and semi-prepared or pre-packaged food items (such as pre-washed bags of salad, already peeled carrots, or frozen dinners) as well as numerous take-out options, may be helping to cut down the time spent in kitchens.
Still, given the trend toward ever bigger homes,3 it seems puzzling to witness a reduction in time spent on housework. Canadians are not alone in this; a remarkably similar trend has been observed in the United States. Between 1975 and 1995 the average weekly hours Americans spent on housework dropped from 15.5 to 13.7. Furthermore, “women’s and men’s hours spent in housework have converged over the period, primarily due to the steep decline in women’s hours of housework” (Bianchi et al. 2000). One reason for the overall decline could be today’s service-oriented economy. From take-out meals to snow removal, groundskeeping and housecleaning, people buy many goods and services once produced in the home. Housework standards may also be falling and people are less bothered if their house fails the ‘white-glove’ dust test. In the same vein, people’s priorities may have changed as to how they want to spend their time (Bianchi et al. 2000).
Bianchi, Suzanne M., Melissa A. Milkie, Liana C. Sayer and John P. Robinson. 2000. “Is anyone doing the housework? Trends in the gender division of household labor.” Social Forces 79, no.1 (September): 191-228.
And another, published by the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in 2003, Appliances and their Impact: The Ownership of Domestic Technology and Time Spent on Household Work by Michael Bittman, James Mahmud Rice, and Judy Wacjman. It looks at the 1997 Australian Time Use Survey which investigates, among other things, time spent on domestic work…revealing that domestic technology “rarely reduced women’s unpaid working time and even, paradoxically, produces some increases in domestic labour. The domestic division of labour by gender remains remarkably resistant to technological innovation”
Marketing Domestic Technologies
January 28, 2008, 5:31 pm
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Marketing Domestic Technologies
Here’s a series of links from the Internet Archive, a pretty amazing collection of archived materials. These are from the Prelinger Archives, a collection of over 48,000 emphemera – advertising, educational, industrial and amateur films. (There was a nice article about the archives by GIDEON Lewis-Kraus in the May 2007 Harper’s Magazine; available on boing-boing here). These links below take you to some humorous ads which highlight gender and gendered roles in the marketing of household appliances such as coffee makers and refrigerators, telephones and the television; there are many more…
What boys did in the 30s: All American Soap Box Derby from General Motors in 1934.Edison Electric’s Young Man’s Fantasy from 1952 features the most annoying teenage girl and her love interest, a self-interested nerd.
Another from General Motors where the Robot assumes Domestic Duty is from 1940, Leave it to Roll-Oh.
Telephone advertising includes instructional films from Bell; Operator Toll Dialing which is all about Cord Signals (1949); AT&T’s We Learn About the Telephone (1965); and Bell (1970) telephone commercials.
Here’s a truly surrealistic ad from AT&T called Once Upon a Honeymoon, a 1956 musical about color telephones.
Yet another dance number is from 1957, Frigidaire Finale .
Post WWII and the girls are outta work and back in the home; proliferating automobiles and mushrooming suburbs … Redbook Magazine produced a film in 1957 called In the Suburbs where they extol the virtues of atomized living amidst atom bomb fears, no less!
In 1955 General Motors produced a film Magic in the Air about early television.
The 1960’s American Women – Partners in Research is about Corning Ware’s manufacturer of a coffee maker.
Flash forward a decade to 1967 and Proctor & Gamble’s notions of Consuming Women – Selling to the Sixties Women.
Socially Camouflaged Technologies
January 27, 2008, 5:42 pm
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The wire coat hangar. No more wire coat hangars. To a certain generation, this imagery resonates in its stark brutality. For young people today, sadly it might seem as merely a call for plastic hangars…a socially camouflaged technology? Certainly a politically charged symbol of technology and one which evokes a visceral reaction.
The Manhattan Mini Storage Company raises a flap with their billboard, above.
The Coat Hangar Project Blog is the site for the forthcoming film, The Coat Hangar project, forthcoming in 2009, a doc about abortion and the pro-choice movement in the U.S. For a reminder of the roll-back in reproductive rights in the U.S., follow this link…
And, what’s happening in Canada with the 20th anniversary of the Morgentaler decision that legalized abortion rights in Canada? Andre Picard writes in the Globe and Mail that access across the country is not great….
An incredible review by Manohla Dargis in The NY Times on Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, “a ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an abortion, the camera doesn’t follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself.”
A bit on the politics of surveillance systems…
January 22, 2008, 8:05 pm
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From: The Culture of Surveillance: G-Men Redux and Total Information Awareness, by LR Shade, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies Spring 2003. Full article here from York University’s Open Journal System.
Abstract
Part of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Awareness Office, the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, enacted in wake of September 11th, aims to capture the “information signature” of citizens suspected of terrorism or criminal acts. Technical means (including computer algorithms and human analysis) afford the government the ability to track those involved in “low-intensity/low-density” forms of warfare and crime, with the ultimate goal to track individuals through collecting as much information about them as possible. Various public interest groups have criticized this initiative, particularly on the basis of privacy and security risks, identity theft, misuse of information, and overt citizen surveillance. This article will provide an overview of TIA, and situate it within an ongoing political economy of the military-industrial complex, now revamped for an emerging security industry.
Images from TIP website.
Below, HID at a distance: will develop multi-modal biometric technologies to improve our ability to identify foreign terrorists from a distance.
And, Babylon: provides two-way natural language speech translation interfaces and platforms for users in combat and other field environments:
