The Gender Of Things

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 chapters cover an original selection of “things”: from cosmeceuticals to early motor scooters, from Scrum boards to border walls, and 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 chapters 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 (STS), 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.

Learn the French grammar with this easy French textbook full of examples and exercises! This course is divided into 7 chapters and includes 200 exercises and free video lessons for each point. The method is simple: start from a simple sentence and add slowly more elements to it. Then practice after each new element with one or more exercises.

The National Book Critics Circle Award–winning author delivers a collection of essays that serve as the perfect “antidote to mansplaining” (The Stranger). In her comic, scathing essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters. She ends on a serious note— because the ultimate problem is the silencing of women who have something to say, including those saying things like, “He’s trying to kill me!” This book features that now-classic essay with six perfect complements, including an examination of the great feminist writer Virginia Woolf’s embrace of mystery, of not knowing, of doubt and ambiguity, a highly original inquiry into marriage equality, and a terrifying survey of the scope of contemporary violence against women. “In this series of personal but unsentimental essays, Solnit gives succinct shorthand to a familiar female experience that before had gone unarticulated, perhaps even unrecognized.” —The New York Times “Essential feminist reading.” —The New Republic “This slim book hums with power and wit.” —Boston Globe “Solnit tackles big themes of gender and power in these accessible essays. Honest and full of wit, this is an integral read that furthers the conversation on feminism and contemporary society.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Essential.” —Marketplace “Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing in its conclusions.” —Salon

"A rare pleasure. Rooting gender and consumption in the actions of people making their own history, these brilliant essays move from nineteenth-century pinups to the formation of gendered modernity. Once you've savored this volume, you'll never think of modern life in the same way again."--Temma Kaplan, author of Red City, Blue Period

Moving beyond traditional notions of gender as a static concept wherein human beings are passively molded into gender-appropriate behavior, 23 scholars instead view it as a negotiated, contested, and interactive process. In showing some of the ways gender is made visible, they explore avenues such as the gender of things that surround us; subtle and invisible processes of inclusion and exclusion from valuation; fusing form and content, practice and product; and how the material culture of gender produces gendered beings.

Shortlisted for The Green Carnation Prize 2014 'This is not a fairytale. This is a story about how sex and money and power police our dreams.' Clear-eyed, witty and irreverent, Laurie Penny is as ruthless in her dissection of modern feminism and class politics as she is in discussing her own experiences in journalism, activism and underground culture. This is a book about poverty and prejudice, online dating and eating disorders, riots in the streets and lies on the television. The backlash is on against sexual freedom for men and women and social justice – and feminism needs to get braver. Penny speaks for a new feminism that takes no prisoners, a feminism that is about justice and equality, but also about freedom for all. It's about the freedom to be who we are, to love who we choose, to invent new gender roles, and to speak out fiercely against those who would deny us those rights. It is a book that gives the silenced a voice – a voice that speaks of unspeakable things.

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender—masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora). Sexing the World surveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as "dust" (pulvis) or "tree bark" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories. Sexing the World contributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.